Embedded in Cork

With the end of it’s mandatory 30 day consultation period Motorola Cork is announcing 330 job losses. Only 20 employees will remain with the company in Cork. The announcement was widely expected as the company had shed 90 jobs over two previous rounds of redundancy last year and they had announced a global cull of 3,500 jobs after their 4th quarter results from 2006. The main projects undertaken at the Cork plant (Telecomms Element Management Systems and SoftSwitches) were already being wound down and the redundancies should be complete by April.
I would imagine that the remaining 20 jobs are in the area of services, as they had a different funding and reporting set-up to the rest of the site and were in a profitable area.
The tone on RTE 1 news was somewhat upbeat in respect to the prospects of those lossing their jobs. The opinion being that their will be queues of employers lining up to offer the workers jobs. Time will tell, but the signs are promising with Havok apparently looking to set-up an operation in Cork. The recent announcement of 370 VMWare jobs in Cork may yield some positions for the departing Motorolans and there are rumours that Vivendi’s games division are to bring 500 jobs to Cork.