Corus' beleaguered plant gets a month's reprieve

Please read the clarification at the end of the article.

The new year has brought some hope for the 1,700 workers at Tata Steel-owned Corus’ Teesside Cast Products (TCP) unit in northeast England who were to lose their jobs. Instead of mothballing (closing for now) part of the plant by the end of this month, as announced earlier, the management will not do so till the end of February. Meanwhile, it will look for ways to avoid implementing the painful decision that will render 1,700 jobless and affect another 1,300-1,500 workers in the region.

The Joint Management and Trade Union Task Force met on Tuesday and agreed to postpone the partial mothballing of TCP by a month. Union members who attended told Business Standard the meeting was meaningful and provided cause for hope.

A senior member of Community, the employees’ union, who attended this meeting, said the additional time can be used to find new customers for TCP and possibly a buyer for the facility itself. Craig Brooks, a member of Community, also said the additional time can now be effectively used to talk to the government for support at this crucial juncture.

Corus’ management, however, also indicated that preparations for the mothballing would also continue. As the joint statement put it, “this extension of the operating period would not affect timescales associated with the ongoing HR process”.

In May 2009, a consortium of four buyers for the TCP prematurely withdrew from a 10-year buying contract with Corus. It forced Corus to consider the option of mothballing. This contract was to end in 2014 and would have kept the TCP running at 80 per cent capacity during its tenure. In December, just days before Christmas, the company finally announced it was running out of options and would mothball the plant by the end of January 2010.

A clarification
Tata Steel owned Corus has clarified that in a meeting with union on 12 January, it had agreed to consider a trade union proposal to extend TCP’s operating programme and postpone the partial mothballing to the end of February. In our report dated 13 January titled "Corus' beleaguered plant gets a month's reprieve" we had wrongly stated that the decision to postpone the mothballing by a month has already been taken. The error is regretted.