re: Westlake Chemical Layoffs

Hate seeing this. U.S. petrochem sector doesn't seem to have a great outlook right now for the next couple of years.

Sad but expected. This will impact more people than the quoted 295 across WLK facilities. Lots of Contractor support will be hurt. Those plants stayed producing maintenance work with leaks and repairs.

Turner ran VCM N ops. That's gone.
Turner was nested over at South and I'm sure that is affecting Plant A.

This isn't a shuffling. They're cutting real folks. I had to guess, it's probably going to be a Last In First Out scenario with Union.

If I had to guess this probably impaxts 450-500 people in LC alone with other businesses affected.

No

Right before Christmas is brutal. That just sucks for everyone

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Westlake in years past have been good about that.

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The folks that got laid off are incapable of applying for jobs themselves?

I’m genuinely curious here. Other layoffs happen, frick it. Operators laid off, let’s coddle them and find jobs for them lol.

It’s the reasons most are at the plants in the first place I suppose. Lack of work ethic.

Westlake always tried to retain good experienced hands if at all possible
If you were just dead weight they didn’t have a problem letting you go.

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The folks that got laid off are incapable of applying for jobs themselves?

I’m genuinely curious here. Other layoffs happen, frick it. Operators laid off, let’s coddle them and find jobs for them lol.

It’s the reasons most are at the plants in the first place I suppose. Lack of work ethic.

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are you fricking retarded?

and what in the frick are you talking about? did anyone say they were incapable of applying for jobs? why the hell would you think they have a lack of work ethic?

you understand that these are well paying 6 figure jobs right plus great benefits? you understand that for everyone of these operator jobs you are competing with a couple hundred people? do you think these people get them by not having work ethic? not to mention now a days, no matter the position you are usually brought in as a contractor representing westlake and then after 6 months to a year you get hired

essentially its a year long job interview now

and layoffs do happen and I feel bad for them when its happening, especially around the holidays


anyways most will get a severence and heard it was more than 50 let go that were union so that would be operators/maintenance at north and south plants as petro is non union.

as someone else mentioned this will end up affecting alot more than just the the roughly; ~200 direct in the LC area. going affect a lot of contractors too.

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Trade war got them?

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This feeds their PVC pipe plants in North America. Construction slowdown would be the cause. They did buy up much of the PVC pipe competition over a decade ago then consolidated.

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You wouldn't know that with the way Chlorine prices have stayed relatively high since the incident.

I was thinking of a putting a pool in until I saw that chlorine was still high.

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You are forgetting that Caustic Soda is about half the production and with all of the papermill shutdowns over the last 20 years along with many still open mills importing pulp, the sales of Caustic Soda are down. Another industry which caused a price drop in the 1980's was alumina plants closing. They also use a lot of caustic soda.

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Hate seeing this. U.S. petrochem sector doesn't seem to have a great outlook right now for the next couple of years.

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That is why Saudi Arabia and Qatar have invested in world class petchem plants in the Texas? The US is still the low cost producer. If anything, the market slowdown, downstream in Europe, is the issue. Europe has been unable to compete with the US for well over a decade now, if not two decades. All this talk about cheap Russian natural gas and oil is from people who know little to nothing about feedstocks and products.