Pe­ter Christo­pher

pe­ter­christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Over 100 work­ers at­tached to Unilever may be out of a job at the end of Ju­ly af­ter the com­pa­ny con­firmed it would cease pro­duc­tion in T&T.

In a no­tice on Mon­day, Unilever con­firmed that its sup­ply agree­ment with a third par­ty, which came in­to ef­fect af­ter the sale of its Spreads busi­ness in 2018 as a key part of its glob­al strat­e­gy, would come to an end on Ju­ly 31, 2022.

Unilever said as a re­sult, all man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­duc­tion in Trinidad will cease.

Unilever Caribbean Ltd’s OW­TU rep­re­sen­ta­tive Neil Mc Each­nie con­firmed that work­ers had been in­formed of the sit­u­a­tion.

“(Mon­day), we were alert­ed that the com­pa­ny cor­re­spond­ed with the union of­fi­cial­ly ad­vis­ing of the ces­sa­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions. That would be ef­fect­ed in Ju­ly of this year,” Mc Each­nie said.

He said 119 unionised work­ers, and an un­known num­ber of non-unionised would be af­fect­ed as a re­sult.

Mc Each­nie said the move had been ex­pect­ed since 2019, when over 250 work­ers were re­trenched fol­low­ing re­struc­tur­ing at the com­pa­ny.

“Some­where around 2019, the com­pa­ny would have in­di­cat­ed that they in­tend­ed to ex­it man­u­fac­tur­ing and that they had im­ple­ment­ed the first phase of a two-phase re­trench­ment ex­er­cise.

“In that first phase, they would have out­sourced some of their ac­tiv­i­ties and they will have closed a plant as well. So they closed the plant that pro­duced de­ter­gent pow­ders and they out­sourced their func­tions as it re­lates to ware­hous­ing and so on. And so this was not un­ex­pect­ed, it was in fact com­mu­ni­cat­ed to us at that point as well,” he said.

He ex­plained that the work­ers that were not dis­missed then had on­ly re­mained on staff due to the agree­ment which will end in Ju­ly.

“They do have a co-pack­ing agree­ment with a com­pa­ny that pur­chased their spreads busi­ness glob­al­ly for five more years. And as a con­se­quence of that, they re­tained such em­ploy­ees as were nec­es­sary, to ful­fil the re­quire­ments of that con­tract. That con­tract, based on in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed from Unilever will ex­pire in Ju­ly of this year.

“As I said, and con­se­quent­ly, they will no longer re­quire the work­force, so that’s the in­for­ma­tion we were pro­vid­ed with,” he said the com­pa­ny was plan­ning to be­come an im­porter and dis­trib­u­tor.

“What that means for work­ers is that we will now join the very long list of per­sons of peo­ple who were pre­vi­ous­ly em­ployed in T&T.

“We will join the bread­line ba­si­cal­ly be­cause we are all to be re­trenched,” he said, “The busi­ness mod­el that they will be adopt­ing, which is al­ready in train, is es­sen­tial­ly a dis­tri­b­u­tion type ex­er­cise where they will store their fin­ished goods from wher­ev­er they have a man­u­fac­tur­ing set up and they will dis­trib­ute to the lo­cal mar­ket or through­out the re­gion wher­ev­er they have a busi­ness in­ter­est.”

Both Unilever and Mc Each­nie con­firmed that meet­ings will be held with the rep­re­sen­ta­tive union to dis­cuss the fu­ture of the work­ers in keep­ing with their col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment.

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