in the NEW WORKER
ROVER plans to axe 1,260 non-manual jobs, 12 per cent of the group’s workforce. It brings the total number of Rover jobs lost in the last 18 months to 3,500.
Around 500 will go at Longbridge, 400 at Solihull, 180 at Cowley, 110 at Swindon and 70 at Gaydon.
The recession has hit motor companies world-wide. In Europe only German new car sales are up significantly fuelled by re-unification.
Rover claims that this latest round of job cuts are part of a long-term restructuring, “emulating Japanese manufacturing efficiencies” as a company statement put it.
Even so, Rover has said it will put 12,000 production workers on a four-day week because of falling demand for key models.
Rover has been increasing its share of the market, but the market itself is shrinking fast.
Last month Ford announced it was halting production at Harewood. But it will retain the plant’s 6,500 assembly workers, already working short-time on full pay.
**************************
A SENIOR European Community official has met the Albanian government which has been desperately seeking imperialist aid to stave off famine.
The Ramiz Alia government, a coalition of anti-communist nationalists and Alia’s revisionist wing of the former Party of Labour, faces an economic crisis provoked by the so-called reforms of this year.
This has seen the abandonment of the socialist constitution, the break-up of the co-operative farms and the beginning of the restoration of capitalism in the small Balkan republic.
The talks between the EC Foreign Affairs Commissioner Frans Andriessen, and Albanian Prime Minister Ylli Bufi centred around Albanian appeals for urgent supplies of food and medicine.
The Albanian premier warned the EC official that government wasn’t bailed out soon the people would lose confidence in what he called the “democratic reforms” and the subsequent backlash could jeopardise its very existence.
