Workers at the AFG Industries Jerry Run Plant, formerly known as Fourco Glass, will be facing layoffs within the next two weeks.
    The layoff will affect between 30 to 60 employees, according to Mike Morris, human resources manager.
    For the first time next week, the plant will begin producing gray and bronze architectural glass and the company has purchased automated mechanical stackers to handle the large 130- by 204-inch sheets, instead of using workers who traditionally stack the glass, Morris said.
    The plant has normally produced clear household glass used for things like refrigerator shelves and picture frames. Last March, the plant started manufacturing green automotive glass used for windshields and side windows, he said.
    The gray and bronze glass to be produced is used in the architectural industry for high-rise buildings, Morris said. The plant will produce these types of glass for four months out of the year, at which time workers will be temporarily unemployed, he said.
    The four months will be broken up throughout the year and not in a consecutive period, Morris said.
    Once the batches of gray and bronze glass are run, the workers will be recalled to work when the plant produces the batches of clear and automotive glass.
    "Long-term, for our plant, this is a good thing," Morris said. "We're the only AFG plant to run gray and bronze glass, and as far as automotive, we are only one of two AFG plants to run this type."
    The clear glass they have produced for years will only be made in limited amounts for two months out of the year, according to Morris.
    Some workers at the plant are concerned about their future and the number of people who will be laid off, said Timothy Elder, the United Steel Workers Union president for Local 518G.
    "According to what we've seen it looks like it could affect about 100 people for at least four months of the year," he said.
    "They are concerned because it is not a one time thing. They can't make it working only seven months out of the year every year."
    Although the glass packers are the ones primarily affected, the workers' contracts state if they have seniority they could bump another worker from another department, Elder said.
    Elder met with members of management Friday morning to discuss the situation and the meeting went well, he said.
    "I've asked them if they would be able to accept early retirement proposals for the older people," Elder said.
    The plant normally employees about 290 people, Morris said.
    "We've had a lot of changes lately and we went through them well," Morris said. "Looking long-term from the plant's standpoint, our flexibility to run these products guarantees us to be here for the long run."

    Out-of-towners came to Twyla Saltis' indoor flea market, and oohed and aahed and picked things over until almost all of the valuable antiques were gone. Saltis still has a few items left, though, a few things nobody wanted.
    The coal miners' caps and carbide lamps, left over from the old days when hand-digging and deep mining built this town. Little plastic bags of marbles from the 1940s, when factories around Taylor County led the world in production of the tiny glass globes.
    The entire coal-and-glass legacy of northcentral West Virginia, up for sale.
    Saltis hadn't heard about the most recent glass layoffs, announced last week by AFG Industries, Taylor County's largest private employer. The factory is producing a different type of glass, starting this week, and the new machines will put 60 to 80 workers out of a job.
    "Which glass plant? Fourco?" Saltis asked, invoking the plant's old name. "My son works there. I hope he's going to be OK."
    AFG's Flemington plant traditionally manufactured small panes of clear glass for picture frames and the like. In the past couple of years, though, competing factories in North Carolina and New York have flooded the market with that kind of glass, said Mike Morris, human resources and materials manager for AFG.
    In March, the plant switched products. It started making green glass for car windshields and windows, laying off 25 to 30 unneeded workers temporarily.
    This week, the plant will start making huge sheets of bronze glass for skyscraper windows. Sixty to 80 workers will be temporarily laid off during the four months the plant manufactures that glass.
    AFG will only make clear glass a couple of months out of the year from now on, Morris said. So many of the workers, accustomed to $13-an-hour, full-time union wages, will only be working a few months each year if they stay with the factory.
    Plant managers met with workers last week to talk about the layoffs, but workers still worry about their future with the multistate corporation.
    "I don't even think they know what's going to go on," said one young worker who didn't give his name, nodding toward the central office.
    More than 500 glass factories have operated in West Virginia since the 1800s. Fewer than 20 remain, and several of those are tiny operations.
    Glassmakers came to West Virginia in the first place because the land offered huge reserves of silica sand, and the natural gas to melt it down. The glass industry didn't really start its downslide until the late 1970s, when plastic and aluminum containers came into vogue.
    Suddenly, household items that had always come in glass - cough syrup, honey, peanut butter, vegetable oil - started showing up in plastic. Pop stopped coming in the tall, returnable bottles, and aluminum cans and plastic bottles took over the soft-drink industry.
    At the same time, cheaper European import glass began to flood the market, strangling West Virginia glass plants.
    Those that hung on faced a final hurdle.
    For years, glass-factory workers had retired with sizable pensions - and a case of "white lung" from the dust they'd breathed. The handful of remaining glass factories were left to pay huge workers' compensation premiums on behalf of the defunct companies.
    In 1989, when it was still Fourco Glass Co., the Flemington glass plant laid off 15 percent of its work force to cut costs so it could pay its workers' comp. At the time, plant manager Al Slavich predicted that the glass plants would never get any workers' comp relief, because some legislators are lawyers who make money from workers' comp claims.
    The layoff took Fourco from 450 employees to fewer than 400. Today, the plant employs about 270 people.
    Morris said AFG's new types of glass make it more valuable as a plant to the parent company. It's the only AFG plant that makes the bronze skyscraper glass, and one of two that make auto glass.
    Some workers will be laid off, but Morris said that's better than shutting down the entire plant. That's what might have happened if it had stubbornly kept making clear glass in the face of a glutted market.
    "Two or three years down the road, we'd have been in trouble as a plant," he said.

    As many as 60 workers at AFG Industries, formerly known as Fourco Glass Co., will be laid off in the next two weeks, a company official says.
    The Taylor County business has purchased automated equipment, replacing workers who stack glass, said Mike Morris, personnel director.
    The plant produces household glass used for items such as refrigerator shelves and picture frames. Next week, the company will begin producing architectural glass in four nonconsecutive months a year.
    Workers will be idled for the remainder of the year, Morris said.
    Some workers at the plant worry about their future and the number of layoffs, said Timothy Elder, president of United Steelworkers Local 518G.
    ''They are concerned because it is not a one-time thing,'' he said. ''They can't make it working only seven months out of the year every year.''
    As many as 100 of the plant's 290 employees could be affected by the four-month work schedule, Elder said.
    Morris said the revised work schedule provides the company with flexibility and ''guarantees us to be here for the long run.''