Soft-touch on redundancies

Amicus has claimed that British workers are more vulnerable to redundancies than their European counterparts as multinational companies see the UK as a “soft touch”.

A survey for the union found that 57 out of 69 cases of company restructuring in the UK involved the loss of more than 100 jobs, the highest rate in Europe.

Britain also experienced more corporate restructurings and more redundancies in the last quarter of 2004 than any other EU country.

“In an increasingly global economy, multinational companies will always chose to make job cuts where it is cheaper, quicker and more politically expedient to sack,” said Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson.