National

Federal-Mogul Corporation: Federal-Mogul, a leading supplier of auto parts, will reduce its workforce by 8 percent in response to the decline in the automotive market. The company will streamline business, which will involve consolidating and closing locations.

The McClatchy Company: McClatchy, the third-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, has announced its second round of job cuts in three months, attributing the decision to a decline in advertising. The company expects half the cuts to come from voluntary buyouts and attrition and the other half through layoffs.

Schering-Plough Corporation: Pharmaceutical maker Schering-Plough will eliminate 1,000 sales jobs to reduce costs. The layoffs, which represent 20 percent of the company's salesforce, are part of an overall staff reduction of 10 percent, which was announced in April.

Telstra Corporation Limited: Telstra, Australia's No. 1 telecommunications provider, will eliminate 800 jobs as part of an ongoing strategy to streamline operations. Jobs to cut are in senior management, middle management, and professional services.

Running Aces Harness Park: Ten percent of the employees at Running Aces Harness Park in Anoka County will be laid off, said the track's local owners, who also acknowledged recently that they are being sued for more than $10 million by two Oklahoma tribes. Executives from Southwest Casino Corp., the Minneapolis-based co-owner of the $62 million harness track and card room, said about 60 Running Aces employees will lose jobs in this round of layoffs, which has already begun. The owners opened the track in April with the promise of more than 500 new jobs for their sparkling facility in Columbus, and had 380 full-time employees and 140 part-time workers before the layoffs. But recently, the owners cited their own miscalculations, an economy crippled by rising gas prices, a state law that did not allow the card room to open until 50 days of live racing had been completed, and near perfect summer weather that kept people outdoors and away from the card room as reasons necessitating the layoffs.

Allstate Corporation: The late August closing of an Allstate Insurance Co. claims center in St. Petersburg resulted in 173 lost jobs, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice published by the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation. Allstate claims centers in three additional cities, including Hudson, Ohio, Charlotte, N.C., Dallas and Houston were also closed. These closings, first announced about a year ago, will give way to nine new locations throughout the U.S. as part of a consolidated, "express" format, said a senior communications consultant at Allstate. The Florida regional offices for Allstate, also situated in Carillon Park, will remain open. Allstate employs about 37,000 nationwide. Headquartered in Northbrook, Ill., the company offers 13 lines of insurance, among them life, auto, property and commercial. Allstate was founded in 1931 and has been publicly traded since 1993.

Delphi Corporation: Slumping sales of new GM vehicles caused the temporary layoff recently of 61 hourly workers at Delphi Thermal Systems. The addition of another 51 who are scheduled for furlough in the coming days will bring the number of production workers on temporary layoff to 112. The United Auto Workers union represents 1,648 production workers at the Lockport plant. In addition to the production workers, 33 union members who are skilled trades workers have been on indefinite layoff, some since January. Severance packages have been offered to them and most accepted.

Hewlett-Packard Development Company LP: Hewlett-Packard said recently that it will lay off 24,600 people as it seeks to cut costs and refocus operations at Electronic Data Systems, the giant tech-services company that HP bought over the summer. Most of the cuts will involve employees from Plano, Texas-based EDS, although a smaller number of HP workers will be affected. HP said the layoffs represent 7.7 percent of the companies' combined global workforce of 320,000. Nearly half the cuts will occur in the United States. As it eliminates those positions, HP said it will create about half as many new jobs that will help the company increase sales and serve new markets.