Kevin Thomas, a 46-year-old engineer on Bombardier Inc.’s BBD.B-T subway car assembly line, came to work at 6 a.m. Tuesday and was herded into a meeting hall at Britain’s oldest train factory. He and his colleagues all knew what was coming, but the news – the elimination of almost 1,500 of the factory’s 3,000 jobs – still hurt.
“I was gutted,” he said.
With amazing good grace, they all went back to work, barely speaking to one another as they contemplated lost careers in a flat-growth economy that has been pummelled by the recession. In a month or so, when Bombardier completes a review of all of its British rail operations, they will learn which of them will joining the dole lines in the autumn, as well as the fate of the other 1,500 workers at the Derby factory.
While Bombardier is officially keeping the options open for Derby, not one line worker or manager interviewed expects the factory – still Europe’s largest train-making centre – to survive.
“It’s a disaster for all of us,” said Paul Stead, Bombardier’s manager in Britain for subway cars. “This is the last train manufacturing site in the U.K. and at some point it will be dissolved. There are no more orders.”
Tuesday’s jobs announcement was a direct result of Bombardier’s loss, to Germany’s Siemens, of the £1.4-billion ($2.2-billion) contract to build trains for the £6-billion Thameslink rail project that will run on an east-west axis through London. If the related services work is included, the value of the contract would have been worth more than £3-billion.
While Bombardier’s enormous, multinational train-making arm will survive Siemens’s win, Derby’s role as the epicentre of British train industry since the middle of the 19th century almost certainly will not. Derby’s downfall would be more bearable to the British economy if it were an isolated case, but it is yet more proof that Britain’s deindustrialization stumbles on.
In the decades since the Second World War, Britain has sacrificed strong positions or outright leadership in the production of textiles, ships, cars and aircraft – a Titanic run unequalled in any modern Western economy.
Almost no shipbuilding remains in Britain. While cars are still built in great volumes, the plants are foreign-owned save for a few niche brands. The country that first produced passenger jets – the de Havilland Comet flew in 1949 – long ago surrendered its aviation lead to Boeing and Airbus (though Rolls Royce PLC is a global leader in jet engines).
There were times early in the last century when manufacturing accounted for 40 per cent to 50 per cent of British gross domestic product. The sector is now worth about 12 per cent of GDP, less than half its level in the late 1970s. As manufacturing fell, so did Britain’s share of world exports. In 2000, the figure was 4.4 per cent. In 2009, it was 2.8 per cent, according to Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat cabinet minister in the government of Prime Minister David Cameron.
Of course, other industries – notably financial services – have filled part of the gap left by manufacturing. The costly bank bailouts and nationalizations triggered by the financial crisis convinced Mr. Cameron’s government that the economy needed to be rebalanced. Derby, about 200 kilometres north of London, was held out as the model.
Mr. Cameron held a Cabinet meeting there in March. George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), said “Derby is a great example of what Britain’s economy should be in the future, and a strong endorsement of the importance of manufacturing industry.”
