A WARN Act notice was filed Tuesday for JSW Steel in Mingo Junction to lay off 160 employees. A large reason for the reduction is due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jefferson County Commissioner Dave Maple hopes this change to staff isn’t long-term.

“Anytime you have a reduction, or layoffs– it’s not good, obviously,” said Maple. “I mean, there’s a lot of families depending on that, so there will be an impact.”

JSW Steel did suffer a two-month outage at the beginning of the pandemic and filed a prior WARN Act notice in April– before restarting operations in June.

And this time around, the notice says these layoffs will come in two phases– the first beginning Friday, and another one set to take place in August.

According to Commissioner Maple, these kinds of changes typically impact one major area of funding.

“You see it most directly in permissive tax– or spending. So, folks are not going to go out and buy a car, they’re going to buy exactly what they need,” said Maple. “That’s, to us, the most immediate change that we see is peoples spending behavior changes.”

When it comes to the future of the plant, Evan Scurti with the Jefferson County Port Authority released the following statement:

“The good news is that I continue to see ongoing commitment from JSW toward their Mingo assets. The local team has had recent discussions with the Port about capital investments that would make the facility even more competitive, so I’m hopeful that the layoffs will be brief and the team will continue to move the plant forward, bring folks back to work, and even create more jobs.”

The company says it is working to modernize the existing arc furnace during this shutdown– which Maple adds is a good sign

“They made it clear that they’re going to keep taking care of the equipment, keep projects moving forward. So if you’re going to hear negative news about layoffs, this at least seems more positive.”

The TIMET plant in Toronto has also filed a WARN Act notice to lay off 200 employees.