Boyers to consult workers and honour deals with unions

Management at Boyers is set to begin consulting with workers who face the loss of their jobs when the department store closes in January.

Developer Noel Smyth’s Fitzwilliam Finance Partners, which owns the business, announced this week that it intends to close the Dublin store after it could not find an operator willing to take it on and manage it.

Trades unions Mandate and Siptu, which represent Boyers’s 80-plus workers, confirmed that they and management agreed a framework for talks at a meeting yesterday.

Mandate official Jonathan Hogan said that negotiating the nuts and bolts of any settlement is likely to begin when the sides meet again early next month.

“It’s horrendous that people are losing their jobs, but the company has made a commitment to look at all options,” he said. “They are trying to establish who is interested in some type of redeployment.”

He added that the company has begun consultations with staff, something to which it committed when it announced the store’s closure earlier this week.

Siptu organiser Ethel Buckley said the company has begun speaking to individual staff to see which workers are interested in staying with the business.

Boyers employs 48 people directly and between 30 and 35 people on concessions.

It is the second long-standing Dublin department store to have announced its closure in three months.

However, Clerys, which closed in June, shut its doors without warning, leaving 460 direct and concession employees without work.

Fitzwilliam stressed this week that it would honour any deals done with the unions and has opened a separate bank account to ensure that redundancy and other terms are met.

The company acquired Boyers as part of the Arnotts group last May. Arnotts itself is not affected and it has reportedly done a deal with the Weston family’s Whittington Investments to manage that business.