Job losses pose threat to coalition
At the stroke of a pen in New York or Tokyo, scores of jobs can be wiped out in Dublin, Donegal, Cork or Waterford.
A painful example of this process is now manifest as global drugs giant Pfizer moves to close part of its Irish operation with the loss of 65 jobs. The company will also sell two plants with a 480-strong workforce over the next two years.
A global cost-cutting exercise to shed 10,000 jobs will mean hundreds of redundancies in Ireland’s pharmaceutical flagship. Pfizer has been in Cork since the early 1970s. Nationally, it employs 2,300 people in a range of business operations.
By 2009, a portion of the pharmaceutical factory at Little Island and all manufacturing at the Loughbeg plant in Ringaskiddy will be phased out leaving 480 people facing an uncertain future.
It is poor consolation to the workforce that a Pfizer manager has expressed confidence that these state-of- the-art facilities would be sold as going concerns.
Obviously, the question that arises is whether other companies will be prepared to take over plants Pfizer has closed.
The immediate threat to 65 jobs follows the company’s decision to stop work on a cholesterol treatment drug to be manufactured at a plant in Ringaskiddy, built at a cost of $90m. The company spent a total of $800m developing the drug.
Broadly speaking, the changes in its Irish operation are part of what Pfizer describes as “an ongoing initiative to align global manufacturing capacity with product demand”.
In other words, globalisation, a process that will see more than 50% reduction in Pfizer’s worldwide network over a four-year period. The 10,000 job cuts announced last year will reduce the global workforce by 10% and slash annual costs by $2 billion.
Despite the latest development, the company insists it considers Ireland a key manufacturing location and continues to make significant investments here.
By no means is the exodus of jobs confined to the pharmaceutical sector. Worrying trends show jobs being lost right across the spectrum of industry.
Ireland’s “lack of competitiveness” is often used as an excuse by international companies to move to sweat shop locations.
In a classic example of global restructuring, the town of Fermoy suffered a major blow when FCI Ireland announced it is closing its plant there with the loss of 240 jobs. The French company is moving to a lower cost location.
Just before Christmas, the electronics firm Create Labs in west Dublin announced 230 redundancies in a “restructuring” move to a lower cost location overseas.
In a major psychological blow to the Cork region, a question mark hangs over the future of 350 jobs at Motorola, the electronics and mobile phone company.
People are also counting the cost of hundreds of job losses in Waterford, Bray, Macroom, Carlow, and in parts of Donegal and Roscommon.
On a brighter note, it has to be said that hi-tech companies like Google continue to expand their Irish operations. New ventures are setting up here to cash in on the opportunities offered by Ireland as a multi-lingual European service centre.
To a worrying degree, however, the construction industry is replacing manufacturing as the engine driving the economy. A fall-off in house building would have dire consequences.
With barely four months to the General Election, there are signs that Ireland’s haemorrhage of jobs could deal a body blow to Coalition hopes of holding on to power.
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