Electrolux Layoffs Near Complete; Overhaul for New Products Set to Begin
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
For 37 years, the Electrolux Anderson plant has been tied to food preservation. But after April’s announcement of a long-term North American partnership with Midea, the Chinese appliance giant, a reordering of production that will move the Anderson factory away from refrigerators and toward laundry equipment.
The facility retooling into a fabric-care operation, requiring a layoff of more than 1,200 workers, promises—if the plan holds—to bring many of them back when production resumes in the first half of 2027.
While some of the workers received a severance package, more than a few have not. Many of these workers have already found new jobs in other local manufacturing concerns, said Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns, adding the county continues to help those who have been laid off.
“We have hosted, and continue to host a number of job fairs,” said Burns. “There are a lot of manufacturing jobs in Anderson County available and many more on the way as our industries continue to expand. People with a good work record are not having trouble finding jobs.”
The change in Anderson is part of a broader corporate arrangement that includes three joint ventures in North America. One will focus on sales of food-preservation products, divided evenly between the two companies. Another will run Midea’s existing refrigerator plant in Juárez, Mexico. The Anderson venture, by contrast, will be controlled slightly by Electrolux, which will own 55 percent, with Midea holding the remaining 45 percent.
The company’s wager is that Midea’s manufacturing model—lean, highly automated, and built for scale—can help solve some of Electrolux’s long-running problems in North America, where high costs and underperforming factories have weighed on the business. For Electrolux, the appeal offers a potential both practical and financial: shared risk, lower fixed costs, and access to a more efficient production system.
For Midea, the attraction is no less strategic. The company has global reach and enormous revenue, but less of a manufacturing base inside North America than it would like. By buying into these ventures, it can reduce exposure to import tariffs, gain a foothold in American distribution, and attach its production discipline to brands that consumers already know well.
The partnership also reflects the strangely durable power of brand recognition in the appliance business. Electrolux and Frigidaire still carry weight on the showroom floor, even as the factories behind them are redesigned with a very different industrial imagination. In that sense, the deal is less a merger of products than of business logics: one company brings the name, the other the method.
For Anderson, the immediate story is less abstract. The plant will stop making refrigerators this month, undergo a major retrofit, and reopen as a laundry factory in 2027. The workforce will shrink abruptly before it grows again, with the new venture expected to add back as many as 1,200 employees over 2027 and 2028 as production ramps up.
Though a sequence is a pause rather than an ending, pauses have a way of landing heavily in Anderson where the plant has mattered for decades. Anderson has long lived with the rhythms of manufacturing, and the coming year will test how well a community can endure the gap between one industrial identity and the next.
If the plan works, shoppers may eventually see more technologically ambitious laundry products and sharper pricing in the mid-to-high end of the market. That would fit the larger corporate logic here: fewer wasted costs, more efficient plants, and a stronger position against rivals in a market that has been under pressure for years.
But the more immediate reality is more human than strategic. A familiar factory is being emptied out and remade, and the people who made it work are being asked to wait for its return.
