Results tagged “Longbridge” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

Yesterday The Guardian reported that the cost of the DTI / BERR inquiry into the events surrounding the collapse of MG Rover in 2005 has topped £14 million, according to BERR's own figures.

As I've noted in previous blogs, setting up the inquiry was absolutely the right thing to do. Serious questions remain to be answered about what happened, and the 6300 workers and their families who lost their jobs at Longbridge (plus several thousand more in the supply chain) deserve some answers.

Whilst 90% of ex MG-Rover workers were back in work by March last year, they were earning substantially (£5600) less in real terms than when they were at MG Rover, as a report by the Birmingham Business School and The Work Foundation recently demonstrated (see here for my blog on this).

A key lesson here is the urgent need right now to save Jaguar Land Rover. Firstly we can see what a wage drop workers coming out of manufacturing have to experience, and secondly those ex MG-Rover workers would again be affected by a JLR shutdown (see here on the need to support JLR).

(Blogged by David Bailey and Caroline Chapain)

This week we launched our report into what has happened to the MG Rover workers who lost their jobs so suddenly back in 2005. The research was a joint effort by The Work Foundation and the Birmingham Business School and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Richard Burden, MP for Birmingham Northfield, kindly hosted the event in Westminster.

A short webcast summarising the research can be found here. (you need to scroll down and click on 'download swf file').
What we found was that three years on from the historic collapse of MG Rover in April 2005, 90% of workers who lost their jobs have found new employment, but most have taken deep pay cuts.

We interviewed over 200 workers out of the 6,300 workers ex-Rover workers who lost their jobs when the Longbridge plant closed, and found two thirds have suffered wage falls. Overall, on average wages had fallen by £5,640 per year in real terms. A third of the former workers reported an increase in their salaries. Those out of work the longest suffered the largest drops in income.

In November a group of us at the Birmingham Business School working with colleagues at The Work Foundation will report on the initial findings of our study of what happened to the ex MG Rover workers. We've just interviewed over 200 of them to find out how they have got on, what work they are now doing (if any), how much they are earning, what skills they use, whether they have retrained and so on. The project has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and is throwing up some fascinating results. I hope to be able to blog about this in a few weeks' time.

Meanwhile another investigation of sorts has been on-going for three years. That's the DTI (now BERR) Inquiry into the MG Rover collapse.

Setting up the inquiry was absolutely the right thing to do. There were (and remain) some serious questions to be answered about what happened. The 6000+ workers and their families who lost their jobs at Longbridge (plus thousands more in the supply chain) deserve some answers.

News yesterday that MGs were being produced at Longbridge seemed to catch everyone on the hop. Even the City Council, which has done so much to develop a positive relationship with owners Nanjing and Shanghai, seemed to be expecting the announcement next week.

A rather bungled PR operation by Shanghai should come as no surprise; afterall Chinese state-owned firms going international are very new to dealing with the media, as Duncan Tift notes on the front of Today's Post.

Maybe the experience they gain during the Olympics shortly will help with that. Better communication by Shanghai with the local media, and indeed their own workers, would help a lot here.

Leaving this aside, how much can we actually read into the news that a limited edition run of 500 'new' MG TFs has finally kicked off?

News in the Post today (read Duncan Tift's article here) that Shanghai Auto (SAIC) remains committed to the Longbridge site comes as welcome news given the uncertainty created in the wake of the recently announced StadCo pullout from MG TF production.

That MG TF production will finally restart in July this year also comes as some relief after lengthy delays given concerns over the quality of parts coming from China.

Let's get things in perspective, though. The TF is basically a 15-year old design with nearly all of the parts brought in from China. It is not a sustainable project beyond the very short term. And with StadCo leaving, we now basically see a screwdriver operation with very few linkages into the local economy and fewer benefits than we'd hoped for in terms of economic development.

That Shanghai are going ahead at all is the crucial thing, though. This keeps them interested in a site whether further production and R&D may come in time. It's here where the case needs to be made to SAIC. And there is a strong case to be made.

News today that that StadCo will no longer produce MGTF bodyshells at Longbridge for Nanjing raises some urgent questions as to Nanjing's intentions at the site. In particular, is MGTF production still going ahead?

StadCo and Nanjing said simply that "Stadco and NAC jointly confirm that for commercial reasons, production of bodyshells for the MGTF by Stadco will cease. Both parties are working to ensure minimum disruption to the workforce." They added that "consultations with elected employee representatives will commence immediately and every effort will be made to assist those affected by this announcement".

Until today, StadCo had been seen as a key partner for Nanjing in its efforts to restart small scale MGTF production at Longbridge, and had shifted body-shell production there from its site in Coventry (StadCo had always made the body shells for the MGTF, back under MG Rover days).

Quite where this leaves MGTF production is the big question.