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Magna International, the lead investor in a group buying General Motors’ Opel unit, was accused of plans to move van production to Russia from its British factory, by Unite, a trade union at Opel’s Vauxhall division, the Financial Times reported Friday.
“This is a stitch-up,” said Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite, the newspaper reported. “We could see vans go to GAZ.”
Woodley told the newspaper that Magna had given no guarantee that the Luton plant would produce vans after 2013, when a production joint venture with Renault expires. Production may go to Oleg Deripaska’s GAZ Group, the newspaper said.
Magna denied the plans to the newspaper, saying, “No movement of production facilities to Russia is envisioned under the business plan and workers at Luton are in no worse a position than they were under GM, which had made no commitment beyond 2013,” the newspaper reported.
“What we’re dealing with here doesn’t … share the pain of downsizing and job losses,” Woodley said.
“It’s clearly biased for obvious political and financial reasons toward the German plants,” he said.
Magna gained favor early on with the German government, which strongly backed the firm’s Opel bid. Germany is providing 4.5 billion euros ($6.6 billion) of loan guarantees, which are necessary to finance Opel’s restructuring.
The deal has come under increasing criticism from other European countries where Opel operations are housed. Critics say that most of the downsizing is targeted on Opel’s non-German operations.
On Friday, Magna told Opel’s unions in Spain that it planned to present a new proposal on cost cuts next week, a labor representative said Friday.
Chema Fernando, a union leader at the plant in Figueruelas, Spain, said he was “satisfied” that Magna agreed to review an earlier proposal for the factory following a two-day meeting in Germany this week. A new plan will be presented Oct. 5, Fernando said in an interview, without giving details.
Opel’s reorganization after the division’s planned sale to a partnership of Magna and may lead to the loss of as many as 10,900 jobs in Europe. Under a July proposal, Magna, Canada’s largest car-parts maker, would eliminate 1,672 jobs, or 23 percent of the work force, at Opel’s Spanish plant.
Workers at Opel’s four German factories, where GM employs 25,000 people, may have to achieve 175 million euros ($254 million) in annual savings out of a proposed 265 million euro Europe-wide cost-cut target, Alfred Klingel, works council chief at the Kaiserslautern, Germany, plant, said Sept. 30.
(Bloomberg, MT)
