Manolo Yadao and eight of his brothers and sisters work for Maui Land & Pineapple Co., and at the end of the year they will all lose their jobs.

Yadao, 45, a transportation supervisor at the company's Häliimaile Division, shares a house and expenses with four siblings, and he's wondering whether he'll have to sell his home.

"I'm really worried about it because there are no open jobs out there," said Yadao, a 23-year employee. "I'm not going to wait until I default on my mortgage. I'm planning to sell it before that happens."

Many of the 285 Maui Pine employees who received layoff notices yesterday are from the same families — married couples, parents and their grown children, and, like Yadao, brothers and sisters.

"It's so heartbreaking for everybody," said Harold Gouveia, 61, who joined the company in 1978 and is the lead mechanic at the Häliimaile plantation. His late father worked there for 45 years as a truck driver and Gouveia's children held summer jobs with the pineapple company.

"It goes back a long time," he said yesterday. "I wasn't ready for the shutdown. I thought they would continue on slowly, but no, they went down one time. It's a sad day for Maui County. I'm really upset with the management and the way they handled it."

The layoffs include 193 employees with company subsidiary Maui Pineapple Co. who are members of ILWU Local 142, which represents 7,000 workers in Maui County, including 4,500 hotel employees and 650 Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. workers.

William Kennison, ILWU 142 Maui Division director, said union officials met with the workers yesterday to discuss severance packages, signing up for state unemployment benefits and other issues related to the layoffs. Their contract calls for severance pay of nine days' wages for each year of service, he said.

"You could see the disappointment on their faces, especially because they made concessions for a 10 percent wage cut a couple years ago to help ensure the survival of the company, but that never materialized despite all their hard work," Kennison said.

RETIRE OR NEW JOBS

Some of the workers can afford to retire but many of those who will lose their jobs are longtime Maui Pineapple Co. workers who were saved from earlier rounds of layoffs because of their seniority. And many of them are in their 50s and will need to find new jobs, Kennison said.

"The timing is doubly bad because of the tough job market and it's also the holidays," he said.

The unemployment rate on Maui was 9.5 percent in September, up from 5.1 percent a year earlier, according to the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

"The job market is so thin right now, with so many furloughs and the ag industry really taking a hit. We just had Gay & Robinson (sugar plantation on Kauai) go down and now this. And sugar on Maui is having a tough time," Kennison said. "There's a lot of gloom right now because of the whole economic situation. People are just worried for their jobs and what they are going to do. We're hoping there's a silver lining but it's hard to see right now."

A large number of workers affected by the Maui Pineapple Co. layoffs had been sent to work in the fields after the company closed its Kahului cannery in 2007 and cut 274 jobs in July 2008.

"I'm scared that I have no more job. How am I going to pay my mortgage?" said Ben Balanza, 52, of Wailuku, a 22-year employee.

Nineteen-year employee Rufino Almarez, 42, of Kahului, used to work in the juice plant but more recently has been planting pineapple at the Häliimaile Division. He said he knew the company was in financial straits but didn't expect a complete shutdown of pineapple operations.

"We thought that maybe they were going to shrink," he said.

Former cannery worker Alejandro Sijalbo of Wailuku said he plans to look for another job.

"I'm 63 years old and now I no more job. No more money to pay my house," he said.

Putting aside worries about his future, Yadao said Maui without pineapple just won't be Maui.

"It's really sad because all my life, pineapple is already here, and then it just happens like that," he said. "Tourists are expecting those good pineapples from Maui. I just can't imagine Maui without pineapples. It's going to be a disaster and it will look like an abandoned island."