NEWARK — A biotech and medical devices company that produced a 15-minute COVID test kit, has decided to chop more than 1,000 Bay Area jobs, according to official state labor reports.
Cepheid is cutting 948 jobs in Northern California, according to WARN letters the company has sent to the state Employment Development Department.
The layoffs will eliminate 1,003 jobs in the Bay Area, the WARN notices show.
The job cuts will terminate 746 positions in Newark, 256 in Sunnyvale, 1 in Santa Clara and 23 in the San Joaquin County city of Lodi, the WARN notices state. That works out to a loss of 1,046 Northern California jobs.
The biggest round of employment cutbacks came at a Cepheid manufacturing center at 7000 Gateway Blvd. in Newark, where 683 positions were lost.
Sunnyvale-based Cepheid said it is shutting down operations at the manufacturing center which the company calls its Newark B1 facility.
“This shutdown is expected to be permanent,” Cepheid stated in the WARN notice. “The entire facility is being closed.
Another 63 Cepheid workers lost their jobs at a nearby manufacturing site at 6601 Overlake Place in Newark. The wording of the company’s WARN letter suggests this site, which it calls B2, won’t be closing completely.
“The employment losses are expected to be permanent,” Cepheid said of the Newark layoffs.
Cepheid gained high-profile status in 2020 because of its creation of COVID test kits that could produce results in 15 minutes.
Yet the company’s core business is its automation of tests that can identify an organism such as a virus through its DNA or RNA.
None of the employees are represented by a union.
Cepheid was founded in 1996 and went public in 2000. In 2016, Washington, D.C.-based Danaher Corp. bought Cepheid for $4 billion.
Some of the job cuts in the current round of layoffs occurred at the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters. The Sunnyvale layoffs occurred at several facilities that are near the main office.
In all of the job cuts, the employees affected by the layoffs do not have the right to bump, that is, displace, other employees. This is the case even if the affected employee who is losing a job has seniority over another employee.
“Cepheid will be offering all impacted associates outplacement services provided by a third-party vendor, free of charge,” the company stated in a WARN letter.
