‘The Visteon sit-in at Belfast is continuing,’ Unite regional industrial organiser Davy McMurray told News Line yesterday.
He added: ‘The convenor John McGuire and six shop stewards are going to London today.
‘They are meeting the other convenors from the Enfield and Basildon sites.
‘The stewards are planning to go to Enfield and Basildon to show their support for their comrades.
‘We had a Fun Day in Belfast last Sunday. Over 1,000 turned out from the local communities.
‘The Visteon members are calling for the factory to be kept open, failing that to get their Ford terms and conditions that they were promised for life.
‘The main thing is to keep the factory open and keep jobs in Belfast.’
At a High Court hearing on Monday, the main points of the agreement made by the union and Visteon administrators in relation to the Enfield occupation were:
• An agreement was made that the (potentially imprisonable) charges against Unite convenor Kevin Nolan and others would be dropped.
• The union Unite gave an undertaking that it would see that the Enfield plant was vacated.
• Unite says that the plant will be vacated on Thursday.
• The Unite counsel assured the judge that as the occupiers are members of Unite they would carry out the union’s instructions.
• Visteon already, in a separate case, have secured a possession order for the Enfield factory but gave an undertaking not to use it while negotiations are ongoing.
Convenor Nolan is today flying with Unite joint general secretary Derek Simpson and national officer Roger Maddison to the US to negotiate with senior Visteon management, not with Ford.
The workers’ demands have always been that Ford should honour the redundancy deals that workers signed up for when they were originally employed by Ford, and which they were promised would be honoured when Visteon took over.
From the start of the occupations, Ford has maintained that any obligations it had to the workers were in the past.
