360 jobs lost as implant maker lured to Costa Rica

THE trend of wholesale job losses in the manufacturing sector continued yesterday with the announcement of 360 job losses at Allergan in Arklow.

News that the breast implant production facility is to close by early 2010 brings to more than 700 the number of job losses announced nationwide over the past week.

As has often been the case with significant job losses in recent months, the lure of cheaper operating costs has been blamed for the US company’s owners to uproot the operation and move production to Costa Rica.

The latest manufacturing job losses come following a week which has seen, amongst others, 220 redundancies announced at Jacobs in Dublin, 109 at IQON Technologies in Dundalk and 45 at Tillotson in Tralee.

The redundancies at Allergan will occur in three phases. The first people will be let go by December 2008, the next tranche in mid-2009 and the remaining number will be made redundant in early 2010.

This is the second significant set of jobs losses to hit Arklow in the past six years. In 2002, the IFI fertiliser plant closed with the loss of 200 jobs.

The Allergan facility, then called Inamed, offered a ray of hope to the town when it announced shortly after the fertiliser plant’s closure that it was to create 200 jobs over the next five years. A number of those who lost their jobs at IFI joined the breast implant facility.

Yesterday Paul Moody, general manager of Allergan Arklow, told workers that it too was being closed.

“This is a sad day for all of us here in Arklow. We have a hard-working team and our employees have responded well to our increased production needs in recent years.

“However, Allergan needs to look to the future needs of our customers.

“Increased demand means we have to move manufacturing to a site that has the capability to meet this growing demand. Our plant in Costa Rica is a modern facility.”

The company said it was strongly committed to its other Irish operations. It employs 750 people in Westport and 70 at its services centre in Dublin.

SIPTU, which represented workers at Allergan said the announcement of yet more manufacturing job losses must put pressure on the Government.

“The key player here is the Government, not alone in relation to Arklow but the country at large,” said SIPTU president Jack O’Connor. “It has been slow to react to the growing threat to the manufacturing sector in terms of retraining. Even the relatively modest proposal in Towards 2016 to reduce fees for workers attending third level courses on a part-time basis has yet to be delivered. There is no evidence of the urgency needed to address the crisis that threatens to engulf a large section of the workforce and see the emergence of unemployment black spots in communities dependent primarily on traditional manufacturing jobs.”