About 80 employees at Anderson-Tully Company’s sawmill operation at the Port of Vicksburg will be laid off by Jan. 4, a move the company said Wednesday has been in the works for two months because of a depressed housing market.

“This is a core business decision to right-size production to match market demand,” company president Richard Wilkerson said in a statement.

Instead of two eight-hour shifts during the work week, the facility on North Washington Street near Waltersville will go to a single 10-hour shift at least five days a week. Workers on the second shift will receive severance pay and benefits based on tenure, the company said.

Workers said the timing to find new jobs is tight.

“I’ll try to figure something out,” said Israel West, a forklift operator at the sawmill and father of three children, ages 6 to 11. “I’m also trying to go back to school in the medical field.”

Initial talks concerning layoffs began with the Teamsters Local 891 in September, said Mike Myrick, director of human resources and risk management. Government officials in Vicksburg and Warren County were informed of the layoffs last month, Myrick said. The cuts pare Anderson-Tully’s workforce to just fewer than 200, Myrick said.

Housing starts jumped 15 percent in September, to 872,000, and jumped an additional 3.6 percent in October, to 894,000, the highest since July 2008, according to the Commerce Department.

But the Anderson-Tully statement said the company’s September figures were only “about 40 percent of the peak year of 2005.”

Eastern U.S. hardwood production is down 35 percent since 2006 and “not likely to return to those levels,” while hardwood lumber prices are down 25 percent over the same period, the company said.

In the statement, Wilkerson said the company held off the decision “as long as possible, considering the impact to employees and their families.”

“Anderson-Tully is one of the few sawmills running two shifts, and one of the last to make any reductions,” he said.

In 2008, the lumber producer closed its Mill D on Levee Street, citing the housing market collapse and bad economy. Since then, improvements to the protective levee system built during the Mississippi River Flood of 2011 and other infrastructure investment has exceeded $10 million.

The Vicksburg WIN Job Center is expected to assist affected workers with job searches this month. Layoffs at the facility will hit barely a month after the Bunge-Ergon ethanol plant closed Nov. 30 and 40 jobs were lost there.

“I think it’ll have some impact,” Warren County Port Commission Executive Director Wayne Mansfield said of the layoffs. “But, it’s just a product of the housing market.”

Unemployment in Warren County was 9.4 percent in October, down from 10.2 percent in September. Later figures are due this month.

Anderson-Tully moved to Vicksburg shortly after being created as a manufacturer of vegetable crates in Benton Harbor, Mich., in 1889. The company, whose forests are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, is the premier supplier of Southern U.S. hardwoods and is among the largest and most productive sawmills in North America, the company said.