Plant Performance Services. located at 1520 S. 129th West Ave. in Sand Springs will be shutting down its plant on December 23. As a result, 73 local workers will be losing their jobs at Christmas time.

The plant has been in business in Sand Springs for 50 years where it retrofitted and installed furnaces for oil and gas refineries.

The company may still employ a handful of workers at the site through January, but all production work at the plant will cease by the end of the year according to Keith Stevens, spokesman for Fluor Corp., the parent company of Plant Performance Services.

Stevens said the work will be moved to facilities near Houston to better serve energy industry customers on the Gulf Coast.

Some employees will be dismissed immediately but will receive pay and benefits for 60 days because of federal laws that require prior notification of mass layoffs.

Of the 73 workers that received layoff notices, 43 worked in production and 30 in administration and accounting.

Source: Tulsa World

Personal bankruptcy filings for the year ended June 30, 2010 surged to a five year high, hitting 1.57 million, a 20% increase from the prior year. Furthermore, in the period between April and June, there were 422,061 bankruptcy filings, a 9% increase from the 388,148 in the previous quarter, and up 11% from 381,073 a year earlier.

Quarterly filings surpassed 400,000 for the first time since a record 667,431 bankruptcies were filed in the fourth quarter of 2005, when Congress passed new bankruptcy laws that made it harder for people and businesses to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The huge spike in filings in 2005 were primarily due to individuals and businesses rushing to file bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy laws took effect whereas the current steady rise in bankruptcy filings since 2006 is directly attributable to the overall weakness in our local, state and national economies.

Indicatively, Nevada had the highest rate of filings on a per capita basis in the last year, with 11.74 per 1,000 people, while Alaska had the fewest, with just 1.58 per 1,000. The states with the most bankruptcies were California (241,975), Florida (107,373), Illinois (80,801), Georgia (77,809), and Ohio (72,924).

Source: Administrative Office of the United States Courts

Hilti USA laid off 64 employees at its North American headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma yesterday. After the layoffs, Hilti has 614 employees at its Tulsa facility.

The Liechtenstein-based company is cutting its Tulsa work force to “enable it to grow on a sustainable, profitable basis in a challenging economy,” said Cary Evert, president and CEO of Hilti’s Western Hemisphere operations.

Hilti is a toolmaking company that has been struggling due to the construction industry slowdown. Hilti said it does not expect the construction market to begin recovering until 2011.

Source: Tulsa World

HSBC Finance Corp. announced yesterday that it plans to close its Tulsa office in September 2010 which means that approximately 465 Tulsa workers will lose their jobs.

Employees will get at least 60 days’ notice, but most will remain on the job until September, said Rob Sherman, vice president of public affairs for HSBC-North America. Details on severance packages, benefits and outplacement services will be provided soon, he said.

Sherman said that all employees at the facility will have the opportunity to apply for open positions at other HSBC locations including Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Las Vegas, Nevada, New Castle, Delaware, Chesapeake, Virginia, Buffalo, New York, Salinas, California and Chicago, Illinois.

HSBC Finance’s local office is located at 4848 S. 129th East Ave. and primarily handles customer service, collections and technology support for HSBC’s credit card business. HSBC Finance is part of HSBC-North America, which is one of the country’s largest banks. It has 370 branches in 12 states and the District of Columbia, and it is the sixth-largest provider of credit cards.

Source: Tulsa World

About 300 employees of Caterpillar Logistics Services Inc., known as Cat Logistics, have been told the company’s Broken Arrow, Oklahoma facility will close at the end of August and they will lose their jobs.

Cat Logistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar Inc., began its Tulsa-area operations in 2000. The 70,000-square-foot site at 13505 E. 61st St. is the national repair and distribution center for U.S. Cellular handsets.

Bridget Young, a media relations representative for Caterpillar said “U.S. Cellular is letting its service agreement expire at the end of August and has selected a provider that specializes in the cell phone industry.”

Source: Tulsa World

The Tulsa area jobless rate surged to 8.2% in January 2010 according to data released last Friday by the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission. That is the highest rate recorded by the Tulsa metro area since at least 1990, which is as far back as revised data goes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Tulsa County’s unemployment rate jumped to 7.8 percent in January, up from 6.8 percent in December. In January 2009, the rate was 5.6 percent.

The Tulsa area’s rate was higher than the state’s other two metro areas, including Lawton and Oklahoma City, which had a 6.7 percent rate in January.

“Tulsa is more heavily engaged in manufacturing [while] Oklahoma City has more of the energy sector” said Steve Agee, economics professor at Oklahoma City University and chairman of the Oklahoma City branch board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “I think what you’re seeing is a little bit more stability with respect to energy and a little less stability with respect to manufacturing.”

Bob Ball, economic research manager for the Tulsa Metro Chamber, said he believes the economy has bottomed, but employers remain cautious about hiring. He thinks it’s possible Tulsa’s jobless rate could go higher.

“In some cases, employers have held off as long as they can on layoffs, and now are finally having to let people go as a matter of survival because the economy is not turning as fast as they had hoped. Oklahoma City and Lawton have large government- related, service-industry-based economies, which also can help explain the difference in their jobless rates and Tulsa’s. They’re less likely to see a dramatic fluctuation in their jobless rates than an entrepreneurial area such as Tulsa where private-sector businesses take risks daily” Ball said.

Source: Tulsa World.

PepsiCo announced last Thursday that it is closing its two-year old Gatorade plant located in Pryor’s Mid-America Industrial Park. The company has already stopped regular production work at the plant and plans to wind down operations during the next three months.

Pepsico says all of the approximately 100 employees will receive three months and one week of full pay with benefits plus outplacement services.

The Pryor facility was the largest of Gatorade’s nine manufacturing plants and produced both Gatorade and Propel Fitness Water drinks.

There had been two previous rounds of layoffs at the Pryor plant as 22 employees were let go in October 2008 and another 87 received pink slips in December 2008.

Source: Tulsa World and NewsOn6

Back in December, the qualification dates for existing tiers of unemployment benefits were extended for an additional two months. This extension is up at the end of February which means that unless another extension is made, millions of unemployed workers will lose their unemployment benefits over the next few months.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a new report last week showing that …

1.2 million jobless workers will become ineligible for federal unemployment benefits in March unless Congress extends the unemployment safety net programs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). By June, this number will swell to nearly 5 million unemployed workers nationally who will be left without any jobless benefits.
…
Currently, 5.6 million people are accessing one of the federal extensions (34-53 weeks of Emergency Unemployment Compensation; 13-20 weeks of Extended Benefits, a program normally funded 50 percent by the states).

The following graph is based on the January employment report and shows the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more …

The blue line is the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The red line is the same data as a percent of the civilian workforce.

According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce. (note: records started in 1948).

Source: Calculated Risk Blog

Tulsa-based Homeland Federal Mortgage has closed for business.

The mortgage company’s officers, Daniel & Laura Newberry, filed a personal Chapter 7 bankruptcy on February 5th in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma.

Homeland Federal’s president, Dan Newberry, who also is an Oklahoma state senator, said the closing of his mortgage company and his bankruptcy filings is a “severe reminder that no one is immune to the current economic crises afflicting our nation.”

Newberry started his mortgage company at his home in 2003 with only two employees. When it ceased operations at the end of December, the company had grown to seven employees and was located in a suite at 5800 E. Skelly Drive.

For a short time, the business had a presence in Oklahoma City and considered the possibility of opening in other states. In 2006, though, the company decided to pull back and focus on its home market of Tulsa, according to Newberry.

“We have survived the ‘mortgage meltdown’ which began in 2006 while many of our competitors closed their doors,” Newberry said. “However, recent federal legislative initiatives that favor big banks have made it increasingly difficult for small family-owned businesses like ours to survive. Their actions have led to reductions in available funds to lend, approvable borrowers, and a significant increase in the time it takes to close a home loan. This combined with a weakening economy has forced us to close our company.”

Newberry noted that according to some reports, more than 70 percent of mortgage brokers in Oklahoma did not renew their licenses between 2006 and mid-2009.

Source: Tulsa World

After weeks of negotiation between Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett and the City of Tulsa police union came to naught, 124 Tulsa police officers were laid off yesterday reducing the city’s police force from 808 to 684.

Tulsa’s police department is funded by sales tax revenue which has decreased substantially due to the current economic recession.

Earlier this week, 91 percent of the police union’s membership took part in the 24-hour vote and 90 percent of those who participated rejected the mayor’s proposal that would have saved all the police jobs.

Read more about the Tulsa police layoffs in this Tulsa World article.