Results tagged “cars” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

(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.

"History has rarely seen factors like this occur at the same time" BMW's financial director Michael Ganal told a news conference last week.

He spoke as BMW's first half pre-tax profits fell to €1.24 billion, down some 35% compared to the same period last year. Net profits also took a nose-dive, down 26%. They were not alone. GM and Nissan also announced dire results last Friday. GM's spectacular $15.5 billion second quarter loss is the third-worst in its 100-year history. Meanwhile, despite increasing market share in the US, Nissan's net income still fell by over 40%.

Ganal was in effect referring to a number of events that have come together at the same time. A 'perfect storm' might be another way of describing things for some major auto manufacturers.

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?