End of the line for Pierce’s Foundry
November 2002
By Christmas, Pierce’s will be gone from the Wexford town site it has occupied since 1839. It will be the last gasp of an old-style industry that once underpinned the economy of Wexford and the entire region.
In 1900, Pierce’s employed 600 people. Over the coming weeks, unless there is a miracle, it will shed its remaining 62 workers.
There will be nothing to fill the vacuum and with jobs fast disappearing and scores from Wexford Electronix and other closed-down firms still unemployed, the majority of those being made redundant by Pierce’s face an uncertain future.
Pierce workers voted by 34 to 23 last week to reject Labour Court recommendations on a move to an alternative site.
The vote was virtually identical to one several weeks ago, despite the intervention of local politicians and many, many hours of fruitless negotiations aimed at finding scarce common ground between the workers and the bosses at Waterford Stanley, which owns Pierce’s.
‘The positions of both sides were so entrenched that there was no way forward,’ said a trades union official, ‘although who knows what will happen now?’
Company Managing Director, Mike Baldwin, said however that ‘there is no way back’. He will himself be losing his job, and says he is saddened by how things have turned out. ‘I have been here 19 years myself,’ he said. ‘The men knew what they were voting for. The Labour Relations Commission and the Labour Court did an excellent job and tried to facilitate both sides, but we didn’t find a solution. I am sad about the whole thing.’
At the heart of the matter was the question of payouts for the proposed move to a new site. While the £210 per year of service that was on offer to workers as a sweetener for the move was considered generous by people outside of Pierce’s, it was nowhere near enough for the workers, who wanted a greater share of a much bigger cake: the windfall resulting from the potential sale of the Pierce’s site to developers planning to build a shopping centre there.