TWO hundred Bombardier workers and their supporters descended on parliament yesterday to urge the Tory coalition ‘to save British train manufacturing’.
The government has already awarded a train building contract to Siemens, resulting in 1,440 Bombardier redundancies, with 3,000 more jobs in the balance.
They had travelled down from Derby for the lobby on a train built by Bombardier on the day that the Transport Select Committee met to discuss the issue, with thousands of jobs in the balance.
Adrian Lacey, who works on the shop floor of Bombardier and is a trained electrician, told News Line: ‘We are here to protest and turn around the decision to give Siemens the contract to build the Thameslink trains.
‘At the moment at our factory they are looking at shedding just under 200 jobs on the shop floor alone.
‘But then there is going to be a lot of jobs go in the offices.
‘What a lot of people don’t know is that there are a lot of contractors that are going to lose their jobs as well.
‘If you include all the sub-contractors and jobs in the supply chains, the job losses could rise to an estimated 20,000!
‘The investment in Derby and the surrounding area would drop, every city relies on the big industries.
‘Without us then who can build trains in Britain?
‘We were literally just going to take on youth apprentices next month, but now we have had to cancel them.
‘You just have to look at the riots to see what youth think of their future.
‘Now they are taking more and more of their future away.
‘We had a march through Derby about a month ago and there were at least 6,000 people there and a whole number of unions supported us.’