Yahoo Finance Rolls-Royce swings the axe with 3,000 UK jobs to go this year
Rolls-Royce has launched a first wave of British job cuts as it seeks to slash costs to combat the coronavirus downturn.
Around 1,500 roles will be axed at the company's Derby base roles this year, along with at least 700 redundancies at its site in Inchinnan, Scotland.
Further, smaller job cuts will be made around the company’s UK operations as part of a plan to shed 3,000 British jobs this year.
Other Rolls sites in Britain set to be hit are: Solihull, 175 jobs; Denby/Trentham, 90; Ansty, 65; Rotherham, 100; Washington, 50; Heathrow, 50; Barnoldswick, 200; Bristol, 50.
The engineering titan is expecting to eventually shed 9,000 roles worldwide - almost a quarter of its global workforce - as it battles against a collapse in air travel that has sent demand for the company's jet engines plummeting.
On Wednesday the company opened a voluntary redundancy scheme which will run until June 26. If this does not attract enough applications, Rolls will go into consultations with staff and unions about compulsory job losses.
A fortnight ago the company said it was launching a massive reorganisation as it seeks to counter the air travel chaos caused by coronavirus. The industry is not expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels for at least three years.
Rolls’s civil aerospace business makes and services airliner engines and generates half of the company’s £15bn annual revenues. It will be hardest hit by the cuts.
In total, Rolls has 52,000 staff worldwide. Some 23,300 work in the civil aerospace arm, with 15,650 of them based in the UK.
A spokesman for Rolls said the cuts revealed today would mainly affect staff in engine maintenance and servicing operations.
He added: “Following constructive talks with trade union and employee representatives, we have opened voluntary severance to all civil aerospace employees in the UK.
“This is an important step as we resize our business to adapt to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the aviation industry. We will unfortunately lose people who have worked hard to establish our world-leading position.”
The company has yet to open voluntary redundancy programmes in other countries.
Last week crediting rating agency Standard & Poor’s cut Rolls’s debt rating to “junk” status, making it largely uninvestable. It means the company will have to pay more to raise finance.
