MORE than 30 agency workers at crushing and screening equipment maker Sandvik in Co Tyrone have been laid off, it was confirmed last night.
But the company - which manufactures and assembles mobile crushing and screening equipment for the construction, quarrying and recycling industries at its Ballygawley production unit - said the core workforce had actually grown by more than 200 in the last year.
The lay-offs come in the wake of a stellar-performing 2015 for the company, in which its export sales rose by more than 50 per cent from around 320 to more than 500 units.
That came after Sandvik's Swedish parent company decided to concentrate its mobile manufacturing capacity at Ballygawley because of the site’s proven ability to deliver major change projects, and it moved 160 manufacturing jobs from Derbyshire in England to Co Tyrone.
In a statement from its Stockholm headquarters yesterday the company said: "At Sandvik Mobile Crushing & Screening in Ballygawley we supplement our workforce with flexible agency workers employed by Diamond Recruitment in Belfast.
"This is common practice among many companies, and the agency numbers vary constantly over the annual cycle in response to market and holiday variations.
"While there has been a recent reduction in agency workers in response to natural variation in demand, there's still a substantial agency presence in Ballygawley."
The statement added: "There have been no permanent employee redundancies, and since 2014, as the Ballygawley factory’s output has grown by
60 per cent, we have increased our total workforce by over 200."
In February 2014 Sandvik, which acquired Fintec in Ballygawley in 2007, stopped production of mobile screens and crushers at Swadlincote in Derbyshire with the loss of 360 jobs, though nearly half of the posts were moved to Tyrone.
Sandvik Mobile Crushers and Screens Ltd is part of the Sandvik Group, operating in the UK since 1914. It has around 1,500 employees in the UK in 15 different businesses.
