Report in The Times, Tuesday re RR:
Strike over ‘secret agenda’ to shut Barnoldswick, home of Rolls-Royce jet engine
The factory in Lancashire was the crucible that made Rolls-Royce pre-eminent as a producer of jet engines. In 1943, Frank Whittle’s engines for the RAF’s first jet fighters were built at the plant, which gave the initials RB — Rolls Barnoldswick — to generations of the company’s jet engines.
Now, however, amid a financial crisis at Rolls-Royce, a three-week strike has been called at the historic Barnoldswick site, with trade unions claiming that the company has a secret agenda to close the facility on the Yorkshire border north of Burnley.
Rolls-Royce is set to secure a £5 billion rescue with the issuing of £2 billion of bonds, £2 billion of new shares to equity investors and raising £1 billion of bank loans as it counts the cost of the coronavirus pandemic on the aviation and aerospace sectors.
As part of its efforts to shore up its finances, the group is also trying to save hundreds of millions of pounds a year by laying off 9,000 people — about one in six of its workforce around the world.
The reason is obvious. Demand from Airbus and Boeing, its two main customers, has halved because airlines have deferred or cancelled deliveries of the new aircraft that the two manufacturers would normally be supplying. Fewer new aircraft means fewer new engines, forcing Rolls to review its options.
Barnoldswick’s operations to build fan blades for Rolls’ Trent XWB engines for the Airbus A350 are to be transferred from Lancashire to the company’s much newer facilities in Singapore. Since the start of the year, Barnoldswick’s workforce has fallen from 740 to 550 and, with 350 workers employed on the Trent fan blades, unions believe that there will not be enough work left to sustain the plant.
“To offshore work and destroy the viability of this historic factory would be nothing short of industrial vandalism,” Ross Quinn, a local officer at Unite, the industrial union, said.
Last month 94 per cent of Unite members at the factory voted for industrial action if Rolls could not guarantee that there would be no compulsory redundancies. Unite said that as the company had failed to give commitments on redundancies and the future of the plant, it had instructed members to take targeted strike action from Friday next week until the end of November.
“Barnoldswick is the cradle of the jet engine and the workforce and the local community will not allow Rolls-Royce to destroy the viability of the site without a huge fight,” Mr Quinn said.
A spokesman for Rolls said that the company had no intention of shutting Barnoldswick, adding that it would continue to produce engines for the RAF Typhoon combat jets and remained in the vanguard of work to produce Rolls’ next-generation “ultra-fan” commercial aircraft engines.
“Although we are proposing that some work will no longer take place at the site, we have no plans to close it,” the spokesman said. “Our people in Barnoldswick will play an important role in developing fan blades for our future jet engines, keeping the UK at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. We ask them to work with us, not against us.”
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Thought of some of the posters on here when I read this report yesterday.
I worked with a guy in the early 80s who told me he wrote the last £1 million cheque for RR before they went bankrupt in 1971 (or thereabouts) when they ran out of money developing the RB211. Ted Heath/Antony Barber rescued the company by nationalising on that occasion (if my memory is reasonably accurate). Of course, they guy I met was no longer working for RR - he was part of titanium manufacturing project - which shut down after maybe 5 years.
