For the last couple of months I have been frequently reading news in the press on factories in Ireland being shut. There is many examples of it: Pfizer and Motorola in Cork or Procter and Gamble in Nenagh. The second one is said to cause 500 job losses. Procter and Gamble are moving to Poland to Aleksandrow Lodzki (just a town aside of Lodz - my home city). The reasons are obvious… I don’t expect monthly salary to be higher than 200 - 300 Eu in Procter and Gamble Polish factory. In that region minimal salary is 150 Eu, so they will find a lot of people willing to work for that ridiculous amount of money (200 - 300 Eu).
Apart of the fact that Procter and Gamble is moving to Poland, the thing which makes me afraid is shutting factories in Ireland to move them to the poorer countries to save money of payments.
I hope it is not the beginning of an end of the development and general good time for Ireland. Even today in Irish Independent there is an information about firm being shut it co. Clare, causing 100 job losses.
Well, I say good for the companies, and good for the poorer countries where they are relocating.
Irish people are too expensive to employ, and we aren’t as special as we think they are — to many of us Irish have started to believe our own propaganda!!
Us Irish have to wake up to this, and get our economy competitive again.
I think low qualified jobs may be put at risk in country with high production costs like Ireland. I don’t think that companies which make profit mostly on low companies tax, great contacts with UK and USA, English speaking and relatively good educated stuff would move anywhere. Time will show anyway.
Nothing to worry about yet. Despite a large amount of job losses recently, we are still attracting large investment and the unemployment figures are still around 4%. It was inevitable that soom low-skill jobs and other medium skilled jobs would leave. If we play our cards right, and attract R&D and higher services investment, we should be alright. As long as we don’t return to the dreaded 80’s!