San Benedetto, the cost of raw materials and new taxes: what lies behind the cuts

San Benedetto, the Veneto-based beverage giant, has informed the trade unions of its decision to initiate redundancy proceedings for 120 employees out of a total of around a thousand. It is understood that the measure would affect only staff at the head office in Scorzè (Venice) and would be distributed equally between production workers and administrative staff. The company has stated that 70 of the 120 employees will be offered voluntary redundancy. San Benedetto is said to have cited rising energy and raw material costs, the introduction of new tax obligations such as the plastic tax and the Sugar Tax, as well as a reorganisation process involving greater use of artificial intelligence, alongside the transformation and outsourcing of certain general services.

The group, explaining that it wished to ‘preserve the company’s competitiveness and ensure the long-term sustainability of its operations’, attributed the cuts in a statement to ‘rising production costs, with a significant increase in the costs of raw materials, energy and transport, partly due to international geopolitical tensions’, as well as to “changes in the European regulatory framework, with growing concerns regarding new packaging regulations, in particular the deposit-refund scheme and the obligations to use recycled plastic (rPET)”.

For the trade unions, the matter takes on, in any case, ‘an even more sensitive significance because it comes right on the eve of the start of negotiations for the renewal of the Supplementary Company Agreement. A process that was intended to usher in a new era of dialogue, improvements to economic and regulatory conditions, and the recognition of the value of work’.

For this reason, a state of industrial action by all workers has been declared, a meeting has been called for 17 November, and an urgent meeting has been requested with company management to ‘immediately open genuine discussions and put all alternative solutions to redundancies on the table’. San Benedetto currently generates turnover in excess of one billion and last year once again confirmed its leading position amongst Italian soft drinks producers, achieving an overall market share, in terms of volume, of 17.3 per cent. In addition to mineral water and iced tea, the brands produced and marketed by the Veneto-based company chaired by Enrico Zoppas, are Schweppes, which leads the tonic water market with a 53.1 per cent share, and Energade, the market leader in sports drinks with 37.4 per cent.

“A bolt from the blue” – that is how Pierpaolo Piva, general secretary of the Fai Cisl in Venice, described the company’s decision. Together with his colleagues from the CGIL and UIL trade unions in the food sector, he considers a measure of this magnitude to be unacceptable, especially given a season with favourable weather conditions for mineral waters and soft drinks, such as the summer just gone. “There has never been any record of employment problems at San Benedetto in the past,” adds Piva, “and the reasons given to justify the workforce reduction are simply not valid.”