M&W EMPLOYEES SAY PLANT IS LAYING OFF WORKERS

Some M&W Packaging employees are being laid off with two weeks of severance pay, a senior employee at the plant said.

Although employees of M&W, which produces much of nearby Procter & Gamble Paper Products' plastic packaging, say they have been told by plant officials that recent layoffs are a result of an end-of-the-fiscal-year slowdown at P&G and are only temporary, some suspect they may be permanently terminated.

"Two weeks severance pay isn't a layoff; that is termination," said the senior employee, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Another M&W employee, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that last Thursday M&W laid off 24 employees. He said he was told M&W expects business to pick up in September.

M&W senior vice president Elden Lingwood refused to comment on any layoffs or the situation at M&W.

Mike Jennewein, P&G human-resources manager, said business at P&G is just fine. "P&G is not going through a slowdown," he said. "All I can say is that we have normal variation with how we allocate our business to suppliers, but personally I don't know what is causing the problems at M&W."

Jennewein said P&G doesn't release information on specific contracts and he therefore could not say if orders for M&W products have fallen off.

In 1990, P&G provided land at Highway 177 and Route J to bring Mildenberger & Willing, a German-based company, to the United States. It provides jobs for 185 people.

According to the M&W employees, cutbacks started about a month ago. Employees were told business was going to get slow because P&G was not turning in the expected number of orders, they said.

The employees said that shortly after the announcement all of M&W's temporary employees provided by Manpower Temporary Services were released.

Peggy Gates, district manager of Manpower, declined to comment. "M&W is pretty well calling all the shots now," she said.

Cleaning service workers, groundskeepers and construction workers were later laid off, said a third M&W employee, who too spoke on condition of anonymity.

On June 18, Lingwood and other M&W officials held a plantwide meeting to discuss the situation with all departments, the employee said.

"Employees were asking all kinds of questions like if the company was going bankrupt and how long these layoffs would be," said one of the workers. "They told us they didn't know, and that they couldn't get any answer from P&G, if we were going to get the business back."

During the June 18 meeting, officials said that if M&W didn't get a commitment from P&G by the end of June, they were going to have to do something, the employee said.

"Now they are just going through a lot of people but nobody knows what is going on," he said.

M&W cut all overtime and weekend production and pushed the 48-hour weeks to 36 hours and the 40-hour weeks to 32 hours, the employees said.

Fru-Con Construction Corp., a maintenance construction contractor for P&G, also has been laying off employees because of a business slump.

"We are having a slowdown, but it is standard," said Rod Nobis, Fru-Con construction site manager. "It is a market-driven product, and it's typical business to go through cycles."

Although he would not say how many employees had been laid off, he said business for Fru-Con would pick up as soon as construction starts for P&G's new tissue towel plant.

P&G has announced it will build a $350 million tissue towel plant to be completed in early 2000.