North may escape Siemens axe

Jul 10 2008 by Graeme King, The Journal

SIEMENS workers in the North East are likely to avoid redundancy as the company looks to cut 16,750 jobs worldwide.

The German company has announced it is seeking the redundancies, amounting to 4% of its massive global workforce of 430,000, with 2,000 of those in this region.

But yesterday a spokeswoman said Siemens was mainly looking to cut jobs from its own administrative operations such as finance and IT, while most of its North East operations were in other fields. Siemens has several centres across the region, with a power generation site at Byker – the remnants of what was once the Parsons company on the Fossway, with other employees in energy services, metallurgical engineering, and business services in Durham.

A spokeswoman said: “We are making changes to meet the needs of a new structure. Our businesses will be organised into divisions called energy, healthcare and industry, which will be served by core functions such as IT, administrative and finance. It’s too early to say exactly where the job cuts are going to be, as that will be part of the negotiations with the employee councils. Further details will be communicated in the next few weeks.”

Siemens, which has its headquarters in Munich, aims to make the planned job cuts over two years. The main trade union representing the company’s workers in Germany has been hostile to the cuts however, saying Siemens is doing well with orders so should not be making cuts at this time.