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Home > BizTimes Daily > Archives > September 25, 2008
Spancrete to lay off workers as construction slows to a crawl
Published September 25, 2008 - BizTimes Daily
Reflecting the major slowdown in the commercial construction industry, The Spancrete Group Inc. has informed the state that it could lay off 231 employees in Wisconsin by the end of the year.
Spancrete Industries, the Waukesha-based supplier of pre-cast and pre-stressed concrete products, plans to lay off the majority of its workforce in Waukesha and Valders, west of Manitowoc.
Spancrete laid off 28 employees in Waukesha on Sept. 16, and the company could lay off a total of 105 there by Dec. 12, said Gary Noel, director of employee relations with the company. Before the layoffs, Spancrete had 166 employees in Waukesha.
The company employs more than 200 in Valders and could lay off 126 of the workers there by Nov. 14, Noel said.
All layoffs are temporary and are expected to last up to six months, he said.
"We expect to bring them back as quickly as we can, but we just don't know at this point," Noel said.
Almost all areas of employment within Spancrete will be affected by the layoffs, Noel said. The only area that will not see layoffs is sales.
In his letter to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, Noel stated that Spancrete recently lost a major project in Illinois, and another major project in the Madison area was unexpectedly delayed.
"The crisis of the financial markets within the last several days reaffirmed the fact that the major construction projects that the company had anticipated being awarded and scheduled for production had been cancelled and/or delayed," the letter stated. "The continued deterioration of business conditions in the residential and commercial construction markets compounded by the delays of certain developers in obtaining suitable financing to proceed with residential condominiums and other projects that had been in the company's backlog appear to have been made much worse by the crisis of the financial markets within the last week."
