• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Jun 11, 2009 - Page: 6B

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For the second time in two months, The Shaw Group Inc. is eliminating pipe fabrication jobs, with a Walker shop losing 40 workers last week and a Tulsa, Okla., facility closing altogether and ending 168 jobs by August.

Shaw said the job reductions are related specifically to its pipe fabrication business and don’t involve other divisions of the company.

Shaw spokeswoman Gentry Brann said the company’s Shaw Sunland Fabricators business is losing 40 positions out of 600 total jobs at the U.S. 190 site in Walker. In late April, Shaw said it would close a West Monroe pipe fabrication shop and end 202 jobs there by late June.

“The piping, fabrication and construction industry has always seen an influx and outflow of employees based on the quantity of work at any one given time,” Brann said. “These reductions are occurring at a time when many industries around the world are eliminating work forces on a massive scale.”

The more than 400 Shaw job losses are completely tied to a downturn in work orders taking place at each site, she said.

As a $7 billion-per-year construction and engineering company, Shaw has touted its pipe fabrication capacity as the best in the world. And though Shaw’s work has spread to myriad industrial applications — from federal infrastructure projects to petrochemical energy plant construction and maintenance — the company’s pipe fabrication business is what company founder Jim Bernhard began Shaw with in 1987. Many of its other projects depend on the pipe fabrication business for process piping.

The company had been ramping up pipe fabrication leading up to the current recession that began in late 2007. Last year, Shaw opened a 370,000-square-foot pipe fabrication facility in Matamoros, Mexico — just across the U.S. border from Brownsville, Texas — but the company said then that it didn’t expect that expansion to close other shops.

Shaw had operated the Tulsa, Okla., pipe fabrication facility since 2006. Prior to its closing and the shutdown of the West Monroe facility, Shaw operated a dozen U.S. and overseas pipe fabrication plans capable of turning out a collective 10,000 tons of pipe product a month.

Shaw, which has 26,000 employees worldwide, recently had 1,000 vacancies companywide, and the company said it’s continuing to hire in many technical areas.

A job fair is scheduled next week in Lake Charles, where Shaw is completing a 1,400-job nuclear components factory for upcoming nuclear reactor contracts the company is filling.

Workers who lost their jobs in Walker will be eligible to apply for the jobs in Lake Charles or elsewhere within the company, Brann said.