FRANKFURT, 12 October 2006 — The European aircraft company Airbus denied yesterday a newspaper report that it wanted to sell five German factories employing 6,600 people.
“That’s pure speculation,” a spokesman for Airbus Germany told AFP, adding that he denied the report.
The mass-circulation daily Bild had reported in its yesterday edition that crisis-ridden Airbus was looking to sell five of its German manufacturing sites — four in the northern state of Lower Saxony and one in the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
The newspaper quoted company sources as saying that the sites would be spun off as soon as possible to private investors but would continue to supply Airbus at more favorable rates.
Workers would thus retain their jobs but probably be paid less, Bild claimed.
The company’s biggest German facility is in the northern port of Hamburg, which employs more than 10,000 workers, and in the nearby port of Bremen, where 3,100 people work.
Cabling problems that led to the latest delay in production of the Airbus A380 superjumbo have been traced to the Hamburg plant.
The program is now two years behind schedule and Airbus’s parent company EADS has forecast it will suffer operating losses of around 4.8 billion euros ($6.0 billion) as a result.
The newspaper Die Welt, meanwhile, said that a broad restructuring plan for Airbus directly threatened up to 1,000 German jobs, through the elimination of temporary posts or reductions in the number of hours worked. No outright job cuts were foreseen before 2012, however.
The French co-chairman of EADS, Arnaud Lagardere, told the French economic daily Les Echos that the rescue plan would affect France as well as Germany. Airbus has a total workforce of 57,000.
Lagardere stressed in a interview published yesterday that there was no alternative to the plan dubbed Power8, and that it would “include reductions in administrative posts” at Airbus.
On Tuesday, German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee met French counterpart Dominique Perben and said later he was sure Airbus would come up with a “fair solution between France and Germany” to labor problems raised by the restructuring program.
The new chief executive of Airbus, Louis Gallois, visited the company’s headquarters in Toulouse, central southern France, on Tuesday and afterward an official of the main FO trade union there, Julien Talavan, said:
“He reassured us, saying that today there was nothing to make us think that the company was going to get rid of any (production) site.
“He told us that the company would not touch the sites and that it would do its best to get people to leave (the workforce) because of age, and that he would do everything possible to launch the A350 (medium-distance) airliner.”
The trade unionist also said: “He reassured us about the assembly lines, in particular for the A320 which will remain in Toulouse, (and) for the A380.”
Gallois had also rejected press reports that the restructuring plan would involve the shedding of about 10,000 jobs, Talavan said.”
He added that Gallois “is unable to give us a figure” for job cuts and that “nobody has a figure for that...in two or three months we will know.”
Also on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Airbus said “We are categoric. Absolutely no figure has been fixed.”
