For those of you not familiar with Sanofi the company, “…is a diversified global healthcare leader with nearly 100,000 dedicated professions in more than 100 countries. Sanofi US, with headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey, along with our vaccines division, Sanofi Pasteur, employs more than 11,400 professionals throughout the country. We work to prevent and treat the diseases we know about today, as well as those we may face tomorrow.” Apparently in order to face tomorrow the company believes that they need to thin the ranks a little.

The company has sent out layoff notices to 112 workers. The company, which employs about 11,400 people in the US is not losing a large percentage of their staff, but since all of the job cuts are coming from a single location there are some complications to be dealt with. The jobs are all going to be cut from the company’s manufacturing plant in Kansas City.

This many cuts in a single location are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you not familiar with the concept here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “…from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”  This means that WARN notices need to be issued. A WARN notice is designed to help give the soon to be displaced workers a chance to find new positions before they make it onto the unemployment payrolls. In the current economic climate this few month’s notices may not be enough for many of the workers.

The actual layoffs are expected to begin at some point over the summer, but all of the workers impacted by the layoffs will be out of the plant by the end of the month of June. These job cuts are the first step in the planned closure of the Kansas City manufacturing plant. So more job cuts are going to be coming to the workers of this facility in the long run. The plant closure in expected to take about two years from beginning to end. When all is said and done the closure of the facility will mean the loss of 337 jobs for the Kansas City area, and a higher number of cuts are yet to come.

The company has laid out a layoff schedule for the layoff to come, in order to ease the transition on the workers. The next round of layoffs will go into effect by the 31^st of December, 2012. The round after that will come by the 30^the of June 30 in 2013; and the final round of layoffs will come by Dec. 31, 2014. The plant is slated to be closed by December 2014 and there will be no more jobs to cut at this facility.