http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15073105



A quick count indicates that I personally know somewhere between 50 - 70 people that will be affected by this. Frankly, I feel physically sick.

And as if that weren't bad enough:



What a bag of bastards.

BAE doesn't give a toss. Hasn't for years. Despite the name, it actually does more business outside the UK than in it and moved it's head office to the US (where the real defence spending is) some years back. The only thing it cares about is maintaining it's near-monopoly on UK defence contracting.

60% of BAE's staff are employed outside the UK, yet I haven't found any reports of a single person being made unemployed elsewhere, although I am still searching. Remember all this the next time our tax money is being spent on some incredibly over budget bit of defence kit which is what they want to sell us rather than what our troops actually need and the justification for buying it is 'it keeps British defence workers in their jobs'.

Plus it gives a lie to the current government's doctrine that the private sector will create jobs for the people being made redundant in the public sector. How is that working out so far?

Jon

From memory, BAe's worldwide layoffs are around 15k during the last two years.

Fair, should probably have said 'this time', but the point still holds - as far as I can tell from the reporting, this round of redundancies is entirely within the UK. This is somewhat odd, given they've already made a load of people redundant globally this year (as you mention) blaming reduction in revenue due to the UK government's defence spending review, which sounds very UK specific. Whereas this time they're blaming global economic conditions yet only making people in the UK redundant. It'd make more sense if they swapped the excuses round .

As it is the base excuse is always the same - they're doing it to become 'more competitive and to reduce costs'. Honestly, I always wonder how sacking a bunch of highly qualified, experienced engineering and techy staff is going to make you 'more competitive', but then I'm not a captain of industry.

Jon

I do not see that being the end of the cuts at BAE. As the defence cuts start to bite it will lead to further cuts in procurement.

How many does countries BAE manufacturers fighter jets in? My guess is that 100% of that part of their business is in the UK. Their foreign holdings tend to make vehicles that roll around on wheels and are - again, this is purely guesswork on my part - not all that likely to be affected by slowing orders for air superiority fighters.

There should be huge job cuts at BAE. I'm sorry for the people affected directly, but BAE is a giant drain on the public purse that satisfies no worthwhile requirement. Those highly skilled engineers can now turn their attention to doing something productive for the UK economy rather than manufacturing over engineered (yet mysteriously unreliable), largely redundant [LIFTED], that we can't sell in the global marketplace without paying massive bribes.

Assuming that this talk of them being highly skilled engineers is genuine, there will be loads of of them knocking around with big redundancy payouts. This is capital and the labour force with which to start new engineering businesses. If they have the talent ascribed to them, some of them must have some pretty cool ideas and now they have leisure and capital with which to do something about it. That's the creative destruction that capitalism is meant to be good for (albeit somewhat in reverse order).

If they don't have these skills and idea, then we have spent untold millions of pounds over the last few years just to keep a few thousand semi skilled labourers off the dole, which is the wrong investment.

Well there's obviously the final assembly which IIRC mostly happens at Warton, at least for the ones sold to the RAF, each country does that for themselves. The parts (both large and small) will be manufactured all over the place. A fair few of the more sophisticated bits are actually manufactured in the US, by companies that are largely owned by BAE using American 'protected' technology, which they will let us use but won't tell us how to make. Many other parts are shared around the Eurofighter partners so some bits will be made in Italy, some in Germany and so on. Even a British Typhoon jet isn't actually 'British made' as such, more 'British Assembled'. Which is why the whole 'buy Typhoon to keep jobs in Britain' is, to a lesser degree, a scam. Most of the people who contribute to it's manufacture don't live in Britain. If we'd bought F-18's we could have manufactured them under licence (as we have with the AAC's Apache Longbows), probably kept almost as many people in jobs and saved billions into the bargain. But that's rather a different argument.


Well to a degree this is so. It would be I think naive to suggest we don't need an army and therefore equipment but some of the choices that have been made have been startlingly bad (retiring Harrier but keeping Tornado, for example) and seem based almost entirely around the requirements of BAE shareholders, rather than soldiers or the MoD. The problem is you have this self-perpetuating system around the government and BAE. Government gives a contract to BAE, and whatever it is for inevitably ends up massively over-running and over budget. Yet BAE don't bear enough penalty for that, they still get paid a huge wedge. A large part of that ends up as profit, of which a significant chunk is ploughed back into 'lobbying' (let's put it politely) for the next contract. And around we go again. Essentially the UK would actually be better off if the MoD just giving BAE a couple of billion every year as long as they stay out of the way and then bought what we actually need on the open arms market. In the end, we'd probably be better off as a nation.


It's an optimistic view but in fact what incentive do BAE have to pay them any more than statutory minimum?


It's largely what the government is planning on in their public sector finance regime. They hope that people who lose jobs in the public sector will either be picked up by the private sector (doesn't look very likely right now to be honest) or they will start up their own SMEs, leading to jobs and growth for others as well. Personally, I think it's a bit rich for a bunch of millionaires to tell someone who has a small lump sum and, frankly, no great likelihood of a well paid job anytime soon, that he's got to risk it in starting a business up rather than maybe paying off his mortgage to ensure his family will have a roof over their head in a year's time.


We've kind of done that anyway. I believe the statistic when Eurofighter finally made it into service was that it was so over budget that if at the beginning we'd just bought the same number of F-16E's instead, we could have given every BAE worker in the UK a million pounds (thus requiring them neither to work or claim dole for the rest of their lives) and still ended up paying out less cash over all.

BAE are a leech on the British state. Almost literally. They're much much worse than a whole phalanx of single mothers or 'travellers'. The Eurofighter debacle wasn't their fault exclusively (a project managed by an international committee, who could have foreseen that not being a startling success) but there are any number of examples where I have no great guilt in saying their business practices have cost the lives of British soldiers.

Jon

my brother works at BAE, we still havent heard form him about whether or not he still has a job.

also have friends on my degree course who are apprentices, they have yet to find out if they are still going to be financed through the rest of the degree, or if theyll have a job at the end of it.

management don't you just love 'em
remember we are all in this together ...