Airbus Cuts
February 28, 2007
In addition, the company has decided to sell or spin off six of its European factories as part of its "Power8" program, said Xavier Petrachi, an official with the CGT union.
Airbus will make public later Wednesday details of its restructuring, which is intended to save the company some 5 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in costs over the next three years.
The savings are to come mainly in payroll reductions and procurement costs, and to achieve an increase in operating profit of some 2.1 billion euros per year beginning in 2010.
According to Petrachi, the Airbus plants at Meaulte in northern France, Nordenham in Germany and Filton in Britain are to be spun off. Three other factories - Saint-Nazaire in western France and Varel and Laupheim in Germany - will be sold.
The plan to sell or spin off the plants in Meaulte and Saint-Nazaire had already provoked fury among French trade unions on Tuesday, when the moves were only rumors.
Union ire
Force Ouvriere, the largest union representing French workers at Airbus, had said that if the sites at Meaulte and Saint-Nazaire were sold or spun off, it would "consider the measure as a declaration of war."
Saying it would "not accept the unacceptable," the union urged "all of the Airbus unions across Europe (to) get together and mobilize to make this plan fail."
In protest of the expected announcement that the Meaulte plant in northern France would be sold, some 1,280 workers there laid down there tools in what was described as a "spontaneous" job action, which they continued on Wednesday.
Even though the spun-off factories are expected to remain Airbus sub-contractors, trade unions fear that these jobs will eventually be outsourced to low-wage countries.
Where to build what
Unions also said that, as part of the Power8 restructuring programme, the new Airbus A350XWB would be built in the southern French city of Toulouse.
A dispute over where the A350 would be built was part of the reason the French and German executives who share the running of Airbus's parent company, European Aeronautics Defence and Space (EADS), had failed to agree on the restructuring plan 10 days ago.
Now, the plan foresees that a production line of the popular A320 family of single-aisle planes will be moved from Toulouse to the German city of Hamburg.