Waterford Crystal: how cracks appeared in the recession

Conor Kane When the first lump-sum payments from the Government reach former Waterford Crystal workers in the coming months they will symbolise a victory which has been years in the making.

The tax-free amounts of €1,200 per year of service for ex-employees over 50 will be a welcome boost for the hundreds and hundreds of former staff at “the glass” themselves, their families and the regional economy, but the money is no more than what’s owed to them after years of paying into the company’s pension fund before it went into receivership in early 2009.

That bleak January day when the glass-blowing, engraving, packing, selling and all other jobs ended, the whistle also blew on the pension payments which the men and women had been contributing for years, or decades in many cases.

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Former Waterford Crystal workers, at the Unite rally outside Leinster House, Dublin, in 2013, calling on the Government to protect the workers’ pension entitlements. Photograph: Eric Luke/Irish Times

Waterford Crystal was once among the most envied employers in the entire country, fuelling much of the local economy during its peak years with thousands on its payroll and the coveted pieces of glass making their way into homes around the world.

From the 1980s onwards, however, the market gradually declined and with it the fortunes of the factory which began life in the city centre but was now on Waterford’s Cork Road, the illuminated chandeliers of the showroom visible to passing cars and a magnet to tourists who made the place one of Ireland’s top visitor attractions.

Almost 500 people lost their jobs in 2005 when the company closed its Dungarvan factory, consolidating all operations in the city. Waterford Crystal still had the best part of 1,000 people working for it at that point.

However, various attempts to kickstart the business and make it more successful were not helped by the global recession of the late noughties and the inevitable came to pass on January 5th, 2009, when it was announced that the company was in receivership.

Eventually Waterford Crystal’s assets were sold to KPS Capital Partners. A scaled-down House of Waterford Crystal was quickly built on Waterford’s Mall and is now a successful tourist venue and shop in its own right, but most of the products are made overseas.

In the meantime, the realisation that the workers’ pension fund had gone bust with the original company led to a case being brought against the Irish Government to the European Court of Justice. The result was a ruling in April 2013 to the effect that it was up to the State to protect pension rights of employees whose payments had gone south, putting the ball firmly in the Government’s court.

A negotiation process, chaired by Kieran Mulvey of the Labour Relations Commission, led to the deal approved by the cabinet on Friday and unanimously passed by workers at a mass meeting on Saturday, just 12 days before what may now be a happy Christmas in Waterford.