Alex Trelinski
FASHION retailer H&M has announced plans on Friday to close more than a quarter of its shops in Spain.
The Swedish-owned business says up to 588 employees will lose their jobs.
The company said it had to carry out the collective layoff for ‘unspecified organisational, productive and economic reasons’, according to the CCOO trade union.
H&M has 91 outlets and employs 4,000 people in Spain, and the CCOO union says that 28 stores are ear-marked for closure.
Under the law, if closures are to happen, the company has to notify the labour authority at least six months in advance for negotiations to take place.
“We believe the measure is too aggressive and it is possible to look for solutions which doesn’t imply job losses,” a CCOO spokesperson said.
H&M is the world’s second largest clothing retailer behind Spain’s Inditex who own a range of outlets including Zara.
There has been no comment so far from H&M.
In 2021, 349 employees lost their jobs in the wake of the Covid pandemic, with unions managing to negotiate down from the almost 1,100 redundancies originally proposed by the company.
