Tata Steel has halted plans to sell the Port Talbot steelworks and is working on keeping its UK business as part of a joint venture with the German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp. Tata Steel UK’s 11,000 workers meet the announcement with mixed feelings. While the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales is closer to its survival, Tata warned that the deal could still fall apart. One of the problems is the sustainability of its pension scheme. The scheme restructuring needs to be enshrined in law. The scheme has a deficit of £700m and liabilities of almost £15bn. The government has drawn up a plan with trustees and unions that would see the scheme spun off into a shell company and the inflation-linked annual increase benchmarked against the consumer price rather than the retail price index, potentially saving billions of pounds in future liabilities.
English: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/08/tata-stops-port-talbot-plant-sale
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Willy De Backer wdebacker@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. Since June 2013 readers can consult our archive and search through all articles in our database at www.cbnarchive.eu. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.
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