Cammell Laird issues EU worker statement
Cammell Laird worker statement given to the Sun newspaper on November 19 2017 following its report into EU workers at the company:
“The facts are that Cammell Laird has employed all of the people currently available to us locally and nationally with the requisite engineering skills we require for the complex projects we are undertaking. The company is proud to be driving the business forward again, and Cammell Laird has re emerged to become an iconic brand and internationally recognised for our high quality skills and for delivering our contractual obligations.
Cammell Laird is dedicated and totally committed to providing jobs and wealth for our local community and the UK economy. Over the last 10 years we have pumped more than £500million into the Merseyside economy alone. We currently employ more than 1300 local people directly and indirectly on our contracts. In addition, to address the chronic local and national engineering skills shortage, we have invested circa £20 million over the last decade to run one of the biggest apprentice programmes in the region, recruiting around 22 apprentices a year, with more than 200 apprentices having graduated. We have nearly 70 apprentices currently in training with ambitious plans in development to train a further 1000 apprentices to meet our potential order book going forward. We also have an active school and community engagement programme which is making a real difference to our area. It is important to also note that the hundreds of millions we invest in our local supply chain has enabled local businesses, across multiple sectors, to grow through our success driving wider job and wealth creation and innovation on Merseyside.
Cammell Laird has advertised for engineering vacancies across local and industry media extensively this year, and continues to recruit from the local and UK market. After however exhausting the requisite specialist engineering skills available to us in the UK, we have recruited over 300 highly skilled European engineers from a UK employment agency to support our core workforce across multiple contracts within the yard. We value these workers enormously and the terrific job they do. For clarity these workers are not cheaper to employ and they are not undercutting UK workers, as the cost of employment is equivalent to our core workforce. We treat all workers equally and we have no prejudice of any kind in our business and it must be remembered that when our industry collapsed, many workers from our yard travelled throughout Europe to find employment.”
