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Workers at Britain’s biggest steel plant in Port Talbot in Wales are braced for widespread job losses as unions prepare for a crunch meeting with management on Thursday.
Executives from India’s Tata Steel, including chief executive T V Narendran, have flown in for the talks with union leaders in London to discuss plans for the future of the company’s UK operations, which employs about 8,000 people.
The company is looking to push through a restructuring as it moves to a greener form of steelmaking, which is expected to lead to up to 3,000 redundancies across Britain. The vast majority are expected to come at the Welsh plant, the biggest employer in the region with a workforce of 4,000.
A formal announcement is expected within days of the meeting, according to one source close to the company.
Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community steel union, said he was “braced for bad news” but warned that he was “determined to maintain steelmaking in Port Talbot,” adding: “If Tata is not prepared to listen then we could be heading towards a very significant industrial dispute.”
Last September, the government agreed a £500mn grant with Tata Steel to help it switch to greener forms of steelmaking. This would involve closing Tata’s last two remaining blast furnaces, which are both at Port Talbot, and replacing them with an electric arc furnace, which is less labour-intensive.
The company had been expected to confirm the details of its plans — and the impact on jobs — in November but pulled the announcement at the last minute after a union backlash.
Tata has pledged to invest about £750mn as part of the government agreement. The company has previously warned that its UK operations were losing more than £1mn a day.
Steel unions had put forward an alternative plan which would keep one of the two blast furnaces open for another eight years and reduce the number of job losses to 700.
But MPs and unions expect the company to reject that plan, which would have cost Tata an extra £650mn, according to people familiar with the situation.
Tata Steel said it was “committed to meaningful information sharing and consultation with our trade union partners about the plan to develop sustainable steelmaking in the UK and to find solutions for concerns they may have”.