FORD could face national industrial action involving tens of thousands of employees over its plans to close a Jaguar factory in Coventry.
Unions are furious at what they see as the company’s breaches of commitments in Britain and brinkmanship during pay negotiations.
Ford is expected to announce tomorrow the closure of the Browns Lane Jaguar plant, with the loss of 2,000 jobs. Browns Lane, which makes the XJ saloon and the XK sports car, is where Jaguar was founded and is still the marque’s headquarters.
Production of the cars is expected to switch to the nearby Castle Bromwich Jaguar plant which makes the S-type.
Unions are expected to look into the possibility of taking action across the whole of Ford’s operations to force it to honour an agreement to keep Browns Lane open. Earlier this year the carmaker pledged that a new sports car would be made at the plant.
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Ford will meet union leaders, including the general secretaries of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G) and Amicus, tomorrow morning before its announcement on Browns Lane.
Unions were due to meet Patricia Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, and Geoffrey Robinson, the MP for Coventry North West and a former managing director of Jaguar, today to urge them to press Ford to keep the factory open.
Dave Osborne, the T&G’s national secretary for the car industry, said that if the factory was closed, Ford’s integrity and credibility would be thrown into question.
He said: “As far as the unions are concerned we are committed to the agreements that we make with employers. This is surely a question of credibility for Ford and Jaguar managers.”
Along with Jaguar, the US carmaker also owns Land Rover, Aston Martin, a large engine plant at Dagenham and a number of other operations in Britain.
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Ford is expected to try to counter the bad news in Coventry with confirmation that it is to invest £300 million in the Dagenham plant.
The carmaker is blaming poor sales for its review of its Jaguar operations. It had originally intended to produce 300,000 Jaguars, including the X-type and the S-type, but is now making only 118,000. Last month it put all of its three plants on short-time working and said it was cutting production by 11 per cent. After poor sales in the US, its second biggest market after Britain, it is not going to reverse that cut in production.