Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Merry Christmas From Abbott Labs

Five hundred people in Galway were thinking about Christmas yesterday. By day's end, they were thinking about Christmas in an entirely different way.

Abbott Labs makes stents for the medical industry. Surgery techniques change over time, and the Abbott stent is not the be-all and end-all for cardiovascular repairs, so the market has gone down. Don't need to make so many stents, and if you don't need to make so many, you don't need so many people to make them either. That would be the plant in Galway, so.

There's a lot of politicians waxing prolific on the bad state of affairs in the west of Ireland, where Boston Scientific recently cut back on production. Michael D. Higgins is calling for meetings to discuss job creation, as if a lot of hot air can generate employment. Galway's mayor, Tom Costello, is upset that the closing of the Abbott manufacturing facility was put out over the news before the employees were told, but the deed's done.

The staff had a notion that the closure was coming because the FDA canceled a scheduled audit a few months ago, suggesting that there was no need to take a look at the facility. The workers knew that all the stents they were making had lost a piece of their market and weren't in demand any more. That meant that their labor wasn't needed as well.

A few might find work at another Abbott's facility in Clonmel, but most are facing a bleak holiday season. With that in mind, could the suits not have glanced at a calendar and scheduled the closing last October? Or could they maybe have waited a month or two and issued the mass redundancies in February? When they look out over their massive corporate campus in North Chicago, Illinois, do they see anything beyond the end of their own noses?

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