"It's been so tight-lipped that nobody knows what's going on," said Jerry Tully, an Olyphant councilman. "People are scared. They are worried and wondering if the day is going to come when they don't have a job."

"When they lost the Warner contract, the writing was on the wall," said Rick Marquardt, a Clarks Summit resident who was a vice president and general manager at the Olyphant plant when it was owned by Time Warner. "This is about being undercut on price by a factory in Mexico."

"It was the largest optical media factory in the world," said Mr. Marquardt, whose grandfather founded Specialty Records, a predecessor of the Olyphant plant. "It's just not a growth industry. It's kind of gone the way of the phonograph records."