International consulting firm to lay off 66 at Ephrata location

Professional services firm Williams Sale Partnership Limited (WSP) plans to permanently lay off 66 employees at its Ephrata office.

The Montreal-based company announced this month that it will enact a series of layoffs as part of a workforce reduction effort between August and October.

The layoffs were announced in a notice sent to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry through the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The act requires employers to provide 60 days advance notice when enacting a mass layoff.

According to the notice, 29 billing coordinators, nine accounts payable coordinators and 18 senior billing coordinators are part of the number of employees with affected positions.

“WSP is continually evaluating its business and service levels for operational excellence and client support,” said Corey Dade, vice president of communications at WSP. “As part of these efforts, the company has made the decision to restructure some operations which will be impacting some of our valued employees in the Ephrata PA office.”

WSP is an international engineering consulting firm. It provides technical and strategic advisory services for engineering and infrastructure projects.

None of the employees will be offered bumping rights to replace another employee. The workforce reductions are set for Aug. 20, Oct. 1 and Oct. 20.

WSP is providing ongoing support to impacted employees to ease the transition and is placing qualified individuals in other positions, said Dade.

“(We) are providing separation benefits to employees whom we are unable to place in new roles,” he said. “The majority of our colleagues in the Ephrata office will not be impacted.”