400 Limerick jobs set to go as Dell fallout kicks in
THE first major knock-on redundancies arising from the closure of Dell's manufacturing facility are now expected to be at the nearby RR Donnelly plant – formerly known as Banta Global Turnkey – where over 400 employees look set to be laid off.
SIPTU confirmed this Thursday afternoon that while RR Donnelly had not given any confirmation yet, their union members at the plant had been in touch to say they had been informed by management of the company's impending closure in Limerick.
The RR Donnelly operation in Limerick is completely reliant on business from Dell, for which the company prepares kits that accompany computer packages.
At present, over 400 employees are directly employed at the company, along with a small number of agency workers.
"All the work that is carried out at RR Donnelly is for Dell," said a spokesperson for SIPTU. "From what we have been told by our members, it seems that they will be phasing out jobs there on much the same timeline as they are at Dell over the next 12 months.
"Although we have union members at RR Donnelly, at the moment we don't have recognition from the company. However, if there are collective redundancies, they are legally obliged to discuss redundancy packages with the unions."
Employees at the plant would be expected to receive better redundancy packages than their Dell counterparts, the spokesperson added.
"Going on their previous redundancy packages, I would imagine they will be better than those offered by Dell. In the past, it has also been six weeks for every year, but they haven't been capped at 52 weeks like Dell, which meant the most those employees could get was only a year's salary."
Workers at RR Donnelly also contacted the Limerick Leader expressing their frustration at the perceived lack of political and media attention their plight had so far received.
"We were told last week that line one would be closing in April, and that all of them would be gone by October," said one worker who did not wish to be named.
"It looks to me as if people have been given this figure of 1,900 job losses and they're treating everything else as just an add-on. There's been nothing on the TV or radio, no cameras around the gates of our factory and no politicians have said anything about our job losses. People see us as collateral damage."
The worker further claimed that all of the Limerick-based jobs would now be outsourced to the new RR Donnelly plant in Lodz, Poland, which was built at the same time as Dell's plant in the city.
The Limerick Leader made reeated attempts to contact RR Donnelly over the last week but the company failed to return all calls.
Deputy Kieran O'Donnell said that the loss of several hundred more jobs in Limerick was further proof that the Government multi-agency taskforce to address the fallout of Dell redundancies should have been established weeks ago.
"Now we have a couple of hundred more families in the exact same position as those who were affected by last week's job announcement. The Government needed to show more urgency on this. Neither of these job announcements came as a huge surprise to anyone in the region," he said
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