Every Workers Needs To Support The Covalen Strike

Covalen workers took to the picket line once again to take on their corporate bosses over redududancy payments to workers. These skilled workers are taking a brave stand for union recognition and redundancy payments.

The company has failed to engage on these issues with the Communication Workers Union and workers are escalating their actions with two days of strike action this week. The company wants to sack 300 workers and leave them with nothing except statutory redundancy.

This is bad even by tech industry standards and workers who have less than two years working at the company won’t even get statutory redundancy. This is shameful behaviour from a wealthy company.

Covalen is owned by CPL, which in turn is own by Japanese company Outsourcing Inc and this company is ultimately owned by US firm Bain Capital. Bain Capital is a US investment firm based in Boston, with around $185 billion of assets under management.

They can well afford to give decent redundancy terms to workers here in Ireland.

CPL was run by Anne Heraty who was on over €500,000 a year and made over €100 million from the sale to Outsourcing Inc. CPL had made a fortune during Covid by getting state cash - figures show HSE spending under 7 pathways including CPL healthcare, CPL healthcare ltd came to over €163 million.

Bain Capital owns hundreds of companies and ruthlessly pursues profit at all costs. The Covalen workers are subcontracted to do work for Meta. The top managers at Bain Capital get salaries of over $1 million a year!

The Covalen workers are standing up to these greedy corporate giants.

Ian McArdle, deputy secretary of the CWU said: “How these workers are being treated by Covalen, with offers of redundancy terms that fall well short of industry norms and the company’s refusal to engage with their union representatives, is totally unacceptable.”

The company even cut back on lunches which used to be provided to workers. This represents around a €3,000 a year cut for workers. The workers demands are as follows:

Union recognition at the Nova Atria site, improved redundancy packages, a review of pay and pay structures, including recognition of service, formal recognition of roles, including Legal Operations and Specialist Quality Review, fairer annual leave and sick leave policies and genuine hybrid and remote working options.

Sustained strike action is the only way to bring these companies to heel and get them to respect the workers who actually generate all their profits. Rank and file workers need to keep pressure up on their union to call an all out strike that can beat the bosses.

We need to support every strike action by workers in every way we can but also keep fighting until we have a democratically planned economy, with workers in the driving seat, so that no corporation can ever mistreat workers the way Covalen has done.