Laid off from A. O. Smith.

What A. O. Smith layoffs have meant for employees

For anyone who worked in Groveport, the June 23 letter A. O. Smith sent to Ohio lays out the timing it planned. Its schedule put separations in windows from late August to the plant's planned closing in December, with one remote employee's separation set for January 2027, so people from the same plant could be months apart in losing their jobs. If severance was paid when you were let go, Ohio subtracts it from weekly unemployment benefits under Section 4141.31 of its Revised Code. Where a payment isn't tied to particular weeks, the statute treats your normal weekly wage as received in each week after your separation until the money is used up, so a lump sum worth several weeks of pay can cut into benefits for about that many weeks.

In May 2018, Hague announced a $7 million expansion of the Groveport plant with 70 new jobs planned over three years, a Columbus 2020 release said. A. O. Smith's third-quarter 10-Q places the end of Groveport manufacturing, in October 2026, in its restructuring section, under a plan for North America water treatment that the company approved and announced in April 2026 and estimated at about $20 million net of proceeds from selling certain assets. The plan's second-quarter charge totaled $22.6 million, most of it non-cash write-downs, with severance accounting for $2.8 million, so the size of the charge isn't a measure of how many jobs it covered. The filing projects savings of $6 million to $8 million a year, with about $1 million of that expected before the end of 2026, and shows no further charges in the third quarter.

Beyond severance, A. O. Smith's earlier plant moves carried other help, and in Fergus some jobs stayed. In Renton the company said it would fully fund the plant's two pension plans, ACHR News reported. In Fergus, the offer to affected workers paired severance with job placement assistance, a separate ACHR News report said, while about 125 people in sales, finance, engineering and other functions were to stay in the Canadian central office. If you're weighing an A. O. Smith package, it's worth knowing that pension funding and placement help have both been part of what the company put forward before.

The reasons A. O. Smith gave for its Renton, Fergus and McBee moves centered on plants, costs and capacity. It said Renton was small, short of room to grow and getting more expensive to rent, while the larger McBee and Lebanon plants it owned offered economies of scale and more automation, the same trade paper reported. For Fergus, Kevin J. Wheeler, then head of North American water heating, pointed to an industry burdened with overcapacity and the economics of manufacturing in Canada. The company's July 2003 release tied its McBee consolidation to integrating State Industries, a business it had acquired. If you work at a smaller or rented A. O. Smith site, those are the terms the company has used before to explain moving work.

A. O. Smith's own counts show a smaller company. Its 2025 10-K puts the workforce at about 11,500 on December 31, 2025, roughly 1,200 fewer than the 2024 10-K counted a year before, and about 700 of the drop was in North America. Neither filing says how those jobs ended, so the decline sizes the company more than it counts layoffs. The 2025 filing also describes a small portion of the U.S. workforce as union-represented. For a Groveport layoff, our Ohio unemployment benefits page covers the state side of a claim, and the Texas and Washington pages cover the states where A. O. Smith filed its 2003 El Paso and 2018 Renton notices.