The motor manafacturing job losses are coming thick and fast as NISSAN announces it will slash 20,000 jobs from its global workforce in the next year, due to losses of £2 billion.
The profit loss is Nissan’sfirst in nearly 15 years, and has led the firm to cut around 9 per cent from its workforce.
Nissan (which is 44 per cent owned by Renault of France) said job cuts would be achieved over the next 14 months through voluntary redundancies, attrition and the phasing out of thousands of short-term contracts. The carmaker said it hoped the cuts, combined with work-sharing programmes – it has already moved its US plants to four-day weeks – will lower labour costs by 20 per cent.
The Japanese maker suffered a worldwide sales fall of over 18 per cent in the last quarter of 2008.
Despite the UK actually recording a negligible full year loss in 2008, 1200 jobs have already been cut at the company’s Sunderland plant.
The next round of job losses will begin next Month.
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