The latest round of layoffs comes just two months after Thermo Fisher announced plans to close three sites in San Diego, bringing the total to nearly 600 jobs cut in 2023.
Pictured: Thermo Fisher sign in front of building/JHVEPhoto, iStock
Two months after it announced plans to close three sites in San Diego, Thermo Fisher Scientific plans to cut 88 workers in the area, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed in California.
This brings Thermo Fisher’s total number of job cuts in the area to nearly 600 since the start of 2023. Though the 218 job cuts announced in April were related to the company’s decision to close three sites in San Diego, the most recent filing received by the state on June 13 shows these cuts are from the company’s Carlsbad facility, a coastal city in northern San Diego county.
Thermo Fisher was not immediately available to BioSpace for comment.
Nancy Austin, vice president of human resources of Thermo Fisher’s genetic sciences group, wrote in a letter to California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) that the company decided to close the three San Diego facilities due to “unforeseeable business circumstances caused in part [by] a sudden downturn in demand for COVID-19 testing products and other evolving economic and business conditions.”
Though the San Diego area has been the focus of Thermo Fisher’s layoffs in 2023, it isn’t the only place the pharma has made cuts. In March, the company filed a WARN notice stating it plans to close a New Jersey manufacturing site, laying off 113 employees. The pharma told Patch News that the decision was due to a decline in “manufacturing volume demands.”
This staff trimming has been ongoing for Thermo Fisher over the last year. In November, the company cut an unspecified number of jobs in Grand Island, N.Y., and 95 jobs across two sites in California, according to WARN notices filed with the state.
Rosemary Scott is an editor at BioSpace, focusing on the job market and career development for professionals in the life sciences. You can reach her at rosemary.scott@biospace.com and on LinkedIn.
