Steelcase Inc. will close its Lithia Springs plant this spring, idling about 300 workers in phases, the company said Thursday.

The factory, opened in 1996, makes file cabinets and binder bins, work that will be moved to a company plant in Athens, Ala., said spokeswoman Jeanine Holquist.

The $2.3 billion-a-year, Grand Rapids-based company has 13,000 employees at nine plants in North America and 13 plants overseas.

With global demand dropping, Steelcase will shut down its North American plants for one week in late January.

However, shuttering of the Lithia Springs factory is not tied to the recession, she said. “We have been working for five or six years to reduce our square footage to increase our efficiencies.”

In closing the plant, the company expects to save about $40 million, she said.

Most of the jobs at the plant are production jobs. A “handful” are salaried positions, she said.

News of the impending layoffs come as the economy continues to sputter.

On Friday, the government issues its monthly jobs report — numbers that are widely expected to be dismal.

The year’s previous reports showed ten consecutive months of worsening job losses. Roughly 1.2 million jobs have been lost this year, about half of them in August, September and October.

Earlier this week Automatic Data Processing, a payroll processing company, estimated that 250,000 private sector jobs were lost in November — which made most analysts even gloomier about today’s report.

ADP has often been slightly more upbeat than the official numbers. Moreover, ADP does not tote up losses in state and local government — where plunging revenues have been forcing cuts across the country.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also issues a new unemployment rate today. October’s national jobless rate was 6.5 percent.

Local numbers will come from the Georgia Labor Department later this month.