Unions at Jaguar and Land Rover have welcomed the announcement from Indian corporate giant Tata that there would not be any “significant changes” to the terms of employment of the 16,000 staff on completion of the car-makers’ sale.
The $2.3bn deal was concluded yesterday, leaving Ford with roughly 40% of the money they originally paid for the two companies.
The unions are said to prefer the car plants to be sold to Tata, rather than left to the tender mercies of asset-strippers.
“We are confident that Jaguar and Land Rover are in safe hands with Tata,” they said in a press release. “Although this company and its subsidiaries have a somewhat dubious history at home of bringing in cheaply-paid contract workers at the Jamshedpur steel plant, union-busting at the Telco plant in Pune, laying off nearly half of their steel workers between 1994 and 2006, poisoning the environment in the Gulf of Kutch Marine National Park, dumping mountains of boiler ash in the town of Jugsalai, and signing a deal selling hardware and vehicles to the military junta in Burma, we are nevertheless utterly convinced that they will treat their new British employees favourably - perhaps out of gratitude to the Empire, which kindly made them agents for shipping vast quantities of opium to China in Victorian times.”
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