By Rob Kirkbride
GRAND RAPIDS — More than a year ago, Steelcase Inc. started a giant reorganization designed to streamline the company.


The plan was to cut as many as 700 jobs and to shutter the Grand Rapids manufacturing campus.

Since then, the company has posted steadily increasing sales and profits, launched a subsidiary focused on healthcare furniture and found a buyer for its Grand Rapids property.

Time to celebrate the good times, right?

Not so for the company’s 1,300 to 1,500 West Michigan blue-collar workers. Many of them face a difficult choice today. The company is asking 100 to step forward, take a buyout and walk away from their jobs. Workers have until the end of the day to make up their minds.

Whatever happens today, the job losses aren’t over for the world’s largest office-furniture maker. Of the 600 to 700 jobs Steelcase announced it would eliminate, the company still needs to shed 200 to 300 more. The reorganization is expected to be complete by May 2014, spokeswoman Jeanine Holquist said.

By the end of the process, Steelcase will have eliminated more than half of its office and factory work force in West Michigan. Between 1,000 and 1,200 factory jobs will remain.

After years of poor performance, the company’s financial fortunes are on the rebound, which makes furniture job reductions frustrating for workers who have watched as more than 40 percent of their colleagues lost their jobs.

“We all can understand the frustration of uncertainty and certainly empathize with the timing issue,” Holquist said. “When we made the decision, we said it was going to be a lengthy process. It is following the timetable we announced a year and a half ago.”

Workers are apathetic and “almost seem resigned to their fate,” said a 23-year Steelcase employee who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job.