About 13,000 West Midland car workers with Jaguar Land Rover are caught up in a crisis caused by “spivs and speculators of the City of London and New York,” a top auto industry summit in Birmingham will be told today (Tuesday).
Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite the union, will tell the Auto Industry Summit at the ICC in Birmingham - organised by the Birmingham Post - that the 海角视频’s entire manufacturing base was at risk in the economic downturn.
He will say of crisis-hit Jaguar Land Rover: “If these plants go, they go forever.”
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Mr Woodley, who spearheaded the union campaign to save Longbridge in 2000, will say: “In a time of crisis, our community needs to come together to preserve not just what we have but, indeed, our future as a manufacturing country. Nowhere is this more true than in the West Midlands, the heart of our motor industry and its supply chain, which is why Unite stands four square behind the Birmingham Post and Mail car summit.
“This conference is more than timely - it is yet another call for the action to save our industry, action that we all know is now essential.
“Working together in 2000 we showed what we could do. We saved the Rover plant for five years. Of course, we all wish it could have been for longer. But it bought vital time for the wider industry and community.
“And that is what the car industry needs today - time. Because I profoundly believe that this is an industry with a future.”
Mr Woodley’s impassioned speech comes amid key meetings between JLR unions and management to discuss the crisis at the Tata-owned company, which is calling for a further round of cost-cutting to avert more potential job losses.
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With hundreds more jobs believed to be at risk if unions cannot agree a further round of cuts, JLR chief executive David Smith has warned that Business Secretary Peter Mandelson’s latest £2.3 billion aid package to the car industry would not solve the crisis. “What we have been trying to impress on (Mandelson) is that it doesn’t address the urgent nature of the problem,” Mr Smith said. “We have said, if we are going to get finance ready by March, we need something that will take effect now.”
Meanwhile, Mr Woodley will warn at the ICC: “Here in Birmingham and across the country we have productive plants - profitable or near-profitable, world-beating and innovative. They are making the products for which there will be a real demand when the world economy rebounds.
“And we need our factories, our skills, our research potential, our workforce there to meet that demand. Because if these plants go they go forever.
“So now is the time for a long-term vision from government before an industry with touching a million jobs in it or dependent on it is forced to pay the price for a crisis made elsewhere.
“Let’s be clear - the desperate problems faced by our car workers and industry are not of their making but of the spivs and speculators of the City and in New York. But with creativity and political will we can keep these workers in post and off the dole, so that we can retrain and refocus our industry to help this country climb out of this recession.”
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