THIRTEEN employees at a plastics packaging factory in Beccles could lose their jobs as the company aims to restructure.Promens, which has a factory on the Ellough Industrial Estate employing 220 people - including many from the Lowestoft area - said it wants to transform the business in order to make it more efficient in the economic downturn.

THIRTEEN employees at a plastics packaging factory in Beccles could lose their jobs as the company aims to restructure.

Promens, which has a factory on the Ellough Industrial Estate employing 220 people - including many from the Lowestoft area - said it wants to transform the business in order to make it more efficient in the economic downturn.

Yesterday, managers at the Icelandic plastics company were in talks with the workers' union Unite and enter a 30-day consultation period from Monday.

A company spokesman said that the proposed redundancies would be 'across the board' and not from any specific area of the work force, and confirmed that the redundancies will not affect Promens' other East Anglian factory in Thetford.

Promens, one of the world's largest manufacturers of its kind that makes plastic packaging for cosmetics, food, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, has three factories in the UK.

The firm recorded a �61.9m turnover in the year ending December 2007.

Its clients include household brands such as Dettol, Radox and Tresemm�.

Sharon Hill, the company's human resources manager, said the move was a positive step aimed at ultimately securing jobs.

'This is about transforming the business and surviving the climate,' she added.

Promens was in the news last summer when workers staged five 24-hour walk outs because they were unhappy with low pay rise offers, which they claimed were below inflation.

The union was also in action at the end of 2007, just months after the company took over from Polimoon, when Promens proposed 20 redundancies from the engineering sector of the company.

The Beccles factory had traded as Fibrenyle until 2003.