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British Luxury Automakers Resort to Extreme Measures

With the doomed financial crisis affecting the world economies, a lot of people are losing their jobs these days. The new year has just began and automakers have already announced their own extreme “solutions” to fight the credit crunch. And luxury British car makers are no exception to the rule.

An article from The Sun announced today that Jaguar Land Rover laid off 15 percent of its managers, while Bentley stopped production for seven weeks. About 300 of Jaguar’s managers and 150 salaried agency staff were given the sack. In addition, managers who remain at the company will not receive any bonus this year. These extreme measures were taken as they had no choice after a severe drop in demand, a spokesman for Jaguar Land Rover claimed.

In fact, Jaguar asked for a £1 billion loan from the government two months ago.  More importantly, industry experts said further cuts were inevitable unless the Government came with a bailout.

As for Bentley, the British luxury car maker which is extremely popular among football stars and other celebs told its 3,700 workers that it was temporarily halting production. Therefore, work on its Continental model will be stopped for seven weeks at the Crewe factory and for six weeks on its Arnage range.

“Sadly this is likely to be the beginning and not the end of the problem. The Government needs to do an awful lot more to help the car industry,” said  Tony Woodley, of the union Unite commenting on the shocking news.

Unfortunately, not only workers from the auto industry are affected by the current financial crisis. It seems that more than 4,000 more British workers were laid of at the beginning of the year.
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