Metso Paper to cut more than 100 jobs from each of its main factories

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The engineering company Metso Corporation gave detailed information on Thursday on its plans to cut jobs at its largest unit, Metso Paper, which manufactures machinery for paper factories.
      The first wave of job cuts will involve 700 people, 450 of whom are in Finland.
      The corporation announced in the early summer that its reorganisation plans will affect 1,300 people. Now it appears that 700 employees will not be offered alternative work, and will be either made redundant or put on pension. The remaining 600 are to be dealt with through outsourcing and other arrangements.
     
Metso Paper CEO Bertel Karlstedt says that the return generated by the paper machine business has fallen short of the expectations of Metso Paper or the whole corporation.
      Karlstedt says that at present, the operative result of the paper machine business is at about five percent of turnover, which is about half of the target.
      He says that the company’s production capacity would be sufficient for a turnover of about EUR 2 billion, whereas last year the company achieved just EUR 1.7 billion, and expectations for this year are somewhat below that.
     
Head shop steward Pentti Mäkinen, who is also on the board of Metso Corporation, said on Thursday that he was "pissed off", as he rushed from one meeting to another.
      "This company is leaking on the economic side. It should have been fixed a long time ago. Know-how in the whole chain is among the best in the world, and the final result does not depend on the workers, but they have to pay the price", Mäkinen said.
      He also expressed wonder at the massive fluctuations of the company’s fortunes within a short period of time: "We don’t make cell phones or cars on an assembly line. How can we show a brilliant result every three months, when it can take 16 months to build a single machine?"
      More than 100 of the 150 employees at the Metso Paper Karhula factory in Kotka stayed at home on Friday to protest the planned job cuts.


Links:
  Metso Paper web site

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