French veneer specialist Jura Placage is temporarily halting production due to falling demand.
The Danzer Group company, based in Souvans, has only been working three weeks in four since the start of the year. Now the management has announced that the plant will temporarily shutdown from April 24 and that 63 of the 100 staff will be laid off for five months. They also said that this period could be extended.
The company’s sales staff will be retained on reduced hours to sell of existing finished stocks.
The workforce has held a protest about the shutdown and Thierry Boileau of the CGT union, which represents some staff, said that they were concerned that the eventual plan was to close the plant entirely.
He said that there was also a concern that Danzer planned to take oak log stocks from the Souvans site to a group mill in the Czech Republic for processing.
“We are totally opposed to that,” he said. “These logs must be peeled at Souvans. It’s our work and there’s no question of it being taken elsewhere.”
He said that the workers were prepared to blockade the plant to stop the logs leaving.
Jura Placage has output capacity of 14.5m2 of veneer a year, and processes mainly oak, beech, chestnut and ash.
