Teva staff in Ireland vote for industrial action

Workers at a plant operated by Teva in Ireland have voted to take industrial action in a dispute over redundancy pay.

More than 300 job cuts were announced at the facility in Waterford last September after a 210,000 sq. ft. solid oral dosage form production unit at the plant was earmarked to be shut down within 12 months. Production is being transferred to another Teva factory in Hungary.

At the time, Teva said the cutbacks would include both voluntary and compulsory redundancies and were a result of "the challenges of operating in a high cost and difficult economic environment in Ireland," including the relatively high wages paid to Irish staff compare to their counterparts in Eastern Europe.

Members of SIPTU (Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union) voted over the weekend for action over the terms of severance - eight weeks pay for each year of service with no maximum - and also what they claim is unfair selection of staff for redundancies.

Messages posted on local message boards suggest that Teva wants to shift some workers to the inhalation product plant but cannot agree with the union on which staff to transfer. The union is said to be pushing for selection of retained staff on the basis of seniority.

At its peak the Waterford solid oral dosage unit produced over 80 different types of tablet and capsule packs, primarily for the US market, with the capacity to output dose volumes of over 3 billion units a year.

Another production unit at the plant manufacturing respiratory products, including metered dose and breath-actuated inhalers, continues to operate and employs more than 400 staff. Prior to the cuts the facility employed around 730 people.

As yet SIPTU has not set a date for industrial action.