The courier company FedEx has confirmed that it intends to cut 385 jobs here in Belgium. The company’s management announced the job cuts at an extraordinary meeting of the firm’s Work Council on Wednesday.
The unions say that the job losses will be at FedEx’s operation at BruCargo in Zaventem (Flemish Brabant). 1,000 people currently work at FedEx’s BruCargo site. No job losses are expected at FedEx’s operations in Liège.
In a press statement, the American-owned company says that it intends to shed between 1,700 and 2,000 jobs from its back office and commercial teams across Europe.
"We know that this is difficult news for our team members, but these steps are crucially important to ensuring that our company becomes stronger in the future”.
A consequence of 2016 takeover?
The unions are informing staff about the announcement. Kris Vanden Bossche of the Christian trade union ACV Puls told journalists that the so-called “Renault procedure” that is applied when there is a large-scale restructuring has been started. The unions hope that compulsory redundancies can be avoided.
Mr Vanden Bossche said that "We suspect that this is still a consequence of the takeover of TNT Express in 2016. The takeover didn’t deliver the profits that had been expected”.
"This is the 5th restructuring since the takeover and we fear that it won’t be the last. This is why we want to send out a strong signal that enough is enough. The staff have been living in a permanent state of uncertainty for years now”.