MOSCOW (MRC) -- Ineos has invited the Unite union for talks in a bid to prevent workers at Ineos’s Grangemouth, United Kingdom operations from going on strike on 20 October, according to the company's announcement.
"We hope to be able to resolve the dispute to address the financial issues that threaten the survival of the entire site," says Calum MacLean, Ineos’s Grangemouth chairman.
Ineos said on Sunday that it will begin talks on Monday afternoon with Unite at the offices of the Arbitration and Conciliation Service (ACAS) in Glasgow. These talks are intended to find a way to resolve the dispute over Stephen Deans, an employee representative on the site and to prevent strike action planned by the union, Ineos said. Unite has informed the company that it intends to hold a 48-hour strike at the site from 20 October. Ineos says it has started the process of taking the plants down in anticipation of the strike.
Grangemouth Petrochemicals (UK) is currently facing serious trading issues, Ineos says.
"The North Sea gases that it relies on for raw materials are in decline and the company’s major contract with BP runs out in 2017," Ineos says. The site has lost more than 576 million pounds (USD919.8 million) in the last four years and is currently losing 10 million pounds every month. The pension scheme is 200 million pounds in deficit and pension costs are an unsustainable 65% of salary.
The Grangemouth site employs 1,400 people, including 700 at the petchem operations. Ineos under its ‘survival plan’ proposal is seeking to reduce the number of workers at the petchem operations by an unspecified number and make changes to the pension benefits. The proposed job cuts would not affect the refining operations, which are run by a joint venture between Ineos and PetroChina.
As MRC informed previously, Ineos is considering closing its Grangemouth facility in what has been described by union representatives as a "shocking" attempt to browbeat the work. Company chairman Jim Ratcliffe described the plant as "expensive", citing "old-fashioned pensions" as a being a prime cause for concern. He was quoted as saying: "To have a future, it needs cheap feedstocks and a sensible cost structure. If we can’t resolve those issues it would need to shut down."
INEOS Group Limited is a privately owned multinational chemicals company consisting of 15 standalone business units, headquartered in Rolle, Switzerland and with its registered office in Lyndhurst, United Kingdom. It is the fourth largest chemicals company in the world measured by revenues (after BASF, Dow Chemical and LyondellBasell) and the largest privately owned company in the United Kingdom.
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