FORMER WORKERS of a ready-meal company in Cork city which closed in December picketed their old workplace yesterday in protest at their employer’s failure to pay a redundancy package.
About 75 workers of Swissco picketed the plant in Little Island yesterday to protest at receiving statutory redundancy instead of the two weeks per year of service which they say was agreed under a a Labour Court deal.
Employees said when Swissco ceased trading in December they were left with “no annual leave, no notice, no redundancy, not even a reference.” Siptu secured a week’s wages directly from the liquidator.
However, the Swissco workers are now forced to claim statutory entitlements and redundancy from the Government social insurance fund. Siptu says that despite an agreement to negotiate and agree redundancy terms, Swissco UK management abandoned its Irish workers.
Siptu has a Labour Court agreement which provides four weeks’ pay per year of service and it is campaigning for the remaining two weeks’ redundancy.
Siptu Cork branch organiser Alan O’Leary says the 154 workers at the plant were treated with complete disdain by their employers.
“This has to be one of the first occasions where a company in question gave a commitment to the workforce and the union that there was an agreement to do a severance agreement and then frankly abandoned the workforce.”
Former Swissco employee Kevin O’Leary, who worked at the plant for 31 years, said the least the company could do was pay the two weeks’ pay per year of service redundancy that was agreed on.
Mr O’Leary feels that the workers were treated extremely badly by Swissco’s parent company, International Cuisine, which in turn is owned by the government of Singapore.
“I feel hard done by. An extra two weeks [a year] is not much. We feel very strongly about it. We are going to stay put and keep fighting. I am at a stage in my life where I am 49 going on 50 years of age, when the prospects of getting another job are slim. It would mean a great deal to me. People are very angry.”
Susan Gahan, who worked at Swissco for 22 years, said employees were led to believe that there was a prospective buyer for the plant. Then one day out of the blue they were given “a kick in the teeth” and told the plant was closing.
Kathleen Daly, who spent 23 years at the Swissco plant, said she hoped to do a course with Fás but the “queues are just too long”.
More than 150 workers at the ready-meal supplier were told their jobs were gone after a liquidator was appointed to Swissco on December 15th after a period of examinership.
The company had hoped to find a new investor, but it confirmed all 154 staff had been made redundant. Swissco, which opened in Little Island in 1974, employed 154 full- and part-time employees.
The vast majority of workers have been with the company for more than 10 years and 20 have been employed since it opened.
There was no comment from the company.