Adjustment in the template of El Corte Inglés. In addition to reducing its workforce, the company has promoted a retirement plan, which allows workers to reconcile the collection of the pension with a part-time employment contract from the age of 61. At the end of the last financial year, on February 29, the company had provisioned a total of 23.9 million euros in its accounts to cover these partial retirements.
In 2016 and under the then presidency of Dimas Gimeno, the company already promoted a retirement plan with which it intended to seek the release of between 1,400 and 1,500 people, but which, given the avalanche of applications, was finally extended to 1,890.
At the end of the year, on February 29, therefore before the crisis caused by the coronavirus began, the company had 88,268 workers, which means, as the group admits in its latest annual report, “a decrease of 1,736 people over the previous year, that is, 1.93% less”. This cut is mainly due to retirements, voluntary redundancies and termination of contracts. In this sense, the group assures that “the greater efficiency in the organization of human resources has made it possible to compensate for the reduction in the workforce, maintaining the quality and service that characterize the company”.
Template
Taking into account, however, the average number of employees, the company has gone from having 79,976 workers throughout 2019 to 78,739 in 2018, with which the reduction would be somewhat less, of 1,247 people on average.
With all this, the personnel expenses of the department store giant have been reduced by 1.5% in the last year, up to 2,390 million euros. The company launched a restructuring and cost savings plan in 2019, for which it hired the consultancy AT Kearney. The main objective was to seek greater efficiency in the central offices and reduce the number of workers in it. Now, in the face of the crisis caused by the coronavirus, and although an agreement has been reached with the unions to maintain employment, the subsidiary Viajes El Corte Inglés has launched a new Temporary Employment Regulation File (Erte) that would affect principle to 4,748 workers with a validity from October 1 of this year until August 31, 2021.
Closure of 277 offices
Given the sharp drop in revenue –, the company will temporarily close 277 branches out of the current 420.
On this occasion, the Erte would not be due to force majeure, but for economic reasons or organizational causes. Although the group has managed to return to having positive ebitda in the second quarter of its fiscal year (between June 1 and August 31), it accumulated after-tax losses of 510 million euros in the first three months of the year ( March, April and May).
Facebook Comments
Disqus