Electrolux ready to hire 500 for new facilities

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After coming together slower than company officials originally predicted, a new Electrolux assembly plant in Anderson is ready to hire.

Through Greenville-based Human Technologies Inc., the company intends to hire more than 500 workers by May, according to an announcement from HTI. About 1,800 people work for Electrolux in Anderson County now. Production at the expanded facility will begin right away, the announcement said.

The expansion was announced in 2017. The company has invested $250 million to modernize and expand production with an 800,000-square-foot facility and four new production lines.

Direct-hire and temp-to-hire openings include machine operators, assemblers, team leads and braziers. The company is also hiring 40 process and maintenance technicians.

In several announcements made since 2017, Electrolux said it was closing one of two Anderson plants to create one highly efficient plant. The company also closed a Minnesota plant to move freezer production to Anderson. Electrolux originally intended for production to start at the end of 2019.

Jonas Samuelson, president and CEO of the Sweden-headquartered company, said in a December conference call that a series of technical challenges slowed progress on the expanded plant. The delay also caused companywide financial problems, causing more than half of a $70 million hit on its operating income for the fourth quarter.

Electrolux closed one Anderson plant as planned but put it back into production when the expansion bogged down, Samuelson said. Closing the one Anderson plant and the Minnesota plant, combined with not having all four lines of the new facility operating, also caused capacity challenges, he said.

Samuelson said he expects companywide production to be back on track in the second half of 2020, and for that he expects the new Anderson plant will get the credit.

“The savings will come from the fact that we will operate one high-capacity, very highly-automated factory as opposed to two not-highly automated factories,” he said. Samuelson said when fully operational, the Anderson plant will have a capacity of 3 million units annually, the “largest we have anywhere in the group.”