From the Times January 29th 1981

Belgian bitterness over Mini plant closure

By Edward Townsend
BL confirmed yesterday that it was closing its Mini assembly plant at Seneffe, near Mons in Belgium with the loss of 2,200 jobs. A further 225 workers at Cowley, near Oxford, who pack kits for the Belgian plant will also be made redundant.
There is considerable bitterness in Belgium over the Seneffe closure and anti-British feeling is running high among the workers there, some of whom have occupied the plant. Some newspapers yesterday described as "blackmail" BL's threat to close down the distribution section of the plant as well if there was continued unrest. The Seneffe closure, to take place in March, had been under consideration for some months as the BL board formulated its plan for further retrenchment and the concentration of car assembly in the United Kingdom. BL's closure costs in Belgium, where statutory redundancy payments are high, are expected to be more than 2,000m Belgian francs (£25m) and will come from the £320m that has been earmarked in the corporate plan for extraordinary and exceptional expenditure during the continuing restructuring of the company.
In a statement to the Seneffe works council yesterday, BL management stressed that in the last three years 53,000 jobs had been cut throughout the company and three factories closed. The Belgian plant was said to have made a loss of 55m francs (£688,000) in 1978 and 132m francs (£1.65m) in 1979. Losses for last year were expected to be considerably higher. Workers were told th at 500 employees in the plant's pre-delivery inspection and distribution operation, which handles all BL car exports to Europe, would not be affected.
The Seneffe factory was acquired by the then British Motor Corporation in 1965 from an importer of Morris and MG vehicles as the main assembly base for European markets. BL said that demand was insufficient to sustain production at both Longbridge and Seneffe. In addition, the company said that labour costs in Belgium were 61 per cent higher than in the United Kingdom, while Longbridge had achieved a steady improvement in productivity in the recent past which had reduced unit costs. Production at Seneffe has declined rapidly in recent years from a total of 81,960 cars in 1977 to 37,560 last year. Because of reduced demand in the last quarter of 1980, Seneffe had been working about one week in four. Last year BL sold about 100,000 cars in Europe to capture under two per cent of the market.

January 31st 1981

3,500 BL cars held by Belgian workforce

From Peter Norman, Seneffe, Belgium, Jan 30

Over two thousand workers at BL's doomed car assembly plant here continued to occupy the factory and voted to block the departure of completed vehicles and parts from the works and from BL's adjoining European distribution centre. Their aim is to impound the 3,500 new cars in the centre as a bargaining counter to obtain maximum redundancy payments.
Angry union leaders accused BL of "foul play" over its decision to close the plant which assembles mainly Minis. There was no mistaking the bitterness felt towards the Leyland management, Mrs Thatcher's Government and all things British among the 2,000 men and women who attended a union meeting in the assembly plant. After the closure, as much as 30 per cent of the labour force in the area around Seneffe will be out of work. As union leaders outlined plans for demonstrations and consultations with Belgian regional and national governments and the EEC Commission in Brussels next week, they made no effort to disguise their belief that most of the workforce of 2,200, will be out of a job for a very long time. The news that Nissan is planning to set up a manufacturing plant in Britain accentuated the anger among the Seneffe workforce, who in the 17-year history of the plant have never been on strike. But they voted to work normally next week

"to show the English what real work is ".

The cars produced will be added to stocks for a redundancy " ransom". The meeting heard union leaders accuse BL of
"cheating, rapacity and foul play".
"We'll make the British pay through the nose,"
one union spokesman told the crowd,
"for 17 years of good and loyal service which Leyland couldn't have dreamed of at any of its British plants. They will have to reimburse the Belgian Fr150m (£1.9m) in government aid they stole from the Belgian community."

This was a reference to subsidies from the Walloon regional authority to help finance BL's Seneffe plant.