Dawn Meats to lay off 130 at Cork plant

UP to 130 staff will be made redundant at a Dawn Meats plant in Cork today.

The staff are being let go because the company is rationalising its operation here, moving the boning operations carried out at Midleton to its plants in Ballyhaunis and Charleville. The slaughtering process will continue in Midleton.

The job losses had been earmarked for a number of weeks and there had been ongoing negotiations between the management and the main union at the company, SIPTU.

The union represents 57 of the company’s staff. The remainder are 65, mainly Eastern European, agency workers and eight non-unionised clerical and administrative workers.

Ben Weathers of SIPTU said: “We have had our difficulties with the company in the last couple of months with regards to procedures. They initially refused to go to the Labour Court, then after a few conciliation conferences they agreed to go there for an emergency hearing last Friday.”

At that hearing, the union said it managed to secure redundancy terms that, according to Ben Weathers, the workers were happy with. It also received an assurance that workers being let go would be taken on in the Charleville operation.

“The reason given by the company was that it wants to rationalise the operation,” said Ben Weathers. “They say it is not economical to operate all these sites across the country.”

Mr Weathers said he understood there is an intention to develop Charleville in coming years.

“Only last week the Government announced a €70m investment in the meat industry. I think a portion of that is earmarked for Charleville,” he said.

Dawn Meats, established in Waterford in 1980, is one of Europe’s largest food processing companies. It forms part of the Queally Group, Ireland’s largest privately owned agri-business.

The group has seven plants in Ireland and four plants in Britain, processing beef and lamb from which it produces 200,000 tonnes of added value meat products.

It has retail packing plants and sales offices in Ireland, Britain Netherlands and France amongst other countries.

Dawn Meats was unavailable for comment on the Midleton redundancies yesterday.