If you try to buy a set of underwear or pajamas from Marie Claire in their online store, you will see that nothing reveals the situation that the Castellón company is experiencing. Online sales continue to work.
Only the statement that the management published in May 2023 – and which is available in the “communications” area, in plural, although there is only one – warns of the situation experienced by the company that has just extended the current three-month ERTE. three more months, until the month of December. The measure affects the 72 people in Vilafranca and the 33 in the rest of Spain who remained after the departure of the bulk of the workforce, 190 employees.
Union sources explain that last week the management presented the documentation to declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the business activity continues to function, although only security guards are inside the factory and “three or four people” confirm the former workers, for parcel work. The rest of the people are at home due to the temporary regulation file.
The online store continues to operate and also the small business that the company has open inside the factory and that until the firm’s crisis was only open to employees. Until now it was a small store located in a corridor of the factory and accessible only to employees where they could find “lots of clothes.” Opening it to the public was one of the requests of the negotiating committee, and the company committed to it, after the requests that had come from workers from other sectors who wanted to show their support for the Marie Claire staff.
Meanwhile, the labor dispute has not yet been resolved and the former workers are still waiting to receive the dismissal compensation that Fogasa must pay. Some former workers have already found a new job, for their peace of mind, but many others are crunching the numbers these weeks to see how they will manage to make it until their retirement. More than half of Marie Claire’s employees were over 55 years old.
Likewise, in Vilafranca, the town where the plant is located, the Valencian employment service, Labora, gave a talk last Friday at the House of Culture due to the growth in employment demand in the municipality. Updated figures from the Ministry of Labor show that in August 2023 there are 210 unemployed people in the town, and of them 152 belong to the industrial sector. They are 72% of local unemployment. In January of the same year, before the crisis became firm – the company had been having financial problems for some time – there were 135 unemployed in this town of Els Ports, 70 of them in industry, the sector with the most unemployed. The population of Vilafranca is made up of 2,154 people.
Meanwhile, Mayor Sílvia Colom confirms that she is working to convene the Vilafranca Roundtable “soon” in which entities from the territory are involved. The Table seeks to raise its voice from the administrations, town councils, regions and civil society of Els Ports, l’Alt Maestrat, Maestrazgo and Gúdar Javalambre to achieve a joint Economic Recovery Plan, halfway between the provinces of Teruel and Castellón as a result of the deindustrialization of the area of ??which Marie Claire is an example.
