December 29, 2015
DuPont announced Tuesday its plans to cut about 1,700 jobs in Delaware in early 2016, The News Journal reports.
According to a memo sent by CEO Ed Breen to DuPont’s roughly 6,100 Delaware employees, the cuts will affect employees who were told earlier this month that their jobs were being cut, as well as several hundred others who will be notified in January.
According to Breen, the announcement was made now because the company is required to file planned layoffs with the state by Dec. 31.
"Especially given that we are in the middle of the holidays, we would have preferred to wait until individual notifications were complete before reporting the full local impact," Breen reportedly wrote in the memo. " … I wanted you to hear the difficult news – directly from me …"
Although DuPont will eliminate more than 1 in 4 of its remaining positions in Delaware, the company is not expected to shutter any of its local properties. Those facilities include DuPont's Chestnut Run headquarters where about 3,000 employees now work, the Experimental Station in Alapocas with about 2,500 workers or the Stine Haskell Research Center, near Newark, which has about 600 employees.
Employees will leave the company by the end of March.
Earlier this month, DuPont and Dow Chemical Co. agreed to combine in an all-stock merger valued at $130 billion.
Read more from The News Journal here.
