800 Intel workers unlikely to get aid

About 800 Intel Corp. workers about to lose their jobs in Colorado Springs aren’t likely to get retraining, job hunting or moving help from the U.S. Labor Department.

Intel officials told the plant’s remaining employees Thursday that the department had rejected Intel’s request for aid. Company officials plan to appeal the decision, said Judy Cara, a local Intel spokeswoman.

But officials also told employees Thursday they don’t expect an appeal to be successful.

Kelly Parker, a manufacturing technician at the plant at 1575 Garden of the Gods Road, said he is “devastated” by the department’s decision. It will derail his plans to enter a two-year training program in September to become a medical electronics repair technician.

“I had plans to finally get out of all the quagmire of all these layoffs for the past 20 years and get a new profession,” said Parker, who has been laid off from semiconductor manufacturing jobs four times in two decades. “I saw it as a real opportunity to better myself and now I feel that it has been pulled from under my feet.”

Intel announced in January it planned to sell the plant and close the 1.4 million-squarefoot operation if no buyer is found. The company said last week that potential buyers want only the building, and it would begin “redeploying” workers when production ends in August.

The plant produces chips for Marvell Technology Group Ltd., which bought Intel’s specialty-chip business in November and plans to move production to Taiwan.

To qualify for the federal help, a company or its workers must show they are victims of foreign competition in one of two ways: from shifting work to a country with a free trade agreement with the United States, or from imports of similar products that triggered workers losing jobs.

Intel’s request was denied on both grounds. Taiwan does not have a free trade agreement with the United States. Also, the products in question weren’t considered similar enough, said a department spokeswoman, who said department policy required that she speak with the media only on condition of anonymity. The Intel plant here makes silicon wafers, considered a raw material. The Taiwan plant will make completed computer chips that will be sent back to the United States as a finished product.

The federal help would have included up to $1,250 for travel as part of a job search, $1,250 in moving expenses and up to two years in pay if workers are enrolled in a retraining program as well as employment counseling and workshops on résumé writing and interviewing.

Workers laid off from seven local employers, including Agilent Technologies Inc. and Schlage Lock Co., during the past three years are eligible for such help. Employees at 38 companies who lost jobs locally got such help during the past 28 years.

The federal agency approved 57 percent of the 2,478 requests for such help made during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2006.

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