18 Biddeford Textile workers laid off again

BIDDEFORD – Eighteen workers who were called back to work at Biddeford Textile have been laid off again, according to a union official.

The blanket maker called in the workers March 12 to run the production lines, but they were told Friday afternoon that they wouldn’t be needed this week, said Walter Szumita, a business agent for Local 1856 of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.

Szumita said he was not told why the workers were laid off again. The struggling company laid off 350 people in February. Company officials could not be reached for comment.

Beryl Wolfe, a spokeswoman for Michael Liberty, a Portland businessman working to rescue the mill, said the layoffs are indicative of the challenges the company faces as it reorganizes through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“I believe the company is being conservative,” she said. “They need to have orders in order to bring [the workers] back. They are approaching this day to day and week to week because the company is in a holding pattern.”

She said she suspects that the same sort of thing may happen again.

“It’s going to be a slow road back,” she said. “Production is going to be touch and go because the company is in the hands of the courts and banks.”

The company laid off 93 percent of its work force on Feb. 1. It blamed Sunbeam Corp. for the downturn, saying it had reneged on a contract to buy more than $500,000 worth of electric blanket shells.

A federal bankruptcy judge last week gave Biddeford Textile permission to borrow more than $300,000 from the National Bank of Canada to pay employees back wages and to sell $313,000 worth of blanket shells to Sunbeam.

In return for Sunbeam’s promise to buy the blankets, Biddeford Textile agreed to drop its claims that Sunbeam was supposed to buy $500,000 worth of blankets. On Friday, employees received back pay for two weeks of work, but they were not told when they might be back on the job.