Demo on Sunday

On 2 December, we learned that Cargill had decided to make 5% of its staff redundant. A total of 8,000 jobs are at risk, despite profits of 2.4 billion dollars in 2024. Belgium will not be spared by the restructuring plan: the unions have announced that 164 jobs will be cut by the multinational (out of 1,200, i.e. more than 10% of the workforce). Code Rouge activists are in solidarity with the workers and are opposed to this anti-social plan, which is why they will be demonstrating tomorrow in front of Cargill Belgium’s head office. No redundancies in a profitable company!

An insatiable appetite for profits

During the cost of living crisis of 2022 – 2023, the price of many agricultural raw materials soared, allowing Cargill and its competitors to make colossal profits, to the detriment of the vast majority of the population. These gigantic profits have been made possible by the virtual monopoly enjoyed by this handful of multinationals, enabling them to inflate cereal market prices.

Since then, commodity prices have fallen and the situation in the sector has returned to a semblance of normality, leading to a fall in profits for these companies. So it’s once again the workers who are paying the price. They are used as employable and disposable margins to maintain super profits, then recouped by shopping on the job market, where it is easy to find people ready to be hired when the time is right. And this approach is about to be facilitated by the Arizona government’s measures.

Arizona, agribusiness’s best friend

One of the new government’s flagship measures is to limit access to unemployment benefit to two years. The reason behind this is to make the mass of employable people more flexible by giving them a limited time in which to find a job. This measure allows the bosses of large companies to do what Cargill does. It allows them to lay off large numbers of their staff while ensuring that there is always a significant proportion of the employable population to replace them who are running after contacts so as not to find themselves without any income or benefits after two years. Our fight for the living and for workers’ rights is therefore inseparable from the fight against this anti-social and anti-ecological government, which promises to be the best ally of multinationals like Cargill, as much to get rid of their employees as to disregard all ecological considerations.

Join us for a demonstration with the angry community, which is organising to fight against the plan for social and environmental butchery being launched by Arizona. Solidarity with workers made redundant in Belgium and around the world!

No to mass redundancies at Cargill!