Beach defense contractor plans up to 135 furloughs

VT Milcom, a Virginia Beach defense contracting firm, has furloughed roughly 45 employees and could furlough as many as 135 by early April.

The company notified the state recently of its intention to lay off 135 workers, with an impact date of April 5, however, the company's president said Tuesday that he would characterize affected employees as "furloughed," not laid off.

"These are potential actions and we're trying to mitigate the number and the duration of the furloughs," said Walt Yourstone, VT Milcom's president.

"This is an extremely fluid situation," he said. "We're already bringing some of those furloughed people back to work," adding that 13 workers could return.

The company is "primarily a task-order, technical services contractor," which does a lot of shipboard installations of communications and computer systems for the Navy, Yourstone said.

It experienced a surge of orders for such work in the last quarter of 2009, resulting in the hiring of extra workers to meet the demand.

Delays in federal contracting this year, however, have resulted in a drop in demand, Yourstone said.

As a result, more furloughs are possible, in phases, with the next round to include fewer than 15 employees, sometime in March, he said.

The first phase occurred Thursday, when 45 workers were notified they were being furloughed immediately.

The affected workers are primarily those involved in VT Milcom's shipboard installations operations.

Task orders are component units of larger contracts, Yourstone said, with a typical task order lasting about four months.

VT Milcom, which employs about 500 workers, is a unit of VT Group, whose global headquarters is in the United Kingdom.

Its U.S. headquarters is in Washington.

Robert McCabe, (757)-446-2327, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com