Coca-Cola said it is laying off 421 people at its headquarters and two other Atlanta locations on July 15, according to a notice sent to state officials.
The lay-offs, which include 334 at its headquarters near downtown Atlanta, are part of about 1,200 job cuts then-Coca-Cola President James Quincey announced just before he stepped in as the company's new chief executive on May 1.
The other layoffs include 59 people with corporate positions at Coke offices in SunTrust Plaza, and 28 people in an office building next to Coke’s headquarters.
Coca-Cola spokesman Kent Landers said Coca-Cola has been notifying people on “ongoing” job cuts since that announcement, and that a significant share of the job cuts will be in the beverage company’s headquarters locations in Atlanta. He said job cuts are expected to continue to late 2017 or into 2018.
The company's plans to eliminate 1,200 jobs from a pool of 5,500 corporate positions is part of Quincey's goals to re-tool Coke's product line-up, bottling operations and other parts of the company to rev up revenue and profit growth. The company has saidit plans to use part of the savings — about $800 million through 2019 — to reinvest in new products and marketing.
The job cut notices, which Coca-Cola filed with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, are a requirement of a 1988 federal law, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The WARN Act requires companies to give employees and state officials 60 days' notice, in most cases, of such moves.
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