Aluminum smelter Alcoa has announced that it will be firing 660 at its Rockdale plant. Company flack Kevin Lower blamed the problem on Luminant, Alcoa’s power company:

“When you’re running an aluminum smelter, power needs to be online for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for 50 years… But it would be offline, then online, then offline, then online. It was like a yo-yo.”

Luminant accepted a small amount of responsibility, but also blasted Alcoa’s claim to pieces in this prepared statement:

“We had some outages, but we made several alternative arrangements to get them reasonably priced power, and they didn’t take advantage of that… We believe Alcoa has a history of using layoffs like this as a vehicle for managing costs and driving the company’s profitability. Alcoa should acknowledge its independent decisions instead of blaming power supply issues and unspecified ‘market conditions”

Find out more: Houston Chronicle