{"id":678,"date":"2009-02-09T11:25:22","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T11:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/?p=678"},"modified":"2009-02-09T11:25:23","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T11:25:23","slug":"job-losses-and-short-time-for-uk-van-factories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/archives\/678","title":{"rendered":"Job Losses and Short Time For UK Van Factories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Falling van sales across Europe mean that the UK’s two largest van factories are cutting back on manpower.<\/p>\n

Ford has taken the difficult decision to cut 500 jobs at its Southampton<\/a> factory. The plant, which makes the Transit van, as recently moved from running a double day shift to a single day shift, but as I reported here<\/a> the company’s original intention was to manage this transition by cutting working hours, rather than jobs. Perhaps this was always a little too optimistic…<\/p>\n

Ford are struggling with falling global sales – last year, the Southampton factory only produced 66,000 Transits – against almost 75,000 in 2007. This year’s total may be even lower – with export markets all over Europe suffering a downturn.<\/p>\n

Vauxhall are also experiencing falling demand for their hugely-popular Vivaro van. Workers at the GM plant in Luton<\/a>, where the vans are made, have had their working hours cut from 38 to 34 hours per week, although no job losses have been announced as yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ford is cutting jobs at its Transit-making Southampton factory, while Vauxhall workers at the company’s Luton plant are on reduced hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[123,49,612,126,584,67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}