Ahead of the wave of layoffs at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) Eliran Kozlik, chairman of the workers committee at Teva's Kfar Saba plant, has told "Globes" that most of the dismissals in Israel will be at the company's head office in Petah Tikva and the rest at plants around the country.
Kozlik said, "In the last round of layoffs we cut 100 jobs, half of them through voluntary retirement or early retirement, and looking to the future we signed an agreement protecting us from additional streamlining layoffs before 2021."
He added, "We are the only plant that signed such an agreement, and therefore we estimate that the layoffs will now come mainly from head office in Petah Tikva and also perhaps Ramat Hovav."
Kozlik stresses that Teva's management has not yet met with the workers committees and nothing has been said to them about the scope of the expected cutbacks and nothing has been officially confirmed to the workers committees about even the existence of a streamlining plan.
Teva is reportedly planning thousands of layoffs worldwide including shedding more than 1,000 jobs in Israel. The new wave of dismissals in Israel comes just several months after several hundred layoffs at Teva's Israeli plants in Kfar Saba and Ramat Hovav as part of which the aforementioned agreement was signed with Kozlik's workers committee in Kfar Saba.
Before those layoffs, there were 1,228 employees in Ramat Hovav, 1,225 in Kfar Saba and 852 in Jerusalem. The Petah Tikva head office has less employees all of them part of the management structure.
The planned layoffs are being led by Teva's new CEO Kare Schultz who assumed his position at the start of November. The layoffs are part of a streamlining plan to cut the pharmaceutical company's $35 billion debt, while Teva's market cap has fallen to $13.9 billion. Teva's share price rose 4% on Thursday after reports of the planned layoffs surfaced although the share price fell back 2.4% today, possibly on the sentiment that the layoffs are preparing investors for a debt offering.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 26, 2017
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