Mass sackings in Russia (Auto)

[Hannah Bell]

AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest car maker, announced last week that would axe more than one quarter of its total workforce — throwing 27,600 workers onto the unemployment lines or into early retirement...

The sackings at AvtoVAZ will devastate the city of Togliatti, which was built in the late 1960s around the car factory...still the main base of operations for the company. The industrial complex at Togliatti is one of the largest in the world, with more than 90 miles of production lines...

Formerly a nationalised industry...AvtoVAZ was partially privatised in 1993. It has a joint venture agreement with General Motors...to produce its Neva model with Chevrolet, and it has a factory producing GM engines. Last year, the Franco-Japanese car-making partnership Renault-Nissan bought 25 percent of AvtoVAZ shares. The other main shareholder in AvtoVAZ is the Russian state defence-export corporation Rosoboronexport. Sergei Chemesov, a personal friend of Putin, runs the parent company Rosoboronexport.

The government and AvtoVAZ executives hope that a restructuring of Russia’s car industry...can help the Russian elite compete with its international rivals. As well as backing the layoffs in Togliatti, the Kremlin is throwing its weight behind plans to expand the reach of Russia’s other major domestic automobile manufacturer, GAZ.

Moscow, in collaboration with the German government, is backing a takeover of GM’s European operation, Opel, by Russian state-owned financial giant Sberbank and Austrian-Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna. This would see GAZ plants partially integrated with those of Opel in western Europe in a deal predicted to lead to the elimination of thousands of jobs...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/aero-o01.shtml

[Mixopterus]

1. Interesting

Didn't predatory practices on the part of Western banking institutions help spark the period of unrest that led to the October Revolution?