Arms company announces job losses
British arms company axes 1,000 jobs
The arms company BAE Systems has announced 1,000 job losses at five sites across England – only weeks after justifying a major arms deal by saying that it would protect British jobs.
The majority of the cuts will fall on BAE sites in Brough, East Yorkshire and Warton, Lancashire. The company had argued that they were preserving jobs at Brough when they signed a £700m arms deal with the Indian government in July. Campaigners were quick to suggest that most of the jobs it created would be based in India.
BAE’s Kevin Taylor said that the job losses resulted from ‘the impact of the changes in the [UK] defence programme announced in December 2009, together with other workload changes’.
Hugh Scullion of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions said he was ‘shocked at the scale of these losses’. But the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) insisted that the news was ‘no surprise’.
CAAT spokesperson Kaye Stearman told the Friend: ‘BAE have been shredding UK jobs for several years, despite wrapping their activities in a patriotic image’.
CAAT points out that BAE is keen to present itself as a British company, although the UK now accounts for only a minority of its business, staff and shareholders.
