File photo: Wayne Moore
A Lake Country company specializing in factory built homes has issued layoff notices to about 30 per cent of its staff.
Darren Bassett, general manager of SRI Homes, says the company issued one-week notices to 70 workers Wednesday. He tells Castanet News once everything plays out over the next week about 50 to 60 of those employees will likely be laid off.
“It’s been slow coming out of winter, that’s part of it,” Bassett said.
“We are also seeing less activity in the residential market this spring versus last spring without question. So we basically made the tough decision to reduce our production run rate by 30 per cent.”
He says the residential market, especially in B.C., has peaked over the last three or four years.
“It just couldn’t continue,” he said.
Bassett says the company is looking at other options to try and increase production.
“We have started to quote on commercial projects which we weren’t able to prior to that because we were so busy with the residential market,” he said. “We are hoping to backfill the residential work we’re losing with commercial and obviously hire these people back.”
The company underwent large layoffs in 2014 and 2015, but many of those people were hired back within a few months once the market improved.
The latest layoffs take effect April 29, and will leave the company with about 140 production employees.
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