At Least Tata Has Patience

The economic prospects for the West Midlands took a sudden and worrying turn for the worse yesterday when Jaguar Land Rover announced that it was looking to buy out the jobs of up to a further 400 employees.
As recently as last week, soundings that I took with the company indicated that the action management had taken by that stage would be enough to prevent production racing ahead of sales.These included 198 lay-offs - in line with an "efficiency" exercise that JLR insists it carries out every year. The Indian-owned company has also scrapped night shift working and has introduced further one-week shutdowns at its Castle Bromwich, Lode Lane and Hale wood plants.

Now we learn that the existing redundancy programme is being extended to take out between 300 and 400 more jobs.
It would now take a supreme optimist to bet on these latest redundancies being the last.
'It's not a matter of this downturn having a long way to run before it bottoms out: the signs are, it has only just begun. Carmaker severy where are battening down the hatches for what could be the worst storms in their history.
An entire industry employing millions of people and accounting for anything up to 10 per cent of GDP in some countries could be propped up on bricks before this economic storm blows itself out. More than one senior executive has talked about being in "uncharted waters" while Kevin Smith, chief
executive of global components manufacturer GKN, last week said: "I cannot remember it having been this
bad before.
"The sort of sales drops we have seen are huge".
Car sales in the UK, the US and mainland Europe have been going south for some time, but Jaguar LandRover has been insulated to a large extent by the growing popularity for its vehicles in new markets such as China, Russia and Brazil.
Not any more. Economic contagion, like a flu pandemic, knows no frontiers and for "fast growing" we can now read "not growing" if not "shrinking".
Here in the West Midlands we can at least be grateful that Jaguar Land Rover is in the hands of the patient and philosophical Tata conglomerate, whose Indian executives are happy to leave JLR chief executive David Smith and his team to run the business as they think fit.
Were the business still part of the ailing Ford group the prospect of plant closures would certainly be very real indeed.

Source : Birmingham Post