Workers At Castolin Eutectic Ireland To Strike Over Redundancies

Workers at Castolin Eutectic in Citywest Dublin are facing the sack and the company has decided to ignore the Labour Court decision to give redundancy terms of 1.5 weeks per year of service over the statutory entitlement.

The workers’ union SIPTU had sought two weeks’ pay per year of service as had been paid to workers made redundant in 2009, 2018 and 2021. The company also broke with the previous method of “last in, first out” when selecting redundancies, instead opting for skills based selection.

Castolin Eutectic is a massive company with operations on all 5 continents. The private vulture fund Paragon Partners bought the company in 2020. This wealthy company claims the Dublin 24 plant faces severe operational and financial viability issues, justifying its redundancy selection process.

Castolin Eutectic generates approximately €300 million in annual sales globally. While their owner, Paragon Partners, manages €2.4 billion in equity capital and has engineered average profit increases of over 50% across its investment portfolios.

These funds do this through ruthless cost cutting and attacks on workers. The owners of Paragon, based in Munich Germany, are Dr. Edin Hadzic, Dr. Krischan von Moeller and Marco Attolini.

Hadzic was a prominent partner at Triton, a massive European private equity fund. Prior to that, he worked in corporate finance at Arthur Andersen and the investment bank Drueker & Co.

Von Moeller previously managed “restructuring programs” at BZV Partners and headed corporate development at the major German media enterprise Verlagsgruppe Holtzbrinck. He also worked as a consultant for The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s big three corporate strategy firms.

Attolini built his private equity track record as a senior investment professional at Triton

Every major decision—including the budget limits, factory restructurings, and redundancy payout strategies for subsidiaries like Castolin Eutectic—must be directly approved by these three rich individuals sitting in Munich.

They operate on a strict 5 to 7-year investment timeline for every company they buy up. Their main goal is to attack workers’ rights, drastically cut costs and sell the company off at a premium to cash in on their 20% “carried interest” profit share.

They don’t give a damn about jobs or the product the company makes. This is why this strike needs to escalate and the workers currently in the firing line need to let their workmates know they’re all next. These vultures will flip the company and everyone will be out on their ear or sold off to god knows who.

Every worker needs to respect the picket lines and shut the whole company down. The SIPTU leaders will beg these vultures for talks after the first day on the picket lines but workers need to know that the sharks now running the company will only respect strength and to negotiate from a position of strength workers need to show they mean business.

We shouldn’t live in a world where corporate games can overturn working class lives. We need to put workers in the driving seat on industries and kick out the parasites who currently dictate our fate.