Thousands of jobs to go at German mail-order unit Quelle (Roundup)

Berlin - Thousands of workers are to lose their jobs after bankruptcy administrators decided to close German mail-order company Quelle, a union official said Tuesday. 'It you take everything into consideration, more than 6,000 jobs are at stake,' said Johann Roesch, spokesman for the services industry union Verdi. Bavarian-based Quelle, which was founded in 1927, has been teetering on the brink of collapse since its parent company, retailer Arcandor, filed for bankruptcy on June 9. The decision to liquidate the mail-order business came after the failure of intensive negotiations with a number of potential buyers, said Arcandor administrator Klaus Hubert Georg on Tuesday. Georg told a news conference that a continuing decline in the number of Quelle customers meant a satisfactory yield for investors could not be guaranteed. Quelle employs about 10,500 people in Germany. More than 3,000 of them have already left voluntarily or negotiated severance packages. Goerg said between 3,000-4,000 workers would lose their jobs when the company is formally wound down over the next four-to-six weeks, but declined to give an exact figure. Some call-centre workers and technical service employees would be able to stay on for the time being, he said Quelle was the keystone of Arcandor's web of mail-order and online vendors in 28 nations, employing 20,000 people at one time. Profitable speciality mail order operations such as home-shopping channel HSE 24 are to be sold off separately. Until the 1989 fall of Communism, Quelle's 1,000-page mail-order catalogues were the bible of clothes and home appliances for East Europeans behind the Iron Curtain. Most German households own a few low-priced Quelle products. Today, younger Germans perceive Quelle's 70,000 wares as faintly out of date. The company has been operating since July with the help of 50 million euros (75 million dollars) in government-guaranteed loans. The department store chain Karstadt, which is also part of the Arcandor group, was in a much better financial position than Quelle, Georg said. 'The process of seeking an investor for Karstadt is generally promising,' he added.