From office to store

EL CORTE INGLES is transferring 2,324 office and administrative staff to its stores.

Last February, Spain’s leading department store chain announced that it would be taking this step to provide more support for its stores and shops “while addressing sales growth and improving customer care and service.”

A statement issued by El Corte Ingles explained that its agreement with the unions was based on maintaining employment and at the same time providing “voluntary severance” for the chain’s longest-serving employees.

Measures include an incentivised redundancy scheme for 630 employees who will be over 59 by June 30 this year, 40 more than was originally announced.

The agreement reached with the unions also improved the exit deal for employees who preferred to leave owing to the “substantial change” in their future roles.

That’s the spirit!

ON taking over as chief executive at Diageo, Debra Crew will be one of the few women at the head of an FTSE 100 company. Before her appointment as chief operating officer in October 2022, Crew was previously president of Diageo North America, overseeing the company’s largest market.

She joined Diageo in 2019 after heading tobacco firm Reynolds American, until it was acquired by British American Tobacco (BAT), having previously spent five years at PepsiCo.

Diageo, which makes Johnnie Walker, Guinness and Baileys and is the world’s biggest spirits manufacturer, employs 28,000 people globally and sells more than 200 brands in more than 180 markets.

CAN anyone please tell me what is actually occurring on this planet of ours? The whole shebang seems to be teetering on some kind of destabilising precipice, with our socalled leaders stumbling through it all in a complete befuddled daze.

Politicians groping through a tangled jungle of confusion and governmental garbage, getting all their priorities wrong and having no knowledge or way of even vaguely coming to grips with it all. Those, who are laughingly under the impression that they can make a difference, are all rushing around, trying to look important and ultimately reversing up their own backsides. I cannot help but think we are yet again all pawns in some devious plan, set in motion by those who truly run our lives.

Shadowy figures, who walk the secret corridors of those who hold the wealth of the world to their electronic bosoms. These individuals instigate, and even rely on worldwide destabilisation, confusion and chaos to put their own conniv ­