Teva To Lay Off 14,000 Employees Worldwide

December 14, 2017 | Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries will cut 14,000 jobs around the world, with most of the layoffs to occur in 2018 as part of a restructuring plan to save the ailing company, Teva said in a statement on Thursday. As part of the plan, Teva is expected to pay back its almost $35 million debt and cut its total costs by $3 billion by the end of 2019. A majority of the layoffs are expected by the end of 2018, and employees will be told within the next 90 days, the company said. Meanwhile, the Histadrut organization of workers in Israel called for a general mass strike in Israel on Sunday in solidarity with the more than 1,500 Israeli employees expected to be let go. The union’s chairman Avi Nissenkorn announced in a press conference that the strike would include airports, seaports, government ministries, health organizations, banks, transportation services, state-owned companies, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and all Teva manufacturing plants in Israel. He called Teva the “flagship of Israeli industry,” Haaretz reported, and said it has “become the symbol of Israeli industry’s destruction.” Nissenkorn noted that the layoffs were ordered by the company’s current CEO Kare Schultz, a former Danish businessman, and that it was “abandoning the vision of its founders.” While Teva is a global generic drugmaker with locations in Japan, Europe, and the Americas, it’s an Israeli-based company with headquarters in Petach Tikva.