The head of Peugeot and Citroen (PSA) has met with Vauxhall union bosses for a “frank exchange” of ideas, as the French company weighs up how it will integrate the British brand into its portfolio of companies.
The Unite union’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, said the meeting with Carlos Tavares, PSA’s chief executive, was “constructive”, and Tavares repeated his desire not to close UK factories.
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McCluskey explained the PSA chief “also talked of working with Unite to construct a roadmap for future operations in the UK”.
Following the talks, PSA released a statement that said the company “proposed to implement the principle of co-construction with the Unite union, in order to define a roadmap to rebuild the industrial performance of the Vauxhall factories in the United Kingdom, in a reasonable manner.”
These latest meetings follow two rounds of job losses at Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port factory, with 650 voluntary redundancies announced in previous months.
At the start of 2018, it was announced Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant would see a further 250 job losses, following an announcement in October last year the factory would shed 400 jobs. The British marque’s new owner, PSA Group, is set to move production of the Vauxhall Astra from two shifts to one early in 2018.