French retailer Auchan has announced it plans to lay off 1,500 of the 11,422 workers it has in its 51 Italian hypermarkets.
This follows last month’s announcement of 1,100 redundancies, before negotiations with unions broke off.
With the procedure for collective redundancies in place, both sides now have 45 days to try to restart negotiations, in addition to 30 days for technical talks.
Trade unions have called a nationwide strike on 9 May, and said there may be other protests before that.
According to unions, the management of Auchan Italia aims to cut labour costs by €50 million a year, due to the ongoing economic crisis that has impacted turnover in the Italian retail sector.
Specifically, the Auchan-Sma group in the period 2009-2013 lost about eight per cent of turnover, while the negative profit margin has continued to grow since 2011.
© 2015 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Branislav Pekic
