Goodbye to the most famous socks: Marie Claire closes its factory and enters the competition

Textile company Marie Claire has announced its intention to close its factory in Vilafranca (Castellón) and that it will request a declaration of bankruptcy on a voluntary basis in order to continue winding down the company. This was announced to the works council at a meeting where it reported its intention to begin a consultation period for work adjustments starting next Monday.

The company, which currently has a a staff of 214 peopleuntil next July it has an active temporary employment file (ERTE) for 130 workers in its factory, which currently has only 90 people working in production.

The company communicated to workers’ representatives that the viability of the company with its current staff, which also has another 70 workers between technicians and administrative staff in Castellón and Valencia, is “quite threatened”, a critical situation that, according to the unions, has dragged on “for some time”.

The workers’ representatives are waiting for the consultation to start next Monday and from there they will hear explanatory memos and technical reports to find out the “company’s intentions”. In any case, they stated that they do not know at this time if the company intends to initiate an Employment Termination (ERE) document. “Until then, we won’t have any more news, even though we already know what everything indicates,” they specified.

Marie Claire is a company from Castellón founded in 1907, of great tradition and roots in the interior of the province. It started its activity more than a hundred years ago, devoting itself from the very beginning to the production and sale of socks, an activity that over the years has expanded to the production of other textile products. In April 2021, he bought it Think of textiles —whose main client is Inditex—, in an operation approved by the Valencian Institute of Finance (IVF) through a funding plan to combat depopulation. In June last year, the company formalized with the Generalitat a financing operation worth 12 million euros under the Valencia Resilience Fund for strategic companies affected by the crisis.

“The economic injection of the Generalitat came very well and it seemed that the company would be sustainable, but He had a lot of bad luck because of covid, we didn’t raise our heads“, argued the responsible person CC.OO. in the company, José María Gutiérrez. The union warned of the “drama” that the closure of this historic company would mean in the region, where “it is a source of income for a fairly large number of residents”. Where industry disappears, depopulation occurs, and we don’t know how it can be replaced, he pointed out, expressing the concerns of the workforce after “ten years of problems”. “The company has become a leader with almost 1,000 workers, and currently it does not even reach 300. Somehow we could think about this sad end that we do not want,” he explained.