The ax is likely to begin falling at Pfizer’s Rocky Mount, NC, facility in the coming days as the pharma giant begins to trim its workforce there by about 400, according to reports.
The cuts were expected to begin Tuesday, according to WRAL TechWire, although a Pfizer spokesperson would only reiterate the company's earlier announcement that falling demand for certain products required Pfizer to “reduce manufacturing volume and associated staffing levels at the legacy Hospira Rock Mount, NC, facility in the second half of 2016.”
The spokesperson told WRAL that “a few hundred full time” positions will be affected by the cuts.
About 2,000 workers are employed at the facility, which recently got a new state-of-the-art sterile injectable manufacturing facility and new quality laboratory. Overall, the Rocky Mount plant remains an important site in Pfizer’s sterile injectable supply network.
The plant is not the only part of the legacy Hospira operation that Pfizer is cutting. In August, Pfizer said it no longer needed legacy distribution sites that it got with the $15 billion buyout of Hospira in 2015 so it began closing four facilities across the U.S.
The Rocky Mount facility was a legacy Hospira site that had had been a regulatory thorn under Hospira’s saddle but had worked its way out from beneath a FDA warning letter prior to the Pfizer deal, and at the time when the deal was struck, Pfizer said it was completely aware of the issues surrounding the FDA warning and was satisfied with the progress being made to rectify the problems.
- check out the WRAL TechWire report
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