Senneca Holdings, the parent company of multiple commercial and industrial door designers and manufacturers, will cut jobs and close facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to notices sent to the states.
Senneca filed layoff notices for employees of TMI International LLC in Pittsburgh and Thermoseal Industries LLC in Gloucester City, N.J.
The TMI facility, which makes flexible PVC partitions, will permanently close by Dec. 31 and 44 people will lose their jobs, according to a notice filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
TMI products are used for tarps, truck covers, curtains, partitions, exercise mats, bounce houses and awnings. The closure is scheduled for later in the year because there are multiple product lines at the TMI plant.
"To eliminate service interruptions, we are staggering the product moves," Stacie Wingfield, chief marketing officer for Senneca Holdings, said in an email to Plastics News.
Neither of the closures are related to the COVID-19 pandemic, she added.
"We have been evaluating consolidation of facilities for some time," Wingfield said.
At Thermoseal, 47 employees will be out of work effective June 30, according to the WARN information on the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The business makes PVC and glass sliding and swing doors for meat and deli cases and bottle coolers.
The plant is closing and operations are moving to Irving, Texas, but six office personnel will remain on the job and work remotely, Wingfield said. In Irving, Thermoseal expects to hire 18 people, she added.
The Thermoseal website says Gloucester City will remain the headquarters for the business but it is moving to a new facility in Irving "to streamline and expand manufacturing to meet the demand for high-quality insulated glass doors and frames while also allowing for shorter lead times."
Founded in 1956 by Ira Fine and his brother-in-law Irving Newman, Thermoseal received its first patent in 1975 for an electrically energized glass panel and circuit breaker combination. The pair grew the business from a small glass insulator to a company that produced more than 200,000 insulating glass units per year, the website says.
Senneca's portfolio also includes built-to-order traffic doors, flexible strip doors, specialty glass doors and data center enclosures sold under brands such as Chase, Eliason and SubZero in addition to TMI and Thermoseal.
Other brands owned by Senneca include Chem-Pruf, Cold Guard, Curtron, Door Engineering, Enershield, FibRDor, Rubbair, Saino, Simplex Isolation Systems and Tiger. The brands are supported by 12 manufacturing facilities and one corporate office, according to a 2018 news release.
The Cincinnati-based management and holding company has been owned by the New York private equity firm Kohlberg & Co. LLC since May 2018.
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