Vermont firm cuts workweek to avoid layoffs

BENNINGTON, Vt. – A manufacturing company has avoided more layoffs among its production staff by instituting a four-day, 32-hour workweek.

U.S. Tsubaki, a Japanese-owned maker of sprockets for chain-driven machinery, started that schedule last week, according to Michael Manty, a spokesman at the company’s headquarters in Wheeling, Ill.

“We’re holding on to as many workers as we can, and hoping business will come back and we won’t have laid those people off,” Manty said. “It sounds like good government to me.”

On the fifth day, the workers can draw unemployment through a little-known state program called Short-Time Compensation. No such program exists in Maine.

The program has existed in Vermont for several years, but isn’t widely known and may be underutilized, said Steve Engle of the Department of Employment and Training. Engle said he recommends the program to employers whenever it seems appropriate.

U.S. Tsubaki employs 89 people, most of them production workers who earn an average wage of $15.18 an hour, according to Penny Galusha of the human resources department.

U.S. Tsubaki workers haven’t been immune to layoffs. The company laid off 24 toward the end of 2001 and seven more earlier that year. The layoffs were due to a sharp reduction in sales, Manty said at the time.

U.S. Tsubaki has been in Bennington for 25 years, and for a time employed 140.

This month, two more employees at U.S. Tsubaki were laid off, both of them office workers, but no production workers have lost their jobs this year, company officials said.

Instead, at least for now, the workers have been split up into five groups, each group working four out of five days on a rotating schedule so the long weekends are distributed fairly, Galusha said.

“We’re looking at every option [to enhance business]” Manty said. “It’s an extremely tough market. We’ve been hit really hard by Chinese products coming into the country. Getting competitive – that’s the challenge. And we’re trying to hold on to as many workers as we can.”