British Aerospace has axed its factory in Hatfield, Herts, at a cost of 2,060 jobs. Some 940 jobs at two plants in Manchester are also to go. The company also announced that much of the work done at Hatfield would be transferred to a joint venture in Taiwan.
Knock-on effects of the closure could see another 3,000 on the dole in the town. Unemploymentis already 9 per cent - up to 17.5 per cent in some areas.
The latest sackings are in addition to 3,000 BAe job losses already this year, with warnings of up to 4,000 more to come. Plants at Kingston in Surrey and Preston, Lancashire also face closure.
The stock market knocked 43 per cent off the value of the company's shares as it clocked up pre-tax losses of £129m. Nevertheless, one BAe boardroom salary last year reached £338,000, and sacked chairman Sir Roland Smith got a £1m pay-off after he bungled a share issue.
Speculation continues that GEC may take advantage of its rival's difficulties to mount a takeover bid.
The company, one of Thatcher's first privatisations, is Britain's largest engineering employer and its biggest manufacturing exporter.
It has been an inordinate beneficiary of Thatcher's largesse. In 1987, it was allowed to purchase state-owned munitions manufacturer Royal Ordnance for just £190m, after hundreds of millions of pounds of public money had been pumped in to make it a viable proposition.
Some £50m worth of intellectual property rights on missile data and design went for just £1m. Profits on selling off surplus Royal Ordnance land - at the height of the property boom - were maccive A five year contract to supply the government with ammunition and explosives, valued at the time at £1500m, was thrown in. The deal gave BAe a commanding position in Britain's armaments industry.
The following year, BAe got vot ume carmaker Rover for just £150m wnen is assets were valued at £1,300m. Even then the Tories gave back £44.4m secret sweeteners, hidden from the EC to skirt anti-state subsidy rules, and wrote off Rover's £547m debt Since then, BAe sold a 20 per cent stake to Japan's Honda, with press reports that the rest will be put on the market next year at an asking price of up to £800m. work are long term unemployed, jobless for twelve months or more. In the year to July, the number of long term unemployed rose by one million, the largest recorded annual rise for ten years.
This is despite government schemes which temporarily remove the unemployed from the official register and count them as 'fresh' statistics when ployed.
This is despite the fact that unemployment among this age group actually fell between 1985 and 1990 as a result of removing 16 and 17 year olds from the register.
'he European Community's statistical office, Eurostat, which calculates unemployment on an internationally standardised definition, ened out of claiming benefit by the hurdles which they have to jump to prove they are 'actively seeking work'.
The Unemployment Unit provides a more realistic figure for the real extent of unemployment by calculating the rate according to the method officially used before 1982. On this basis the August figure stood at 4,045,000, or 13.8 per cent of the workforce.