Waterford Craftsmen Strike Over Bonus

Ireland’s world-renowned Waterford crystal workers today staged the first all-out strike in their history amid fears that the company’s craftsmen could lose their glass-cutting jobs to Eastern Europe.

All 2,300 workers at Waterford’s three plants went on strike over management cost-cutting plans at the debt-ridden firm, hit hard by a slump in its crucial American and British markets.

The workers, who say they are scapegoats for chronic mismanagement, put down their tools when the company stopped bonus payments for 500 glass cutters.

Waterford chief executive Paddy Galvin warned that the lifeblood is being drained out of the company after three consecutive loss-making years.

“The future of the company is in the balance. We are not in a viable situation. Seventy percent of our costs are labor costs. The cost of our product has gone too high,” he said.

Waterford parliamentarian Austin Deasy said there is a real danger now that the company will consider moving production to East Germany or Czechoslovakia, which have work forces skilled in glass-cutting.

“Investors in my view are not too concerned where the glass is manufactured as long as they get a dividend from their investment,” he said.

Galvin said it would grieve him to move the company out of Ireland but he told reporters: “If we can’t produce our products at a price we can sell to the marketplace, we might be forced into this situation.”

A union spokesman angrily condemned the suggestion, saying: “This is an empty threat.”

Last month a group of investors led by Tony O’Reilly, the Irish-born chairman of U.S. food giant H. J. Heinz, and New York investment bank Morgan Stanley & Co. took a 29.9% stake in the Waterford Wedgwood crystal and china group.

Waterford took control of the British china maker Wedgwood in a 1986 takeover that united two of the most prestigious “table-top” names in the world of luxury goods.