Restructuring events
European Restructuring Monitor (ERM)
The restructuring events database contains factsheets with data on large-scale restructuring events reported in the principal national media and company websites in each EU Member State. This database was created in 2002.
Dow Chemical Company is one of the world's largest chemical companies offering innovative products and services to customers in more than 175 countries. It has 42,000 employees in all the world; in Italy, Dow Chemical Company has seven plants and around 1,000 employees. The company provides a broad range of high-performance plastic and chemical products that meet a variety of specialised needs - such as making drinking water cleaner, paints and coatings longer lasting, or enhancing the quality of pharmaceuticals, building materials, chemical processing. On 30 August 2006, Dow Chemical Company announced the decision to not restart production of the toluene diisocyanate (TDI) - a basic chemical product - at the plant located in Porto Marghera (VE) and the consequence loss of 180 jobs. The Porto Marghera industrial site is the largest Italian petrochemical area and occupies a strategic position in terms of integration between petrochemical companies: in fact, a series of pipelines link the companies located in the Porto Marghera area to several industrial sites in Italy and Europe. The closure of Porto Marghera plant is part of a broader company reorganisation plan that envisages the shutdowns of a number of assets around the world to enhance company's efficiency and cost-effectiveness, mainly reducing structural costs. The trade union representatives at the Porto Marghera plant reacted to the company's decision by taking several forms of industrial action and urged national and local public authorities to intervene, in order to find ways to avoid the redundancies envisaged by the restructuring plan. The unions fear that the closure of Dow Chemical plant could lead to further job losses in the local network of firms that developed around the plant of the American multinational company and that are strictly dependent on the basic chemical product manufactured by the Dow Chemical plant. In order to minimise the negative consequences of its business decisions, the company announced recourse to economic incentives for voluntary resignation, "mobility" with a view to early retirement and different measures to support the redundant personnel during spells of unemployment, with a view to find a new job. Moreover, the government announced some meetings that will involve the national and local public authorities, chemical companies and the social partners in order to elaborate adequate initiatives to guarantee the industrial development of the Porto Marghera area and, more in general, to relaunch and to modernise the Italian chemical sector.
Eurofound (2006), Dow Chemical, Closure in Italy, factsheet number 64001, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://apps.eurofound.europa.eu/restructuring-events/detail/64001.
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