SK Battery lays off nearly 1,000 employees at North Georgia plant

SK Battery America, a Korean electric vehicle battery manufacturer with major operations in Georgia, has laid off 958 employees, or more than a third of its workforce, at a plant in the northern part of the state.

The company notified state officials Friday of the layoffs at its Commerce plant, which sits about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta, through a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. According to the filing, the employees’ last day was Friday and they will be paid through May 6.

The move comes as the Trump administration has cut once-robust federal tax incentives, many enacted during the Biden administration, for consumers and manufacturers of electric vehicles.

Last year, EV industry groups, environmentalists and some residents of Commerce were worried the changes could blunt sales of EVs and cost jobs in Georgia and other GOP-led states, which have benefited most from the incentives.

Those fears now seem to have been founded.

“To align operations to market conditions, SK Battery America has made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce,” the company said in a statement. “SK Battery America remains committed to Georgia and to building a robust U.S. supply chain for advanced battery manufacturing. We are pursuing a range of future customers, including the Battery Energy Storage System arena.”

Electric storage systems are ones that can be fitted to solar arrays, for instance, to store excess power to be used when the sun isn’t shining or to store excess power from the grid for use in times of peak demand.

The state and Jackson County offered SK Innovation about $300 million combined in grants, tax breaks and free land to convince the company to build its plant in Commerce. The $2.6 billion facility started production in 2022.

This is not the first wave of layoffs at the SK plant. In fall 2023, the company laid off an undisclosed number of workers and a few months later furloughed many of the workers at its massive Jackson County plant as part of efforts to cut production to match the sagging demand for electric vehicles.

“Let’s be clear: these were battery manufacturing jobs and now they’re gone,” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, said in a statement. “As predicted, Trump’s war on electric vehicles is hurting Georgia’s economy. We were booming and building new plants. Now Georgians are losing their jobs.”

A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned.

SK is just the latest company to announce layoffs in Georgia. In January, Atlanta-based Home Depot said it would eliminate about 800 corporate jobs, most of which are fully remote positions. Sandy Springs-based UPS said it plans to cut about 30,000 jobs across the company this year.