ST. LOUIS — Pretium Packaging LLC, a St. Louis-based packaging manufacturer, has laid off hundreds of workers, including some in Missouri this spring, as it shuttered five plants following an acquisition.
However company officials said they will be hiring at plants that will be picking up the work from the closed plants.
In September 2021, Chesterfield-based Pretium, which makes customized rigid packaging, acquired Alpha Consolidated Holdings Inc., the parent of Overland-based Alpha Packaging, for an undisclosed amount. Alpha makes plastic packaging such as packers, bottles and jars. At the time of Alpha’s sale in last fall, it operated eight facilities in the U.S. and western Canada and two facilities in Europe, and Pretium had 19 automated manufacturing facilities.
At the end of May, Pretium closed a plant in Hermann, Missouri, laying off 73 employees across a variety of job titles, including inspectors/packers, maintenance technicians and set-up operators, according to a notice filed with the state under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
Last month, Pretium also closed a plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, formerly operated by Alpha Packaging. That layoff resulted in 53 workers laid off, according to a notice the company filed with the state of Michigan.
Pretium also began shuttering a plant in May in Anaheim, California, where it had expected to lay off 101 workers by the end of July, according to a company notice filed with the state.
Another former Alpha Packaging plant in Winona, Minnesota, closed in February, with 45 employees laid off, and 45 workers were laid off at another Pretium plant that was shuttered in April in Escondido, California, according to Tim Wehrfritz, a consultant with Pretium. A former human resources and mergers and acquisitions executive for Pretium, Wehrfritz had retired in 2020 but returned in a consulting capacity to assist with the Alpha Packaging integration, he said.
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