600 jobs to go at Harland and Wolff
Thursday, 21 September 2000 22:34
Harland and Wolff is to shed half its 1,200 workforce in a major restructuring. The Belfast shipyard announced this evening that more than 600 workers will lose their jobs. The cuts, which come only a few months after 300 redundancies, will be on both the shop floor and within management.
Earlier today unions at the Belfast shipyard said that the company planned to lay off 600 employees, half its workforce. The yard, where the Titanic was built, denied it had made any announcement about job cuts or lay-offs and described the union statement as pure speculation.
Harland and Wolff's order book is virtually empty. The yard won a reprieve from total insolvency last week when an arbitrator said that a Texan oil firm should pay them £27m owed for the construction of a drill ship. But the long-term future remained bleak and there has been strong speculation that large numbers will be laid off as part of a restructuring of the parent company.
Today the GMB, the main union at the yard, said that 600 jobs were to go, but the company said that no formal announcement had been made. A GMB spokesman said that the decision was a body blow for the workforce and described the shipyard as a mainstay of the local economy. Harland and Wolff is owned by Fred Olsen energy of Norway, and at its height employed over 20,000 workers.
