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German BSH Domestic Appliances group, which owns the Siemens and Bosch brands, has announced the forthcoming closure of a factory in Esquíroz in the north of Spain.
More than 650 local jobs are likely to be lost, and production could be relocated to Poland or Turkey.
“The situation is really very worrying. This was a company that had proved to be sustainable, a company that had a product that provided services to the rest of Europe and also to Spain, because 80% of the products that came out of this company were then marketed in Spain,” Spanish MEP Estrella Galán said.
“And now the company has decided to close because of relocation,” she added.
This is not an isolated case. Relocations are also under way at Audi, Volkswagen and ArcelorMittal.
Some MEPs would like the European Parliament to take action to combat deindustrialisation and support the re-industrialisation of Europe, at a time when geopolitical uncertainties are undermining businesses.
“We have political instability, we have high energy prices, we have economic uncertainty, we have Donald Trump’s tariff war,” Oihane Agirregoitia Martínez, another Spanish MEP for Renew Europe, told Euronews.
“In this case, we have a lack of strategic autonomy. These companies are looking for lower labour costs, they are looking for access to raw materials”, Agirregoitia Martínez explained.
She recommends simplifying the regulatory and tax framework to support production, innovation and competitiveness in Europe.
For her part, Galán is calling for the 25-year-old European directive on collective redundancies to be updated to bring it into line with the “new realities of the labour market”.
“Within the European Union, we cannot compete between states on the basis of the wage levels that exist in one member state or another,” she told Euronews.
“It is therefore necessary to reform this directive on collective redundancies and prevent social dumping from being a threat to all workers in the European Union”, she adds.
Between 2018 and 2020, 72% of French companies that relocated did so in Europe, according to the French national statistics institute (INSEE).
