Buyout D-day comes for Merck workers

Some veteran Merck employees, including those in West Point and Upper Gwynedd, had a decision to make Friday that will affect employment for themselves and colleagues with the global pharmaceutical manufacturer.

A union official said Friday was the deadline for filing papers to accept early-retirement packages offered by the company, which recently said it was going to cut 13,000 jobs across the company by 2015.

"If they get their number, then maybe not, but if they don't get their number, there might be layoffs," said Dan Bangert, plant chairman of United Steelworkers Union Local 10-00086.

Bangert said the union represents 2,025 of the approximately 10,000 workers at the West Point manufacturing plant, but he said he could only guess on how many would accept the offer.

"We've got a few that were ready to go and think they will take it," said Bangert, who is not old enough to have received the early-retirement offer.

Bangert said the package included two weeks of pay for each year of service up to a maximum of 78 weeks, with a minimum of six months of health insurance.

A Merck spokesman declined comment Friday when asked about the early-retirement offers.

While offering early-retirement packages, Merck officials said earlier there would be hiring for some key positions. The company's online job board still lists positions at West Point and other facilities, and Bangert said 16 union jobs were added in the last week or so.

Merck, like other large pharmaceutical companies, is struggling to maintain growth and profit levels of the past as blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, enabling lower-priced generic drugs to capture some of the market.

The company, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., did not say July 29 how many jobs would be lost at which facilities. Merck employs about 12,000 people at the Montgomery County sites and several non-headquarters facilities in New Jersey.

Merck said its second-quarter sales rose 7 percent to $12.15 billion from $11.35 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, while net income nearly tripled to $2.02 billion, or 65 cents a share, from $752 million, or 24 cents a share, for the second quarter of 2010.

"For our people, this won't be easy," Merck president and chief executive officer Kenneth C. Frazier said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts July 29. "But the realities of our environment dictate the need to operate more flexibly and nimbly from a cost basis."