There was no longer any question of saving the factory. The focus was simply on supporting those who still work there. With the signing of the redundancy plan, Indorama Ventures Mobility Luxembourg is entering the final phase of the closure of its Steinfort site, nearly a month after the announcement that its operations were to be wound up.
The agreement, signed on 22 July by management, the OGBL, the LCGB and the staff delegation, provides for training and reskilling measures, support from an outplacement service, and extra-statutory compensation to supplement the statutory and collective agreement provisions. A monitoring committee will be responsible for ensuring the plan is implemented until the site’s permanent closure. For the trade unions, this signing in no way constitutes approval of the business decision. In their press release, the OGBL and the LCGB reiterate that they remain ‘firmly’ opposed to the closure of this historic site and regret its consequences for employees and their families.
Since the closure was announced, however, the Thai group’s management has put forward a very different account. Indorama Ventures claims that the Steinfort site is facing “increased competitive pressure in the automotive safety market, particularly from Asia”, a “continuing deterioration in margins in Western Europe” and a situation where customers can no longer be supplied “on a competitive basis” from Luxembourg.
Longlaville, which closed in March, was Steinfort’s main client
The group is therefore presenting the closure as an industrial decision rather than a financial one. With an annual turnover of around €12bn and a presence in more than 30 countries, Indorama Ventures is not calling its global strategy into question, but considers that certain European production capacities are no longer viable.
The tone is even more explicit in the parallel case in Longlaville, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, where the same Mobility division is also closing a site. The group cites “increasing competitive pressure”, a “significant decline in volumes” and a “continuing erosion of margins”, concluding that it is “impossible to restore a path to competitiveness”, despite several years of investment and optimisation measures.
The trade unions dispute this analysis. In their view, the employees have become “victims of strategic decisions taken at the level of a multinational group”. They also point out that the Steinfort site was heavily reliant on a single customer and that the closure of the Longlaville factory – which supplied the intermediate products needed for production in Luxembourg – directly jeopardised the site’s future. Finally, they believe that no credible industrial alternative was seriously explored before the decision to close was taken.
Beyond the social implications, this closure represents one of the most significant industrial setbacks Luxembourg has experienced since the closure of the TDK site in 2007, according to the trade unions. Above all, it illustrates a wider trend: the European technical textiles sector for the automotive industry is now caught in a vice between flagging demand, intense price pressure and competition from Asia, which global groups are finding increasingly difficult to cope with.
