Airbus CEO fires a warning shot over "Brexit madness"

[Grafenwalder]

Airbus has branded the UK government’s handling of Brexit a “disgrace” and warned the aerospace firm could pull out of the UK if the country crashes out of the EU without a deal.

CEO Tom Enders said, “if there was a no-deal Brexit, Airbus would have to make “potentially very harmful decisions for the UK”. Please don’t listen to the Brexiteers’ madness, which asserts that because we have huge plants here we will not move and we will always be here. They are wrong.”

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

[Rolluplostinspace]

Airbus has branded the UK government’s handling of Brexit a “disgrace” and warned the aerospace firm could pull out of the UK if the country crashes out of the EU without a deal.

CEO Tom Enders said, “if there was a no-deal Brexit, Airbus would have to make “potentially very harmful decisions for the UK”. Please don’t listen to the Brexiteers’ madness, which asserts that because we have huge plants here we will not move and we will always be here. They are wrong.”

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

Oops Graf I just posted this up in another thread. No harm done though.

[Grafenwalder]

Airbus has branded the UK government’s handling of Brexit a “disgrace” and warned the aerospace firm could pull out of the UK if the country crashes out of the EU without a deal.

CEO Tom Enders said, “if there was a no-deal Brexit, Airbus would have to make “potentially very harmful decisions for the UK”. Please don’t listen to the Brexiteers’ madness, which asserts that because we have huge plants here we will not move and we will always be here. They are wrong.”

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

Oops Graf I just posted this up in another thread. No harm done though.

Oh shit...i looked before posting as well! Must have been having one of my 'senior moments'!

[Rolluplostinspace]

Airbus has branded the UK government’s handling of Brexit a “disgrace” and warned the aerospace firm could pull out of the UK if the country crashes out of the EU without a deal.

CEO Tom Enders said, “if there was a no-deal Brexit, Airbus would have to make “potentially very harmful decisions for the UK”. Please don’t listen to the Brexiteers’ madness, which asserts that because we have huge plants here we will not move and we will always be here. They are wrong.”

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

Oops Graf I just posted this up in another thread. No harm done though.

Oh shit...i looked before posting as well! Must have been having one of my 'senior moments'!

No I posted mine about ten minutes after you.
I was typing and linking and making coffee so my post took a good while to do.

[Rolluplostinspace]

Katherine Bennett, senior vice-president at Airbus in the UK, said: “We fear some MPs see ‘no deal’ as a genuine option and for this reason we’re speaking out louder than ever before because this is too important a moment to let pass without some truths being known.”

[Stooo]

Katherine Bennett, senior vice-president at Airbus in the UK, said: “We fear some MPs see ‘no deal’ as a genuine option and for this reason we’re speaking out louder than ever before because this is too important a moment to let pass without some truths being known.”

The country has been lied to?

[Cannydc]

Domestically, if you are pursuing the Prime Minister’s strategy, you would of course talk up the credibility of “no deal” in order to concentrate minds that it might be a genuine option, to try force people towards your deal in preference.

Despite knowing that it is a grossly irresponsible choice, for which neither private nor public sector is ready. The private sector is not ready, after all, primarily because you yourselves have
consistently told it there WILL be a transition that it can completely rely on, and so companies do not need to take precipitate action. Because you are desperate they do not act as you know they would if they knew there would be “no deal”, as that would hit both the economy and the public finances.

Begging the private sector not to activate contingency plans for “no deal” because you will not allow it to happen, but then allowing it to happen, would be an extraordinary act of folly and self-harm by a Government whose reputation with investors would never recover, and would not deserve to.

The problem at political level though, is that it is simply not a sufficiently convincing threat for any camp to shift position. Time might still make it so, if the Prime Minister could, metaphorically, take the ball to the corner flag and run down the clock.

But the widespread belief that this is her intention - aside from profoundly annoying the private sector, which has no reliable basis on which to plan, and therefore increasingly has to assume the worst because it now gets no reassurance that there is a plan to avoid it - merely persuades Parliamentarians that they must take the ball off her.

Those who don’t want “no deal” think it so self-evidently self-harming on a grand scale that no responsible Government will do it. They think they easily have the numbers in the Commons to stop it happening anyway; and think that the more “no deal” hoves into public view, the greater their chance of persuading the public that Brexit is going badly wrong, and may prove a disaster. And that a new referendum is needed, as the public was hoodwinked the first time about how Brexit could turn out.

From lecture by Sir Ivan Rogers, full text here;

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institut ... 012019.pdf

[wutang]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

[Rolluplostinspace]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

How would a union stop them pulling out?

[wutang]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

How would a union stop them pulling out?

Shut it down for a start. Factories dont just disappear over night, it take time and planning and this can be disrupted - i.e with strike actions. Also the actual disassembly and relocation of plant can be blockaded with pickets and, if need be sabotage.

Depends on the will of the workers themselves, sometimes it means by-passing the Union bureaucracy itself as they will always try to compromise (sell out)

[McAz]

...sometimes it means by-passing the Union bureaucracy itself as they will always try to compromise (sell out)...

(...keep the gravy train rolling).

[wutang]

More on it here

Some great examples of it working

https://libcom.org/library/workers-crea ... management

As some of the examples show even if you cant save your job you can at least force the bastards to give you a decent pay off

When the car parts manufacturer Visteon informed workers that the company would be shutting its doors, the workers decided to occupy the company's plants. They were furious as they had only been given 6 minutes notice and a severance package that was paltry. For over a month, the workers occupied Visteon's buildings despite the threat of arrest.3 In the end, even though they could not save their jobs, they won a severance package that was worth ten times the original offer

[Stooo]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

How would a union stop them pulling out?

Shut it down for a start. Factories dont just disappear over night, it take time and planning and this can be disrupted - i.e with strike actions. Also the actual disassembly and relocation of plant can be blockaded with pickets and, if need be sabotage.

Depends on the will of the workers themselves, sometimes it means by-passing the Union bureaucracy itself as they will always try to compromise (sell out)

It's being shut down anyway. JLR is having a shutdown at the end of March as well. Striking at a shut down plant is futile.

[Rolluplostinspace]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

How would a union stop them pulling out?

Shut it down for a start. Factories dont just disappear over night, it take time and planning and this can be disrupted - i.e with strike actions. Also the actual disassembly and relocation of plant can be blockaded with pickets and, if need be sabotage.

Depends on the will of the workers themselves, sometimes it means by-passing the Union bureaucracy itself as they will always try to compromise (sell out)

More reason to get the hell out of here.

[Grafenwalder]

The European aerospace group is one of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, where it employs more than 14,000 people. A further 110,000 supply-chain jobs depend on its operations, which have an annual turnover of £6bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-disgrace

I hope all those people are unionised and willing to fight to block any attempt by Airbus to strip away the wealth they have created with their labour

It's worth remembering that like Sunderland (car plant workers), Broughton is in a constituency which voted 51% Leave. A local guy Channel 4 news spoke to this evening told them he'd voted to Leave and when the reporter said, "but your son works at Airbus" his reply was "so what, i don't" which pretty much sums up the attitude. Airbus Broughton employs over 6,500.

Bristol where Airbus Filton factory is were a bit more sensible and voted overwhelmingly Remain with 61.73%. They have over 4,500 employees.