US carmaker General Motors is to cut up to 5,900 jobs at its Opel and Saab units in Europe this year through outsourcing or voluntary redundancies, German magazine Auto Motor und Sport said Monday.
Some of the cuts were already announced last year, including 1,300 posts in Antwerp, Belgium, the magazine said in its online edition.
The jobs to be eliminated are at Opel plants in Belgium, Germany, Britain and Spain, as well as at the Saab factory in Trollhaettan, Sweden.
General Motors currently had a total of 55,700 workers in Europe, the magazine said.
“Management has presented us with a drastic job-cutting catalogue that we are looking at,” it quoted Rainer Einenkel, Opel's works council head in Bochum, Germany, as saying.
Up to 900 of the jobs in Spain and another 500 in Ellesmere Port in Britain would be outsourced to other sites, on top of cuts already announced at Bochum and at Antwerp, the magazine said.
A spokesman for GM Europe told the magazine the company is “constantly working on improving productivity” at its factories and is currently in talks with the works council over a “series of initiatives to be implemented this year to further increase efficiency in our factories in Europe.”
GM Europe's pretax profit last year slumped to 55 million dollars (36 million euros) from 357 million a year earlier, while parent company GM posted a record loss of 38.7 billion dollars on soaring writedowns.
A spokesman for Open told AFP on Monday that the firm's management and employee representatives were in talks to explore ways of what he called “improving the efficiency of all our factories in Europe”.
“It is still too early to give details,” he said. “We are not talking about a restructuring programme or drastic job cuts in Europe.”
