You may not think about it, but when things blow up that is usually not an accident. Despite what you may have seen on too many TV shows most explosives are not made by obsessed loners in basement somewhere. They are made by a team of dedicated professionals who do their best to make sure that everything happens as safely as humanly possible. While you may not have ever heard of Tread Corp., it’s not exactly a house hold name, the company describes itself  in the following terms, “The driving force behind the company is TREAD’s MISSION STATEMENT: To provide innovative, high-quality commercial explosives equipment solutions by promoting safety and excellence in an environment of trusted partnerships with our associates, customers, suppliers and community.” So as you can imagine this company employs a lot of very safety conscious people.

About 100 of those people are going to out of a job in the very near future.  The company has been reported to be laying off about 100 people from their Botetourt County facility. That is more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are 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.” On the bright side in this case the layoffs are only temporary, and so a good deal of these workers may be brought back to the payroll when the company has need of them again.

The downside is that these layoffs are set to impact the majority of the workers at the facility. The EastPark Commerce Center, the facility from which all of the layoffs are set to occur, only employs about 170 people in total. So clearing out 100 workers will be the same as stripping the facility down to its bare bones in terms of staffing.

For the time being the company has not been giving out any official word about the cuts to jobs. The company has put out no released and the information about the layoffs has, for the time being, come primarily from the office of the county administrator. Because of this silence there are a lot of details missing from this picture. We know that the company is laying off, we have an idea of how many people will be out of a job, but anything after that is up in the air for the time being. We do not know when these workers will be notified of the job losses, though the terms of a mass layoff action mean that they should get some extra time to prepare.  Information on severance and other details are not available at this moment.