The final act of moving production of our favourite brown sauce to Holland has begun. Birmingham Mail has reported that HP Sauce workers who are to be made redundant in March of 2007 were reduced to tears last week as Heinz brought in heavy equipment to remove a new production line - installed only 2 years ago.

A worker who wishes not to be named said:

“When the cranes turned up to take the machinery out, we realised it was the beginning of the end - morale is dropping by the second.

Jobs are being offered in Worcester but, for the vast majority of us, there is nothing. For 80 to 90 of us, there’s no chance.

The new line that was installed less than two years ago is now being ripped out and is being taken to Holland.

Workers have had to stand and watch the cranes being brought in and some of them have been in tears. Reality is kicking in now.”

Heinz spokesman Nigel Dickie said:

“I can confirm that all the lines are being taken out as planned and as discussed with the employees. That will take some weeks.

The redundancy terms are as generous as we can possibly make them. We wanted to make sure that we came to an arrangement which was as generous as possible. We anticipate that work will continue until March.”

In terms of redundancy packages, workers have been offered £6,000 to stay on until March 23rd, however it is speculated that those who are on sick leave may lose some of the retention money. Workers however aren’t pleased with the package - “The majority of people are not happy with what is on offer. I think that Heinz could have offered us at least £15,000 on top of the redundancy.” said a worker. The redundancy offer amounts to four weeks’ pay for every year of service for qualifying staff.

Authors comment: I have watched this story unfold from the beginning early this year and I sympathize with the workers at the Birmingham factory. I wish there was more I could do.

Site News:

I’ve a bit of other news to pass along today albeit on a much lighter note (to some). It seems that one of the new (unadvertised) additions to the site has been getting some attention since its debut along with the new theme earlier this month.

On the Contact page you’ll find the usual contact form whereby you can continue sending me all sorts of feedback. The point of interest is however the new Instant Messenger feature in the sidebar. Yes, now you can chat HP Sauce with me directly rather than waiting the excruciating 10 minutes for a reply via email.

Some visitors have already used this IM feature to great effect. Joshy, if you reading this - I am sorry to hear about your pony “barnacle” (funeral apparently to be held sometime today). Be sure to give him a proper send off with loads of HP Sauce! Be sure not to skimp with a lesser sauce!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 3:24pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.