In a letter to Wilmington Mayor David Raizk and City Council, DHL said that it will shut down a facility that is a part of its US freight hub at Wilmington, Ohio, and will be permanently laying off 229 employees between January and July 2009. Those DHL employees who will be losing their jobs include both blue collar and white collar employees, ranging from laborers to office administrators.

DHL said that the layoffs will be done within the DHL solutions facility between the first week of January and July 31, based on business circumstances. The letter was filed Thursday November 13 with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services as a 60-day advance of layoffs in order to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

In a statement DHL said:

"The employees employed at these facilities are not represented by a union. No bumping rights exist among those non-union employees, nor are there any jobs to which those employees may bump. The layoff will be permanent."

This is just the latest round of bad news for Wilmington. Last week DHL Express said it would sharply reduce its US operations due to the global economic slump, and projects losses at $1.3 billion annually in the US.

DHL also indicated that it still hopes to finish up a contract by the end of the year to hire United Parcel Service (UPS) at Louisville, Kentucky to handle sorting and flying of DHL's US express delivery cargo.

DHL is the Wilmington region's largest employer. A deal with UPS would eliminate the need for the Wilmington DHL hub, as well as two of DHL's cargo-handling contractors there, ABX Air and ASTAR Air Cargo. If the deal goes forth as DHL hopes, that would eliminate the 7,000 remaining jobs at the hub, not including the more than 1,300 that ABX Air said it lost since May of this year due to DHL cutbacks.

Wilmington is included in the district of US Rep Mike Turner (R-Centerville, OH), who is meeting with leaders of a regional task force Monday afternoon for an update on the expected job losses and what assitance the region will need from the federal government. The state of Ohio is currently seeking a $3.8 million grant from the US Department of Labor for retraining and related needs of workers that will be losing their jobs at the DHL hub.