Former workers at the Irish Glass Bottle Company in Ringsend Dublin, voted yesterday to reject a revised redundancy payments offer from the company.
Ardagh plc, which closed the company with the loss of 375 jobs in July, had given the staff until midnight last night to accept the offer, worked out in talks at the Labour Court last week.
Workers were unimpressed, however, by either the deadline or the offer and voted by 123 votes to 84 to reject it.
Mr Mick Duffy, a TEEU shop steward at the factory, said the "inequality" of the proposed deal had proved to be "the main sticking point".
The deal provided for five weeks pay per year of service, in line with an earlier recommendation of the Labour Court which the company had refused to implement.
The new offer was capped, however, at €42,500 per worker, regardless of their years' of service.
Mr Duffy said the offer meant that workers with up to 12 or 13 years' of service would have received almost as much as recommended by the court the first time round, but those with longer service would have "lost out badly."
A worker entitled to 200 weeks' pay under the original recommendation, for example, would have come out with just 66 weeks in the new arrangement.
In addition, a fund available to pay 52 managers suggested they would be receiving an average payment of €88,000, despite the €42,500 ceiling for others.
There were no plans last night for further talks between the two sides.
The company's refusal to pay the original Labour Court recommendation led to last week's marches in a number of cities and towns by trade union members demanding reform of statutory redundancy legislation.
