“Today is a sad day. 190 people enter an ERE and this for a town and a region is devastating after having had a factory open for 116 years giving work to so many people.” The mayoress of Vilafranca, Sílvia Colom, reflects the sorrow of an entire region that lives worried about the effect that the slow ending of Marie Claire will have.
Paused because as of tomorrow only 73 people will remain in the Vilafranca factory, who will also be affected by an ERTE, since they have voluntarily stayed in the hope that an investment will arrive that will act as an economic float. With the illusion of this rescue, there are also another 33 employees in Valencia and Castelló and she is also welcomed by the mayoress of Vilafranca, who hopes that this investment “can make the occupation and continuation of Marie Claire viable.”
It is the flame that will still ignite in the population, the lifeline of a new economic injection, as was the purchase by the logistics company Think Textil in 2021 of the company. The company’s recovery plan focuses on finding a way out of all the liabilities that it has accumulated for more than five years and on the outsourcing of certain production lines, but above all on finding investors interested in supporting the project to relaunch the company. brand. They all cling to these potential investors, but while there is concern about how the massive dismissal of the lingerie firm will affect the region.
Colom explains to La Vanguardia that “from the City Council we will look for a way to promote an economic recovery plan, or similar formulas in the territorial pacts for the occupation, as I said when we were told that this could end.” In the last two months there have been many movements in the region to ask for help and Colom insists that “we want to continue fighting so that initiatives and companies arrive in the territory, because we are from here and we want to live and work here.”
With this purpose, Colom summoned the mayors of the Els Ports Comarcial Community, since he warns that with the (more than possible) closure of Marie Claire, the industrial stability of the area is endangered and the risk of depopulation in Els Ports is growing, but also in the Baix Maestrat, the Maestrazgo and in Gúdar-Javalambre, bordering Turolense regions where workers of the firm also reside.
That is why the mayors ask to explore new ways of financing and demand that the company maintain industrial activity in Vilafranca “complying with the agreements signed with the Generalitat”.
The Vilafranca Roundtable has also emerged from this spirit, convened by the mayoress, to not only fight for Marie Claire, but also for real investments in infrastructure, productive sectors and promotion of occupation in the area. They ask to design a “sensible and viable” plan to promote employment and economic activity in these towns as they defend that “Vilafranca is part of Marie Claire and Marie Claire is part of Vilafranca”.
The situation of Marie Claire has a lot to do with what has been going on for a few years in the Valencian clothing industry. The textile sector in the Valencian Community has about 2,400 companies (15% of the Spanish total), most of them small, which directly employ some 18,500 people in recent years, according to Social Security data.
The total sales of this sector represented a total of 1,731 million euros in 2022, 3% of the total of its own production marketed, a percentage that includes Marie Claire whose factory in Vilafranca – and until a few years ago its logistics center in Borriol- is drawn as an isolated point in the north of the Valencian map of this industry.
The bulk of employment in the sector is in L’Alcoià-El Comtat and Vall d’Albaida, with more than 4,000 employees, but the relevance of the lingerie firm that is now faltering in its town is understood to be “the basis of the economy of this town and its surroundings”, as reported by La industria valenciana. A territorial vision of the labor market, published by Labora and coordinated by Jorge Hermosilla, from the University of Valencia.
This double roots of the textile industry -in the central Valencian regions of Alicante and Valencia and in the north of Castellón- has been produced since the first Valencian industrialization, at the beginning of the 17th century. In Els Ports and its capital, Morella, there was already a wool textile industry. Years later, already in the 18th century, the region specialized in the production of espadrilles, blankets and woolen fabrics in towns such as Morella, El Forcall, Castellfort and Vilafranca. This is where, years later, in 1907, the couple founded by Francisca Íñigo and Celestino Aznar founded this firm.
With the Marie Claire plant, Els Ports continued on the map of Valencian industrialization as one of the centers of textile specialization in the territory, but its weight has been decreasing. In recent years, the manufacturing sector has been losing weight and has not recovered its pre-crisis levels, also affected by its exposure to international competition or the appearance of new producing countries.
The depopulation suffered by the area also has a lot to do with this reality, as the mayors insist on highlighting. The detail of how employment and depopulation are fed back is collected by Labora in another of its territorial analyzes on industry and employment in the area. He affirms that both Els Ports and Baix Maestrat are basically characterized by their “unequal demographic structure” as a consequence of the problem of depopulation, a fact that “conditions the development of the productive and industrial structure itself that will feed back the existing differences in this area and sharpen the depopulation.” The population density rate in the region is less than 10% and depopulation seriously threatens the socioeconomic continuity of the territory, for which reason experts affirm that it is “essential” that immediate concrete measures be taken.
Currently, the unemployment rate in the Els Ports region is, with data for the fourth quarter of 2022, 8.8%, the lowest in the Valencian Community, with a slight difference between men and women: they represent 8, 55% and women, 9.25%. After today’s sadness, the figures will also be different.
