Billy Skiles worked for the company for almost 50 years.
“I hate it that this many jobs are leaving Springfield,” he said.
Skiles will retire, he said, but many of his co-workers didn’t have that option.
“Most of them are either going to go back to school to be trained for something else or get another job,” he said.
He started working for the company in the stock room in 1967, he said, and worked his way up to assembling and testing pumps.
“It got to where the bottom line was more important than anything else,” he said of the plant’s closure.
He wouldn’t have retired if the plant was still open, he said. “I’m going to miss the people.”
The company closed the plant in order to, “optimize our global manufacturing footprint,” a spokesman said in a statement last year to the Springfield News-Sun.
Calls to National Oilwell Varco on Friday were not returned.
Employees may qualify for additional benefits under a federal program called the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, the News-Sun reported earlier this year.
The program is designed for workers whose jobs are lost or threatened because of trade-related circumstance.
The assistance will be available to both full-time and temporary workers and includes re-employment services and income support.
Locally, the company was most recently known as Moyno Inc., a subsidiary of Robbins & Myers Inc. That firm was purchased in 2012 by Varco, a drilling equipment company based in Houston, Texas.
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