X
Home & Office

Union to fight Nokia redundancies in UK

Unite, the UK's largest union, is to fight the hundreds of job losses in the country that were announced by Nokia on Wednesday.Earlier in the day, Nokia said it would cut 4,000 jobs worldwide, while transferring a further 3,000 Symbian-related posts to the consultancy Accenture in an outsourcing deal.
Written by David Meyer, Contributor

Unite, the UK's largest union, is to fight the hundreds of job losses in the country that were announced by Nokia on Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, Nokia said it would cut 4,000 jobs worldwide, while transferring a further 3,000 Symbian-related posts to the consultancy Accenture in an outsourcing deal. The cuts will include 700 job losses in the UK, Nokia said.

Unite subsequently said it would "take part in a concerted campaign to halt the job losses which will hit Nokia sites in the UK", although it did not give any details of this action.

Calling Wednesday "another dark day for the British economy", Unite assistant general secretary Tony Burke said the union had long argued for the government to adopt a "much more interventionist policy" on industrial and job protection in the UK.

"What is very disheartening is that mobile phones and their associated technology are one of the growth areas in the British economy, yet this still does not stop a successful company such as Nokia throwing people out of work," Burke said.

Burke also suggested that Nokia had "decided to sneak out this very bad news in the week that the country's attention is focused on Friday's royal wedding", although Nokia said more than a month ago that the cuts would be announced around the end of April. At the time, Unite did not offer any comment on the impending redundancies.

Editorial standards