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30 October, 2006
The Imerys announcement last July that the French-based building materials company would relocate its UK paper coating operations to Brazil, and sack over 600 workers in the Cornwall region, was a shock to workers, their families, and the communities and towns in the UK’s South West.
The news followed prior closure announcements, a 100-member workplace in Lamotte-Beuvron, France, where work was being shifted to Hungary, and job reductions at the Lixhe plant in Belgium. Now comes word that Imerys has been planning even more sackings; jobs at its Minerali SpA plant in Massa, Italy, where workers recently struck in protest to jobs being moved to Turkey.
In the UK, ICEM affiliate Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) has called for a mass march and rally on Saturday, 18 November, in St. Austell, Cornwall, in protest not only to Imerys’ community-wrecking job redundancies, but the company’s bad-faith bargaining in the official consultation process.
The TGWU and two other UK trade unions that represent Imerys workers in the region are preparing memberships for an industrial ballot. In late September, Imerys’ workers gave the unions a mandate to call for a ballot when the time and circumstances are ripe. The company has turned a deaf ear on TGWU ideas for job retention and job creation opportunities, and the redundancy package that has been tabled is ridiculously low.
Recently, in what the TGWU is calling “misleading spin,” the company claimed that a large number of UK workers have already opted for the voluntary redundancy package. A representative of FO Céramique, the French ICEM affiliate which is working with TGWU to correct Imerys’ behaviour, was told the same at Paris headquarters.
However, Imerys’ count in the UK merely was on the number of workers who had responded to an inquiry to receive more information on the redundancy package.
The closure announcement of the company’s Minerali SpA operation in Italy is even more inexcusable. Only a few weeks ago, Imerys CEO Gérard Buffière answered a question from an Italian trade union CGIL representative on the subject, at a meeting with other trade union representatives present, including the head of the European Works Council, Serge Gonzalez from FO Céramique.
Buffière responded by saying that the Italian plant would not be touched. Gonzalez and FO Céramique took note, but then an alert came from Italy that jobs would be slashed and a strike commenced.
Striking Imerys workers in Italy ended that industrial action last week when news came that the company withdrew its prior announcement of closing the Massa plant. Negotiations will now restart in Italy on the future of the plant.
FO Céramique’s Gonzalez is currently preparing a document, to be signed by all Imerys unions in Europe. An earlier statement by the workers representatives of the Imerys European Works Council described the current relocation wave as profit driven. The company has posted excellent economic returns, and has no compelling reasons to cause such social distress.