The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) expresses its concern over Swiss multinational Nestle’s announcement last October 16 of carrying out mass layoffs over the next two years. The plan of the world’s biggest food and beverage company to remove 16,000 jobs worldwide in a restructuring process aimed at saving costs and increasing profits should be subjected to intense scrutiny by workers and the public in the interest of workers’ rights.

In a press release assessing its 2025 performance so far and presenting its plans for the future, Nestle said that it will “reduce headcount” of 12,000 white-collar professionals and of 4,000 workers in its manufacturing and supply chain. These figures amount to a significant reduction in Nestle’s 270,000 employees around the world. https://www.nestle.com/media/pressreleases/allpressreleases/nine-month-sales-2025

Nestle’s statement presents a cold-blooded computation and projection of costs, savings and earnings and appears to stem from a single-minded pursuit of increasing profits. These considerations should be balanced with labor rights, as Nestle has a responsibility to uphold the rights of its workers. Labor has every right to expect much from Nestle as it is the biggest food and beverage company in the world that is perfectly capable of delivering on its responsibilities to its workers.

We demand that Nestle exercise transparency on this issue and open itself up to scrutiny from workers and the public. It should present the current state of its business, its plans for growth, and how it plans to uphold workers’ rights to security of tenure and other rights in its plan.

We support the IUF (International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations) in calling on Nestle to put people over profits and in preparing for struggle to defend Nestle workers. https://www.iuf.org/news/nestle-16000-job-cuts-the-iuf-demands-people-before-profit/ We support the Wyeth Philippines Progressive Workers’ Union (WPPWU) in condemning Nestle’s announcement and in bracing to fight for workers’ rights.

The WPPWU, an affiliate of the Drug, Food and Allied Workers Federation (DFA) of national labor center Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), fears that Nestle’s retrenchment scheme will reach the Philippines, as 140 Wyeth workers in the country were already retrenched in 2023 in the name of restructuring and saving costs.

Nestle’s announcement should serve as another wake-up call to the Ferdinand Marcos Jr government. Recent developments are exposing jobs in the country as precarious, and the government should prepare to provide social protection to workers who will lose their jobs, but more importantly create more jobs in the country by implementing nationalist industrialization and land reform.