Technology company refuses to confirm or deny latest layoff rumors

Local economic officials are bracing for another round of layoffs at Hewlett-Packard, even though the company has yet to confirm the cuts are coming.

"We are arranging a meeting for early next week of various service providers," said John Sechrest, an economic development specialist with the Corvallis-Benton County Chamber Coalition.

"What we're going to try to do - assuming this is real - is pull together some work force training stuff."

Rumors of substantial job cuts at HP's Corvallis site have been flying this week, but local government officials say they've received no formal notification.

A corporate spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny those reports.

"HP is focusing on growth opportunities and maximizing efficiencies," said Emma McCulloch, reached by telephone at the global technology company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. "The imaging and printing group is considering some changes in how it produces and distributes original HP supplies and is still making decisions on those specific strategies."

McCulloch declined to elaborate on her comments, but one of the most persistent rumors in circulation has the company shutting down one of its Corvallis fabrication labs, or fabs, the clean-room facilities that produce computer chips. Corvallis is the birthplace of the company's wildly successful inkjet printing technology, and the sophisticated circuitry that controlled the inkjet printheads came from a local fab.

While Hewlett-Packard was tight-lipped on the subject of possible job cuts, the idea had gained enough currency by Friday that concrete plans were being laid to mobilize assistance for hundreds of displaced workers.

Sechrest has contacted a half-dozen government agencies and nonprofit organizations to arrange a time next week to discuss ways to help departing HP employees. That would likely include information on job search resources, a hiring fair featuring other local tech companies and a "business boot camp" workshop for would-be entrepreneurs.

"We'll have somebody there," said Bill Ford, executive director of the Business Enterprise Center, a regional startup incubator. Ford noted that six of the 10 small businesses currently housed at the BEC were launched by Hewlett-Packard veterans.

"This might be a good opportunity for the Business Enterprise Center to rally around the business community and provide some support for workers coming out of HP."

Similar services - some of them underwritten by grants from Hewlett-Packard - were offered in the wake of major job cuts in 2005. The company slashed more than 700 jobs that year through several rounds of buyouts and early retirement offers.

Driven by the growth of its inkjet business, HP's Corvallis campus expanded rapidly through the late 1980s and early '90s, making it the largest private employer in Benton County. Employment peaked in 1996 at around 6,000, plus several thousand more contract workers from security guards to assembly line technicians.

Since then the numbers have shrunk steadily, and the site employs fewer than 3,000 workers today. Last year the company put 320,000 square feet of office space in Corvallis up for lease, and it recently donated the use of an 80,000-square-foot building to the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute for the next 20 years.

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net. Matt Neznanski can be reached at 758-9518 or matt.neznanski@lee.net.