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23 August, 2010
Members of ICEM UK affiliates GMB and Unite, at pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca have voted for strike action over cuts to pension benefits of 2,500 staff, based mainly in Macclesfield, Cheshire, North West England.
Public-sector trade union GMB recorded 70 percent support for strike action in a recent ballot of their members at Astra Zeneca. The multinational refused to back down during three months of talks earlier 2010, maintaining its proposal to end its final-salary pension scheme for workers. Some workers’ pensions would be frozen forever if they accepted the changes proposed by management.
GMB National officer, and ICEM Materials Section Vice-Chair, Allan Black described the result of the ballot as a “clear mandate for a strike in the midst of the current economic circumstances (which) ought to be a wake-up call to Astra Zeneca to resume negotiations”.
Unions agreed in 2000 to close the company’s defined benefit pension scheme to new recruits. Now, new joiners have been offered membership to a defined contribution pension scheme instead. Since that date, workers have contributed £645 million. Now the multinational is attempting to push members of the defined benefit scheme to choose between continuing making their contributions, but with their pensionable salary frozen at current levels, or moving to the defined contribution scheme.
Astra Zeneca employees in the UK have tolerated huge job losses and radical changes of working practices over the last three or four years, to increase to the company's profits.
Strike action will take place next month, although the unions are hoping for a return to the bargaining table by management.
These plans for cost cutting come at a time when Anglo-Swedish Astra Zeneca is making record profits. In 2009, operating profits rose by 24%, and by a further 11% in the first quarter of 2010.
In a letter to CEO David Brennan, ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda described management’s demands as “unacceptable and warrants a critical re-evaluation by corporate management of AstraZeneca”. “Please know that if the dispute escalates, and GMB members do vote to take industrial actions, the ICEM will not hesitate to communicate this dispute to other AstraZeneca workplaces in the world, as well as to all our chemical and pharmaceutical trade unions across the globe,” Warda added.
ICEM Swedish affiliate IF-Metall also wrote to corporate management, urging a change to the draconian measure.
The Macclesfield plant is the company’s second largest facility worldwide. Workers there produce the drug Zoladex, used to treat cancer of the prostate and breast cancer.