Brussels, 07/02/2007 (Agence Europe) - For several months now, Airbus employees in France and Germany have been unsure of their future. Their fears were underpinned last week when the Airbus CEO and and co-president of EADS (the European Aeronautical and Defence Space Company, and Airbus's mother company), Louis Gallois, spoke of the “possibility of giving up the management of certain Airbus sites” as part of the “Power 8” restructuring plan. German Economy Minister Michael Glos lost no time in reacting strongly to this statement, threatening that Berlin may cancel its orders with EADS if the company chooses to de-localise any part of Airbus production outside Germany.
Alongside the union movements in France and Germany which have taken up the fight against this plan, Francis Wurtz, President of the GUE/NGL group at the European Parliament, Marie-George Buffet, National Secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF) and Oskar Lafontaine, President of the Parliamentary group Die Linke at the Bundestag, have also reacted by publishing the following statement (our translation): “Whether it is in France or Germany, there is nothing to justify any job losses at Airbus. The management is making a pretext of its own failures to impose on its staff a social regression which it has been planning for a long time. We vigorously condemn the fact that the French and German governments are not reacting to the redundancies, but are content to insist that all job losses must be in the other country. We hope that the impressive demonstrations of the employees in both countries will force the government to take their responsibilities in the Airbus affair. The states must have an indirect influence over the EADS business strategy”.
The Power 8 restructuring plan is to be presented to the Airbus Works Council on 20 February. This plan would involve the loss of thousands of jobs, a huge reduction in the number of sub-contractors, increased pressure on those remaining and open incentives to delocalisations, according to the press release by the three signatories of the statement. They add that these plans on the part of the management come against the backdrop of a likely doubling in the world air fleet in the next 20 years: a study predicts that aviation companies will order more than a thousand aircraft on average during this period, they conclude. (gb)