LONDON — Jaguar Land Rover plans to cut 4,000 jobs through a voluntary redundancy scheme over the next two years, reducing its global workforce by roughly 10 percent. The cuts will affect nearly 12 percent of the company's 34,000-strong UK workforce.
Chief Executive Officer P B Balaji said the reductions are part of a strategy to save £1.7 billion as the company navigates difficult economic conditions.
The Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker, announced a £500,000 emergency support package for affected workers. The West Midlands Combined Authority will administer the program, offering careers support, skills advice and job matching.
Parker said, "The news from JLR will be deeply worrying for thousands of workers and their families, many of them here in the West Midlands. JLR is hugely important to our region and employs some of the most skilled people in Britain."
He added that JLR has faced "an incredibly difficult period — from the cyber attack last year to the impact of the war in the Middle East and continuing instability around global tariffs and trade."
WMCA staff are coordinating with the Department of Work and Pensions, local authorities and employers to connect displaced workers with new opportunities.
The JLR announcement comes as European manufacturers stage protests over job losses across the continent. Eurometal, which represents European steel, derivatives and manufacturing sectors, demonstrated outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, displaying ten coffins to highlight the crisis.
Eurometal predicts approximately 300,000 jobs will be lost in European industry in the last four months of the year. The organization attributes the losses to Europe's reliance on finished components and chemicals sourced from China, which supply 90 percent of European manufacturing needs.
Alexander Julius, president of Eurometal, said, "China has made no secret of what it is doing. It is in their five-year plan. China doesn't want to be a raw material supplier. It wants to be in key product supply chains because they know that."
Eurometal contends that while Brussels has protected the car and steel industries, it has not adequately shielded sectors relying on finished components imported from China and India.
