Ecco workers start having interviews at the factory with ALPE

Othe workers of the shoe manufacturer Ecco, whose closure will leave 632 unemployed people, begin to have professional orientation interviews at the factory itself on Monday, in Santa Maria da Feira, with the Local Employment Agency (ALPE).

According to Lusa today revealed this structure of the district of Aveiro and Metropolitan Area of Porto, the measure is intended for all employees who want to receive follow-up to prepare the new phase of their career and, although registrations are still ongoing for this purpose, there are already “a large number of interested people” in that consultancy.

For this reason, the Danish multinational has made four offices available for this purpose in its premises, where for a week ALPE technicians will be attending at the same time – always in a “individual, personalized and tailor-made” way.

“The goal is to monitor and guide these people in their new professional choices,” says ALPE Adélia Nunes coordinator. “This can go through the preparation of curricula for the worker to refer to other employees in the same sector, by training that allows him to requalify himself for functions in a different branch of activity or by helping him create his own job or business,” he said.

The agency's support also involves a psychological component, since, although Ecco's production has been suspended since 2 November and all the employees of the company continue to receive the full salary, not all of them regard the interval of time until the bureaucratic formalization of the final closure of the factory.

“ Some are taking advantage of this phase as if they were paid holidays, but others are already in a state of great anxiety, because they are very concerned about the future and do not know what to expect,” explains Adélia Nunes.

This anguish mainly affects older employees, who traditionally have the greatest difficulty in changing jobs. But whatever age group is concerned, Adélia Nunes anticipates a problem for those who want to stay in the footwear sector: “Ecco’s contrast with other companies will be very large.”.

The ALPE coordinator identifies the two major issues that justify this difference: the wage scales, which are lower in other footwear factories that have contacted the agency with job offers, and the working environment, since, in general, the other units of the sector do not have the same conditions as Ecco or its organizational culture – either at the level of cutting-edge industrial equipment, for example, or more social valences such as the canteen.

“Ecco had a very different practice from that which is the norm in Portugal, because it paid above average, it was equipped with a first-line industrial park and had much better working conditions than most other companies,” Adélia Nunes admits. “Especially for the people who will remain in the footwear, the change may imply a very large adaptation effort”, anticipates.

Employers in the region who have already expressed their interest in absorbing Ecco's human resources do not, however, seek only personnel with limited experience in handling footwear. They also have vacancies for “intermediate fillings”, such as management and accounting, and for cross-sectional positions, such as those involving “maintenance” of equipment.

Ecco Portugal communicated on 2 November to its 632 22-department workers the “total and definitive” closure of the unit which, since 1984 in the parish of São João de Ver, was the first that the footwear brand opened outside Denmark.

The closure was framed in a “wider restructuring of Ecco’s global productive structure”, in which the objective is to adapt the group’s productive capacity “to the current and expected needs of the business”.

The restructuring also involves closing the unit that Ecco currently has in Vietnam and could also involve “a reduction of around 400 jobs in the regional and global functions of the group, including Denmark”.

In plenary on November 4, union and workers decided to require the company to pay two wages for each year of service for all employees with monthly remuneration below the 2,000 euros. This claim has already been presented to the director of Ecco, Denmark, and, according to some workers, it acknowledged that Portuguese officials had “a very important role in the expansion of the group”, but referred the negotiations, starting on November 20, to “the group of lawyers that was hired for the process”.