State Farm’s Tacoma operation shutdown continues with state layoff notice

The slow withdrawal of State Farm from Tacoma continues.

On Wednesday, the company filed with the state’s Employment Security Department its layoff notice of 269 workers as of Oct. 31.

State Farm announced in January that it was eliminating its call center operations at the Frank Russell Building, 909 A. St., and at the Columbia Bank Center, 1301 A. St. About 1,400 people worked at the two sites when the closures were announced.

The company has been consolidating operations nationwide in the past several years, with 250 Tacoma jobs moved to the company’s headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois, and about 150 jobs to Phoenix, State Farm told The News Tribune earlier this year. About 600 were to be moved to its DuPont office.

This latest notice is a continuation of that process, as jobs are transferred or eliminated.

“We plan to fully exit the Tacoma Operations Center by the end of 2018,” State Farm public affairs specialist Benjamin Palmer said Wednesday.

The October layoffs are “not new or in addition to announcements we made earlier regarding the Tacoma Operation Center,” Palmer wrote. “This is the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) letter that’s required, and it’s part of that process we already shared publicly back in January.”

Also this week, the company agreed to pay $250 million before the start of a civil racketeering trial over recruiting a judge for the Illinois Supreme Court. The company denied wrongdoing in its settlement.