GSK Plans Staff Reductions at NJ Consumer Healthcare Ops
GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, LP, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, has issued WARN notice to the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development regarding the layoff of 350 employees. WARN requires employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. The notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government. The notice was issued May 1, 2015 and posted on the NJ Department of Labor and Workforce Development in June 2015.
The WARN notification applies to an individual or private business establishments that have been in operation in the State of New Jersey for longer than three years and which employ 100 or more full-time employees. Notification is required if such businesses plan a mass layoff. meanomg a reduction in force which is not the result of a transfer or termination of operations and which results in the termination of employment at an establishment during any 30-day period for 500 or more full-time employees or for 50 or more of the full-time employees representing one third or more of the full-time employees at the establishment. Notice is also required for a permanent or temporary shutdown of a single establishment, or of one or more facilities or operating units within a single establishment.
The notification follows the completion earlier this year of three-part transaction between GSK and Novartis, which included the creation of a consumer healthcare business through a joint venture that combinesd the two companies’ consumer healthcare divisions, the divestiture of the Novartis non-influenza vaccines business to GSK., and the acquisition by Novartis of GSK oncology assets.
In their new consumer healthcare joint venture, GSK Consumer Healthcare, Novartis holds a 36.5% share. GSK Consumer Healthcare is expected to have leading positions in four key over-the-counter categories: wellness, oral health, nutrition, and skin health. The joint venture has scale and commercial presence in the developed world as well as in key emerging markets. Novartis also has four of eleven seats on the joint venture’s board. Furthermore, Novartis has certain minority rights and exit rights, the latter of which would be executed using a pre-defined, market-based pricing mechanism.