SunPower is a name that most of you may not be familiar with at all, so before we talk about the job cuts to come to the company lets get up to date by taking a look at how they have chosen to describe themselves, “Founded more than a quarter-century ago, SunPower has set and broken world records from the start. Without SunPower, the story of solar could not be written. The fact is, we’ve been responsible for major industry milestones since our incorporation in 1985, and we challenge conventional thinking. Delivering the highest-efficiency solar cells and solar panels, and the most advanced solar energy systems, SunPower is The World’s Standard for Solar^TM.”

The company is getting ready to get rid of a significant amount of their workers in order to the company’s most recent release, which was titled SunPower Plan to Streamline Manufacturing Operations, Lower Costs and Improve Efficiency, the company will be making in the near future, “SunPower Corp. (NASDAQ: SPWR) today announced a reorganization plan to restructure its Philippines manufacturing operations and reduce its workforce. As part of this initiative, the company will temporarily idle six of the 12 lines in its Fab 2 cell manufacturing plant and 20 percent of panel manufacturing in the Philippines to significantly reduce inventory, lower operational costs and improve efficiency. As a result, the overall blended utilization for the fourth quarter will be approximately 60 percent.  Additionally, the company will reduce its workforce by approximately 900 employees with the reductions occurring primarily in the Philippines.”

In the same statement the company expressed regrets over the changes that need to be made to the near futures, “Industry conditions continue to be challenging and while it is never an easy decision to reduce positions, we must make prudent decisions to effectively compete in an industry with significant overcapacity. Additionally, we’ll further our efforts to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies,” said Tom Werner, SunPower chief executive officer and president.  “With this aggressive reorganization plan, SunPower is well positioned to lead the solar market due to our world leading technology and products, significant downstream presence in multiple end segments and ability to open new market opportunities.”

These kinds of job cuts are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. 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, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. 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.”  The only good news is that the company, under the terms of mass layoff action, the company will have to give the workers several weeks of notice before they cut them from the payrolls.