Renault to slash 6,000 jobs

10 September 2008

With declining sales in the European automobile, French car maker Renault has announced it would cut 6,000 jobs through voluntary redundancies, of which 4,900 will be in France and 1,100 in other European countries.

In a bid to evade being a fatality to consolidation, Renault feels the job cuts are unavoidable if productivity targets need to be met, so as to keep the company competitive in a worsening economic environment.

The cuts represent about 3 per cent of the company's nearly 130,000 employees of which 41,700 are employed in France.

Its Sandouville plant in western France, which makes the key top-line Laguna model, will bear the brunt of the job cuts, where one thousand people will be laid off.

The labour unions have protested about the job cuts by calling a one day strike and have appealed to President Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene, as the state owns a 15.01-per cent stake in te car maker.

Due to the global economic slowdown and the rise of fuel prices to unprecedented highs, Europe has seen a slack in the demand in car sales, notwithstanding the rise in price of raw materials such as steel and plastics among others, forcing Renault to resort to the drastic cost cutting through elimination of jobs.