Estée Lauder's Islandia plant to close

A subsidiary of Estée Lauder Inc. has filed a layoff notice at its Islandia packaging plant that is expected to result in more than 500 layoffs, the loss of millions in wages for the Long Island economy and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue.

Officials at Whitman Packaging Corp. filed a layoff notice last week with the New York State Labor Department that said 535 full- and part-time workers would be laid off by mid-May. The plant will close on June 30.

New York State's Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers to provide 90 days' notice before a plant closing, mass layoff or relocation, according to the state Labor Department's website.

Officials at Estée Lauder and the plant did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment.

Whitman was incorporated in 1970 as Clinique Laboratories Inc., court records show. Workers at the plant mostly package products for department store displays of Estée Lauder cosmetics.

According to the layoff notice, the facility employs 103 full-time, 219 part-time, and 213 part-time on-call workers.

Michael Crowell, who follows the Long Island labor market as senior economist for the New York State Labor Department, said the average wage in the industry, which is called administrative and support services, is $34,600 a year, or $16.64 an hour. He said the plant's workforce is the equivalent of 250 full-time workers and totals about $9 million a year in lost wages for the local economy.

"It's bad news for an already weak economy," he said Wednesday.

Estée Lauder, which has a campus in Melville, closed a separate Whitman Packaging plant in Yaphank in 2009, eliminating about 150 full-time jobs.

Officials in Islandia village, where Village Hall is closed on Wednesdays, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment.

Records show that last year the plant paid $336,141 in town taxes.

The facility is located in an industrial area with no businesses nearby. But Jay Martino, owner of Mama Angelina in Hauppauge and one of the closest food establishments to the plant, said he feels for the workers losing their jobs even though he rarely gets customers from Whitman Packaging.

"I see a lot of businesses laying off," he said Wednesday. "In my business, you hear it left and right."

Martino said he was recently told that a nearby insurance company had laid off 100 workers.

With Carrie Mason-Draffen, Stacey Altherr and Jennifer Maloney