Latest news : Bombardier to cut jobs

The train manufacturer in Derby is to reduce its work force by half after losing a £3billion contract to a German rival. 18/07/2011

Bombardier, Britain’s last standing train manufacturer, is set to cut 1,400 jobs as the German company Siemens has been awarded the £3billion government contract.

The manufacturing plant in Derby announced plans today to lose 983 temporary staff and 446 permanent staff.

The Department for Transport by-passed the UK’s last train maker and has dashed the government’s hopes of manufacturing its way out of the recession. The railworkers union, RMT is set to fight the decision ‘tooth and nail’, and accused the government of ‘industrial vandalism’.

‘It's a scandal that the government are colluding with the European Union in a policy of industrial vandalism that would wipe out train building in the nation that gave the railways to the world. We will fight this stitch-up tooth and nail from the shop floor to the benches of the House of Commons,’ said Bob Crow of the RMT.

Failure to secure the Thameslink deal, and the completion of current orders, has left Bombardier with a surplus of workers. 

Siemens will now build the 1000 plus carriages for the London Thameslink rail route, which would have secured workload and maintained the current level of employment and activity at the Derby factory.

Union workers and opposition politicians have requested that the government review the decision.

Despite Siemens employing around 20,000 people in the UK, the Thameslink contract will only create around 2,000 jobs; directly employing workers at a factory in Hebburn, Tyneside.