Workers at SABIC's Geleen petrochemicals site in the Netherlands are proceeding to strike after failing to reach a new labor agreement with the management, company and union sources said Tuesday. SABIC has around 1,850 staff at Geleen, which produces 1.25 million mt/year of ethylene, 725,000 mt/year of propylene, 940,000 mt/year of polyethylene and 620,000 mt/year of polypropylene.
The Dutch FNV trade union, which represents the workers, threatened to strike if a new collective labor agreement (CLA) was not reached on Monday night.
"No agreement was reached on Monday," a SABIC spokesman told Platts, although the management remained open to negotiations.
He said the union has yet to formally notify the management of its "plan of action," adding the Geleen site continued to operate normally at the moment.
If industrial action did go ahead, the company would mainly focus on safety measures at the plant.
A source at FNV confirmed that the workers and the company "did not come to an agreement" yesterday.
Discussions are ongoing on how the strike action will proceed, the source said.
The previous CLA ended in June and both parties have been trying to hammer out a new agreement for the past nine months.
The strike would be the first at the Geleen site, which was bought by SABIC from DSM in 2002.
An FNV spokesman said Friday the workers and management were at loggerheads over target pay increases and planned changes in work hours.
The union was also opposing expected redundancies related to business reforms under SABIC's so-called "social plan."
A SABIC spokesman previously said the social plan related to measures aimed at "securing [the company's] profitability" in Europe, given the current economic climate. He declined to provide details of the planned reforms and whether they involved job cuts.
The site is a major stop on pipelines that originate in Antwerp in Belgium and Rotterdam on the Dutch coast to Germany.
