Widespread job loss and working hour reductions

Severe employment declines have affected metalworkers and their communities across all regions of the automotive sector. These have been most devastating in North America, where the crisis first erupted. Hundreds of thousands of automotive workers in the US and Canada have seen their jobs eliminated as scores of assembly and component manufacturing plants shutdown. European workers in many traditional metalworking areas have also experienced large scale employment cutbacks due to consolidations, plant closures and outsourcing, well before the global financial crisis hit. When the crisis did hit, workers across the region were forced to confront additional threats to their jobs and livelihoods. As global demand has slumped, so too has production for export. This has particularly affected workers in countries such as Japan that have a relatively high dependence on shipments of automotive products manufactured for final sale or as component inputs overseas.

Workers in non-permanent jobs -- those on temporary and fixed-term contracts and those hired through dispatch labour agencies -- have shouldered a disproportionate burden thus far in the crisis. Automotive manufacturing is among the industries where precarious conditions had spread most, according to an IMF survey completed prior to the crisis. These workers have been the first to lose employment, often without income protection when out of work. Migrant workers face even greater difficulties and insecurities.

Such widespread dismissals expose how the sector's employers abuse weak terms of employment and work relationships as "flexibility". They have shifted responsibility, adjustment costs and risks that should be borne by principal employers onto the backs of workers whose jobs were made precarious. Effects are most pronounced in several Asia-Pacific countries where non-regular jobs came to account for a major share of total employment in the aftermath of the region's 1997 financial crisis. More recently, non-permanent jobs were on the rise in Europe's metal industry, though to a much lesser extent than in Asia.

For many permanent workers, hours worked and compensation has declined due to extended plant shutdowns and down-days ranging from weeks to months. Elimination of shifts and reduced line rates has taken place in plants across regions. Paid time-off has been brought forward in some workplaces, while time-banking measures based on annualised hours have been stretched to their limits. Short-work time schemes have been implemented where such benefits are provided by collective agreements and/or government programs covering otherwise lost wages.

Due to the prolonged downturn there's an urgent need to extend and strengthen income and social protections for workers. Also essential are effective stimulus measures boosting demand and industrial policies that safeguard employment and utilize productive capacity to meet and improve society's transport-related and manufacturing needs.