This morning, Friday, January 26, 2024, workers from the General Industrie du Nord (Ginor) company in Jendouba demonstrated in front of the regional labor inspectorate, to protest against the draft social plan, which provides for a certain number of layoffs and laid off.
This sugar manufacturing factory is threatened with closure, and management is not considering solutions likely to preserve the company, revive sugar production, and offer employees better working conditions, for example by extending the cultivation of sugar cane and by increasing the production of sugar, of which the country is sorely lacking, as evidenced by the shortages of this product observed in recent months.
The demonstrators demanded urgent intervention from Head of State Kaïs Saïed to find a solution for the Ben Bechir sugar factory, as was the case for the Béja and Bizerte factories, so that hundreds of workers and technicians do not find themselves unemployed and that their social and economic conditions do not deteriorate further, believing that the Jendouba region is forgotten by political leaders and abandoned to its fate.
Ginor employees marched towards the headquarters of the Regional Labor Union in Jendouba to demand the lifting of what they consider to be an injustice and to make their voices, their demands, and their right to work heard.
Ginor is a sugar beet candy. Created in Bousalem in the 1980s to reduce sugar imports, it entered into crisis and was closed in 1998. Sold to the private sector in 2013, it entered production the same year by manufacturing different products: sugar at more than 12,000 tonnes, molasses, fresh pulp, etc., and it has set itself the objective of promoting and developing beet production and all activities linked to it upstream or downstream, to improve the income of beet growers; to facilitate, among other things, their supply of products, materials and services necessary for this crop, the processing and marketing of products and by-products from this crop.
But it didn’t take long for the company to enter crisis again in 2018. Its owners would like to close it for lack of profitability. Today, only 800 hectares are exploited and farmers in the region are showing increasing reluctance towards this crop. There are just over 200 of them working in beet growing and complaining about the cost of production as well as the lack of substance in the aid promises made to them.
The factory’s profitability threshold will only truly be reached with 2,500 hectares planted and transformed. The sugar factory is only operating at a quarter of its capacity and remains in the doldrums regarding its profitability projections.
However, it remains to be wondered whether President Saïed, who is often quick to come to the aid of workers threatened in their livelihood, can find a solution to redress the situation of a private company in difficulty that cannot any longer operate at a loss, if indeed maintaining a near-bankrupt factory by injecting state funds is an acceptable response from an economic point of view.
