Dell's Irish staff avoid brunt of job cuts

Dell's Irish staff will escape the worst of the PC maker's latest job cuts, with the company expected to let go just 100 employees in the Republic.

The jobs are to be cut at the PC maker's European manufacturing plant in Limerick and will be achieved through a voluntary redundancy programme.

A Dell spokeswoman said employees who could avail of the package would be "support staff and management and supervisors in the manufacturing plant".

She said there was currently no plan for a similar programme at Dell's facility in Cherrywood, Co Dublin, which employs 1,500.

The spokeswomen said Dell locally continued to recruit for "specific roles at both sites" and as a result the company expects its Irish headcount of 4,500 to be relatively unchanged at year end.

Staff at both Cherrywood and Limerick were briefed about the plan yesterday morning.

It had been feared that Dell's Irish operations could be subject to much deeper cuts. When the company announced better than expected results at the beginning of June it said it would reduce its workforce by 10 per cent.

On that basis 450 staff could have been expected to have been shed from the Irish operations.

With Dell set to open its second European manufacturing plant in Poland this autumn, it had been felt that even more than 10 per cent of the jobs in Limerick could be cut.

The spokeswoman said Limerick is the "most efficient and productive manufacturing" site in the Dell organisation. Over the last two years Dell management have embarked on a programme to develop a broad business campus on the site that is not reliant on manufacturing.

The Polish facility in Lodz is being run by a senior management team and a variety of support functions such as finance and engineering will be provided from Limerick.

Globally Dell has been hit by a litany of problems in the last 18 months. Last summer it had to recall millions of laptop batteries manufactured by Sony due to a fault that could cause short circuits. Just a month later the company announced its accounting practices were being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.