ASHLAND — Pioneer National Latex, an 84-year-old toy balloon company that helped cement Ashland’s reputation as “The Balloon Center of the World,” has been shutting down its production lines since last fall and has lost around 80 employees in the process.
In November, Pioneer told the Ashland plant that it would have to close by the end of the year and that its production would shift to the company’s other plants in Dallas, Canada, and Mexico. The Ashland facility’s operations would shift to shipping and packaging balloons, a process that requires far fewer employees.
By Christmas, the Ashland location had lost around 80 employees who had mostly quit to find new jobs. Only a few ended up getting laid off, production supervisor Boone Bunn said.
“I mean, so it kind of makes you feel better, you’ve dealt with the people this long and knowing that they do have income,” he said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the company struggled to keep up with rising wages, leading to a shortage of employees that hampered production. Some employees would stay for a few weeks and leave to find other jobs, and others that stayed with Pioneer began to leave when its seven-day work week began to be cut down, Boone said.
“If you’re used to working seven days a week and then the money starts getting less, you’re gonna go somewhere you make some more money,” he said.
The plant’s advanced age, 87 years old, and its aging equipment, which was installed as far back as 1961, also influenced the company’s decision to close its doors.
Of the around 30 employees that remain, 15 are maintenance workers sticking around to dismantle the company’s production machines. The other 15 work in administrative roles or ship and package balloons, and a few of them could be laid off by mid-year, Boone said.
Boone also said he was satisfied with how Pioneer handled the plant’s closure.
“Pioneer was fair with us and stuff. I think they stretched it as long as they could here. I really do,” he said.
I spent 26 years at National Latex, it was my first job after discharge from the US Navy in 1970. During my 26 years I was in charge of maintenance of the balloon packaging department, and they allowed me to use my creative imagination to automate the balloon counting and bagging processes. I taught myself how to program PLCs, and to implement them into the process. And then they sent me to North Central Technical College to learn Automation techniques. I engineered most of the new funnel balloon counting system that was the reason for adding the two-story addition to the Commercial Avenue plant. The balloon counter machines were on the 2nd floor and gravity-fed (through 4 funnels) four packaging machines on the ground floor below. That system was still in use in 2016 when I was given a plant tour by Boon Bunn. I left the Latex in 1995 to continue my automation career at Merillat in Loudonville. After several successful projects there, the decision was made in 2001 to close the plant. I remained as part of the disassembly maintenance crew to remove all the equipment from that 500,000 square feet plant. So, I was tasked with the removal of the work I had so proudly done there. I was the last maintenance man there in 2003 when the doors closed for good. And now National Latex is victim of the same fate. It’s a sad, sad day!