LITTLE ROCK — A representative with Trane Inc. on Monday said the transfer of coil production to South Carolina will reduce the hourly work force at its Fort Smith plant that makes residential air conditioners.
About 59 hourly positions out of an estimated 243 represented by the United Auto Workers will be eliminated by the third quarter, Maria Weber, a Trane spokesman in Carmel, Ind., confirmed in an e-mailed statement.
“The actual number of employees affected could change depending on fluctuations in production levels, attrition and other factors,” a company statement said.
The Zero Street plant also employs another 27 salaried workers.
Ingersoll Rand of Dublin, Ireland, has owned the Trane brand name since June 2008, when it bought American Standard Corp. of Piscataway, N.J. The company employs another 280 people in Fort Smith at a commercial air conditioning plant.
The Columbia, S.C., plant is the company’s coil center of excellence, “with specific focus on ensuring quality production of coils for the entire business,” Ingersoll Rand noted in its statement.
“Today’s economic environment requires we consider every opportunity to reduce our cost structure to remain competitive,” the business said.
Weber confirmed workers at the South Carolina plant were not represented by a labor union.
Ingersoll Rand employs about 59,000 people in the United States, China, Mexico, Europe, Africa and India.
Kermit Kuehn, director of the Center for Business Research and Economic Development at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, said the Fort Smith manufacturing sector represented about 18 percent of the region’s total work force and about double what the national average is for manufacturing.
The manufacturing sector in the Fort Smith metropolitan statistical area employed 20,700 people in December 2011, compared with 21,000 people in December 2010, according to state data. The statistical area encompasses Sebastian, Crawford and Franklin counties in Arkansas and Le Flore and Sequoyah counties in Oklahoma. Nearly 290,000 people live there.
News of the internal restructuring was just “part of the manufacturing landscape,” Kuehn said.
“It doesn’t matter if the economy is good or bad, manufacturers are perpetually realigning their resources,” he said.
Robert McCarthy, an equity analyst with Robert W. Baird Investment Bank that follows Ingersoll Rand, said Monday that the company continues to fight back after a series of setbacks beginning with the 2008 economic slow down.
“The housing market is lousy, it’s a weak market and consumers are trading down” in their purchases of air conditioning systems, he said.
McCarthy was unable to say whether the changes at the Fort Smith plant were part of a formal restructuring plan or not.
Business, Pages 21 on 01/31/2012