The company isn’t selling enough cars to keep its Birmingham factories open and thousands of jobs are on the line.
What it means: If you’re anything like us, you probably reacted to the news that 1,000 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) staff are getting a five-day weekend without a paycut by digging out your CV and looking up Car Making for Dummies on Amazon.
But it might not be as good a deal as it sounds. JLR said the reason for the cutback was to ‘review its production schedules to ensure market demand’, which is basically business-speak for ‘crap, we’re not selling enough cars’. If car sales don’t pick up, JLR will probably close some of its factories or lay off some of its workers. That could affect a lot of people: JLR has 40,000 UK staff.
So why is JLR struggling? Both the local Labour MP and a trade union representative blame Brexit. JLR sells about a fifth of its cars in mainland Europe, and has said that a ‘bad’ Brexit (by which they probably mean a no-deal one) could cause it to cut jobs and close factories.
Their reasoning is that without a free trade deal with the EU it’ll become a lot more expensive to buy car parts from the rest of Europe and sell cars there. But Bernard Jenkin, a Tory Brexiteer, says that’s just ‘scaremongering’ and that being free of EU regulation will help businesses in Britain thrive.
