H&M has announced a redundancy programme in Spain. As published on Friday 26 January by the Europa Press news agency, the Dutch fashion chain has announced that it will carry out a collective redundancy procedure in Spain that will affect a total of 588 workers and close 28 shops.
According to the Comisiones Obreras union, the fashion firm will carry out a readjustment of the workforce for "organisational, productive and economic reasons in the points of sale". This announcement follows another 'readjustment' by H&M, when it announced that it would carry out a new employment regulation in the Barcelona offices.
H&M expects to start the negotiation process with employees in September and in the view of the CCOO union, the fashion chain has taken an "overly aggressive" measure. For its part, H&M has defended itself by claiming that it is "fundamental" for the growth and development of the company to have theindas in "suitable locations and to be competitive". H&M explains that "we constantly evaluate and optimise our shop portfolio to align it with our global strategy, with the aim of meeting our customers' expectations".
On the part of Comisiones Obreras, and as stated in the press release issued by the news agency, they hope to be able to reach an agreement and reduce this number of redundancies as was already done in 2021. Then, this readjustment of the workforce finally resulted in the departure of 349 workers, against the proposal of 1,100 that the Dutch fashion company had as its initial idea.