Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves has called on ST Engineering officials to report on their hiring and training plan after 300 Chilean workers were laid off, and if enough information isn’t forthcoming, work on a new hangar and aircraft mechanical school will stop.
Reeves said he had a call with ST Engineering officials Tuesday, and he’s asked the company to prove the number of jobs they’ve created specifically with Hangar No. 1 at the Pensacola International Airport and the company’s strategic plan for growing the workforce.
The hangar opened in 2018, and the company said it would hire 400 workers at the site. The city is currently building a third hangar for the company through a $210 million program funded by multiple government agencies to expand ST Engineering’s footprint in Pensacola and add a total of 1,700 jobs.
“In the first week of September, I’ve asked ST leadership to come here and walk through that strategic plan of how we’re going to build this workforce here and what that investment is,” Reeves said. “And then my goal would be to turn soon after that and go into our community, FloridaWest, CareerSource Escarosa, PSC, UWF, and that we have a conversation about making sure that we’re all on the same page, with clarity, about how we maximize this economic development investment that our taxpayers have made.”
Reeves said community investment is a two-way street and the city, county and state have done their part, but ST Engineering should do their part by providing clarity on their strategic goals for hiring at the site.
“If we reach a point where these things aren’t fulfilled because we’re too busy building hangars or building A&P mechanic schools, then we’ll pause those until we have this cleared up,” Reeves said.
The announcement came in the wake of news that the company had first fired approximately 100 Chilean workers at the Pensacola site and another 200 for its campus in Mobile, Alabama.
The workers believed they were going to be able to stay in the country for multiple years, and according to a photograph of an ST Engineering recruitment slide shown to the workers in Chile given to the News Journal, the potential of a path to permanent U.S. residency was used as a selling point to the workers.
However, earlier this summer, the workers began to be suspended from the company and later laid off, leaving them with no way to renew their annual visa to stay in the U.S.
Escambia County Commission Mike Kohler sent a letter to the company on Monday asking for three months of severance pay for the laid-off workers and a meeting with company officials to discuss the situation.
Kohler said on Wednesday he has not heard back from ST Engineering
Reeves said he was aware of Kohler’s letter and supported efforts to help the laid-off workers, but his focus is on the overall project with ST Engineering.
“I’m trying to stay less into the telling a private company how they should operate because, frankly, I don’t have the expertise to tell a private company worth billions of dollars exactly how they should handle their employment situations,” Reeves said. “I don’t like reading about the plight of these people. I hate reading that for anybody. I’m sympathetic to that. But what I’m trying to focus on is the greater good of the expectations of the success of this project.”
Reeves said he believes the conversation around ST Engineering’s treatment of the Chilean workers is “fair” but the city is focused on its obligations.
“The city has an obligation to make sure that these jobs are created and to make sure that Pensacolians are getting these jobs,” Reeves said. “And so as other folks, other leaders in our community, have kind of taken the approach of taking on that specific issue (with the Chilean workers). I’m really looking philosophically at the entire project.”
Reeves said the city’s job is to be the “quarterback” of the development of the ST Engineering project.
“The quarterback of this project should also be holding people accountable to what they said they’re going to do,” Reeves said. “So that is what I’m focused on right now.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola demands answers from ST Engineering on hiring practices
