150 H&M stores in Italy closed due to strike. Saturday June 10th. Employees are protesting against the Swedish chain's decision to close 4 of its stores, the two most famous of which are in Milan's Piazza San Babila and Porta Venezia. At stake are 89 redundancies and the start of collective redundancies announced by the company on 19 May. There will also be a garrison in front of the shop windows in Piazza San Babila.
Filcams Cgil Milan and UilTuCS Milan and Lombardy consider "the heavy questioning of employment by a growing and thriving company unacceptable, requesting the immediate withdrawal of the procedure". “We consider the position of H&M to be very serious and unjustified, a company in constant expansion which is planning various openings and which is certainly not in crisis”, says the union: “H&M closed 2016 with 756 million in revenues and 16 million in profits” , a situation "even more serious if one considers the exorbitant use of on-call workers who are almost 30% of the company's total employees". According to the union, then, H&M "continues to hire and search for them despite the communication of the layoffs", with the aim of "laying off workers with the old contracts to replace them with call-on contracts also in view of the new openings planned".
H&M for its part confirms, in a note taken from Ansa, the closures of the shops specifying that “it has started the formal procedure of 'collective redundancy' as required by law. “H&M – reads the company press release – believes in
people and immediately committed itself to finding the best possible solutions for employees, in compliance with the law and in compliance with its internal policies and values". Furthermore, the company states that it has started "a process with the unions, still ongoing, aimed at finding shared solutions for the employees of these stores, including the relocation of employees to other existing stores, in order to guarantee the greatest number of jobs".
