Engineering news
Tata Steel is to hold a board meeting which could decide whether the company will cut more than a thousand jobs, with 750 set to be lost at Port Talbot in south Wales.
The board meeting in Mumbai will consider a turnaround plan for the Port Talbot steelworks, with Roy Rickhuss, the general secretary of steelworkers’ union Community set to call on Tata to support the UK workforce and back the plan.
Rickhuss has travelled to Mumbai with two Port Talbot steelworkers. This follows the past week’s ‘Save Our Steel’ campaign which has seen more than 35,000 people sign an open letter to Tata Steel’s chairman, Cyrus Mistry.
Rickhuss said: “In Mumbai, I’ll be standing up for the whole UK steel industry and asking Tata to give us the chance we need to succeed. Steel is the very foundation of our manufacturing base, even the Prime Minister has conceded that it would be simply unacceptable for Tata to end our steelmaking capacity.”
Stephen Kinnock, local MP for Aberavon, near Port Talbot, has also travelled to Mumbai to back the steelworkers bid to save jobs. Kinnock said: “This is the week that the impact of the January announcement of 750 job losses at the Port Talbot steelworks becomes tangible. In a series of meetings this week the men and women who have given years of service to the works will find out if they are amongst those being laid off.” He stressed that Labour has been urging government to produce a long-term industrial strategy for the steel industry.
Kinnock added: “The underlying cause of many of the failures that we have seen since 2010 can be attributed to the absence of a long-term industrial strategy for steel, with a commitment to a strategic approach to skills, investment, regulation and industrial relations."
While steelworkers await the decision from Tata, workers at the steel giants’ Clydebridge and Dalzell steel facilities have welcomed news that the two plants will be sold to the Scottish government, which will sell them on to Liberty House.
The agreement follows Tata Steel’s announcement in October 2015 that it would stop its European plate production, which led to the mothballing of the Dalzell and Clydebridge plants at the end of 2015. Rather than closing the facilities, Tata Steel has continued to maintain them to enable plate production to potentially restart in the future.
Bimlendra Jha, executive chairman of Tata Steel’s Long Products Europe business, said: “We welcome this deal which opens the possibility of a resumption of steel processing in Scotland.
“This has been achieved with the determination and support of employees, trade unions and the Scottish government all working together.”
Tata Steel continues to negotiate the potential sale of the rest of its Long Products Europe business to Greybull Capital.
Rickhuss welcomed the news and said it was the first step towards restoring jobs and resuming production, but warned that there are still more steps to come.
“The work of the Scottish government’s Task Force should not end here if the new business and other steel businesses in Scotland are to be part of a brighter future,” said Rickhuss. “There is further action and support needed to create an industrial and procurement strategy that enables Scottish steel to recover and then grow as part of a steel supply chain across the UK.”