PORTLAND — SolarWorld plans to lay off most, and possibly all, of its Hillsboro staff in July, according to a letter the company sent to state employment officials.
At least 500 regular employees and as many as 711 would be affected, according to a May 19 letter released by state officials Thursday night: “This employment action is expected to be permanent.”
The letter also says the plant could close, painting a considerably more dire picture than the one SolarWorld has presented in the two weeks since its German parent declared itself insolvent.
As recently as Wednesday, SolarWorld had said it was operating as usual and ” intends to continue operating into the future,” albeit with an unspecified number of job cuts.
SolarWorld sent its May 19 letter in compliance with the 1998 federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires employers to give employees and local communities advance notice of large job cutbacks.
It’s not clear why state officials hadn’t disclosed the letter earlier. Previously, they’d said they were expecting a letter from the company but didn’t know when.
Like other U.S. solar manufacturers, SolarWorld had been under growing pressure from Chinese competitors the company says are dumping products on the American market. Earlier Thursday, SolarWorld joined a trade case that it hopes could trigger tariffs or other sanctions on Chinese imports.
SolarWorld opened its 103-acre Washington County campus in 2008, after spending $440 million to convert an idle computer chip factory for solar production. State and local tax breaks worth $80 million helped underwrite the project.
From the start, though, SolarWorld has battled Chinese competition in the U.S. and abroad. The U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels in 2012 and 2014, but they proved insufficient.
On May 10, the company’s German parent, SolarWorld AG, announced it could no longer cover its debts and would file for insolvency – which is roughly analogous to corporate bankruptcy in the United States.
The pending layoffs may be the largest since last year, when Intel eliminated 784 jobs in Washington County in a massive restructuring. Hundreds or thousands of additional Intel employees in Oregon – Intel won’t say just how many – took buyouts to leave the company as it retooled to prepare for long-term decline in the PC market.
Nonetheless, Oregon’s job market is the best it’s been in decades. The state’s unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent, the lowest since at least 1976.
And economists say Oregon is approaching “full employment” – a metric that suggests employers are having increasing trouble filling open positions, but not that every single person who wants a job can find one.
Oregon once sought to become a leader in solar manufacturing, pumping tens of millions of dollars in subsidized loans and tax credits at a time into large companies like Sanyo and SolarWorld, as well as smaller outfits with little track record, such as the thin film solar manufacturer SoloPower and polysilicon manufacturer Peak Sun Solar.
The strategy has largely flopped. Oregon has 4,509 jobs in the solar industry, according to the most recent census from the Solar Foundation. But only 1,200 of those jobs are in manufacturing, and SolarWorld accounts for two-thirds of them.
The solar installation and development business, by contrast, remains fairly strong, and is largely responsible for the 1,500 jobs the industry added in 2016.
