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Unilever plans to cut up to 3,200 jobs as the consumer goods giant’s new chief executive looks to turn things around.
The struggling conglomerate has come under pressure from shareholders, including activist Nelson Peltz, to boost growth.
The owner of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Dove soap said yesterday it will cut about a third of all office jobs in Europe by the end of next year, after Chief Executive Hein Schumacher announced a “productivity programme” in March to cut up to 7,500 jobs.
“The expected net impact in Europe is in the range of 3,000 to 3,200 jobs,” Constantina Tribou, head of human resources, said on Wednesday.
The cuts will apply “mainly to white-collar jobs” and will not include factory jobs, according to the Financial Times.
Fight: Cuts will apply “mainly to office jobs” and will not include factory jobs
Unilever has not formally decided on the exact location of the losses, but London staff are expected to be affected. It will begin a consultation process with employees in the coming weeks.
“From a shareholder perspective, a turnaround was clearly needed in a business that was underperforming,” said Jack Martin, portfolio manager at Oberon Investments.
“These measures represent the biggest job cuts at Unilever in decades,” Hermann Soggeberg, head of Unilever’s European Works Council, told staff.
He said almost all European offices would be affected, but especially the company’s corporate headquarters in London and Rotterdam.
Unilever has already said it plans to spin off the Anglo-Dutch company’s ice cream unit, including Ben & Jerry’s, into a separate business.
Ben & Jerry’s has been a headache. In January, its chairman called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and in 2021 it attempted to boycott the occupied Palestinian territories.
There has also been a backlash from investors against “woke” policies.
As part of its turnaround plan, the company relaxed its targets on plastic packaging, worker pay and diversity in April.
Schumacher said he needed to “boost performance” and backtracked on his sustainability promises.
Star fund manager Terry Smith, whose firm Fundsmith is the 10th-largest shareholder, said that in 2022 Unilever was “labouring under the weight of management obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business”.
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