Alternative ways to save those jobs at Twinings (From Andover Advertiser)

Alternative ways to save those jobs at Twinings

4:25pm Thursday 28th January 2010

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YOUR report ‘Fight for Twinings Jobs’ was accurate in so far as it reported comments and statements made at the meeting but it failed to report suggestions that I made at the meeting, which Derek Kotz was keen to follow up, and which one member of the audience described to me as being ‘the only positive suggestions of the evening’.

While all speakers paid credit to the Twining's workforce for having adapted to changing market conditions and for keeping the company profitable year after year, most spoke, emotively, only of supporting the protest campaign.

My observation was that a campaign that does nothing more than bring public attention to the situation at Twinings has little chance of changing the minds of the directors at the company. My suggestion was that the campaign directors should aim at the controlling shareholders of Twinings.

According to the Oracle of the day, the Internet, Twinings is owned by Associated British Foods; ABF was founded by Mr Willard Garfield Weston, succeeded by his son, Gary Weston, who has in turn been succeeded as CEO by his son, George Weston.

The Wittington Trust holds 54.5 per cent of ABF’s shares; a fraction short of 80 per cent of the shares of the Wittington Trust are held by the Garfield Weston Foundation, headed by George Weston’s brother Guy, and supported by a board of trustees made up entirely of other family members.

And guess what! According to Wikepedia the Garfield Weston Foundation is ‘one of the largest charitable foundations in the world, with assets of £3,720 million at 5 April 2008, of which £3,620 million was attributed to the foundation's majority holding in Wittington Investments Limited’!

A charitable foundation. And should charity not start at home?

Is it not a supreme irony that an organisation which holds the controlling interest in ABF, is party to management methods which involve putting 400 loyal workers on the scrap heap to move jobs abroad, to make more profit, so that they can have even more money to give away!

Would it not be very charitable, and commercially a very good decision, to continue with a very profitable organisation, albeit one that is not maximising to the last degree its ability to make profit, in order that they keep faith with the very workforce which has enabled them to achieve the market prominence they have?

My comment to the meeting, in response to the suggestion that the workforce might go on strike, that to do so would merely hasten the day when Twinings shut up shop in Andover completely, fell like a lead balloon.

To my mind, an appeal to the GWF would be a far more positive move. If such an appeal failed to move them, perhaps an appeal (or the threat of an appeal) to the beneficiaries of the GWF, on the basis that there is not much difference between maximising profits by a) cashing in on sweat shops in India and b) putting people out of work in the UK, might just move the mountain.

My other suggestion was to approach the Co-op, soon to be one of Andover biggest employers, and who sell own brand tea, to see if a buy out of the whole Twinings operation might not be possible.

Since ABF both acquires and divests itself of subsidiaries which sometime fit and sometime do not fit the corporate model, they might well divest themselves of Twinings.

It might seem far fetched now but eventually it might be that the ethical Co-op is a better long term bet than the somewhat unethical Twinings.

Stanley Oram, UKIP Parliamentary Candidate, NW Hants, Bulbery, Abbotts Ann.

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