According to the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services, the year 2011 saw a drop to 155,000 manufacturing jobs, a change of about 3 percent, in the state.
That trend was not evident in all of the state’s larger manufacturers surveyed for Arkansas Business’ annual list.
(Click here to see a PDF of the list of the largest manufacturers. Click here for the spreadsheet version.)
In fact, the largest manufacturer in the state, Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale, added about 400 employees. The additional positions were mostly to bring hand deboning of chicken back in-house, spokesman Worth Sparkman said.
Another company, Nucor Corp. of Charlotte, N.C., gained about 72 employees in the state in the past year. A Nucor representative, Keith Prevost, said some jobs were added to expand a sheet steel operation. Nucor has two plants in Arkansas.
Three of the top five manufacturers, ranked by the companies’ Arkansas employee counts, did not have year-over-year changes in employment numbers. On the other hand, about half of the top 25 businesses on the list ended up with fewer employees at the beginning of this year compared with last year’s reported worker counts.
Most notably, Georgia-Pacific LLC of Atlanta lost about 600 positions in the state. Greg Guest, a spokesman from the company, said about 700 jobs were eliminated when Georgia-Pacific closed indefinitely its plywood and lumber plant in Crossett last fall, although some plant workers were able to obtain positions with the Crossett paper mill. The plant closed in response to weak market conditions for building products, Guest said.
In its December report, the Department of Workforce Services reported that durable goods manufacturing jobs dropped by 1,100 positions to 76,300. Nondurable goods manufacturing lost 3,000 jobs, bringing the count in that sector down to 78,700. While the number of manufacturing jobs went down, Workforce Services reported that the average weekly earnings of Arkansans in manufacturing went up from $581.74 to $617.12 year-over-year.
This suggests the changing nature of manufacturing in Arkansas and elsewhere in the country. Low-skill, low-wage jobs are being automated, and higher-skill, higher-wage employees are needed to run the machines.
Among the blows to manufacturing in the state were the closure and Chapter 7 bankruptcy of Yarnell’s Premium Ice Cream Co. of Searcy last June. While it was not one of the largest manufacturing companies in the state, Yarnell’s was an iconic Arkansas brand, and about 200 employees lost their jobs unexpectedly.
Since the closure, Schulze & Burch Biscuit Co. of Chicago bought the company at auction for $1.3 million, without acquiring Yarnell’s $15.7 million in debt, and expressed interest in reopening. The extent of the buyer’s hiring plans in Searcy have not been detailed, though Schulze & Burch President and CEO Kevin Boyle said only a limited line of Yarnell’s products would be made and sold initially. Yarnell’s ice cream was sold in Arkansas, Tennessee and parts of Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.
Affecting more Arkansas manufacturing workers was the announcement in 2011 that Whirlpool Corp. of Benton Harbor, Mich., planned to shut down its Arkansas operations. As recently as 2007, Whirlpool reportedly had 4,200 employees at its lone plant in the state.
However, when the 45-year-old Fort Smith plant winds down its operations in June of this year, about 1,000 employees will lose their jobs. The approximately 1,000 employees left are 130 workers fewer than Whirlpool reportedly had at the plant in February 2011.
Hundreds of jobs in the Fort Smith area that are dependent on Whirlpool are also expected to disappear once the company leaves. The coming closure “was driven by a decrease in demand for the side-by-side refrigerator platforms,” the company said in an official statement.
Economic developers at the state and local levels are seeking a tenant for the plant Whirlpool will leave vacant.
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