Last week, Petrol-Head reported that British unions were meeting Tata executives while a rumour about the sale of Jaguar by the Indian group was spreading in the news. It appears that the meeting went rather well as union confirmed their support to Tata.
"We are confident our members’ long term future is best served by Tata," said Dave Osborne, national secretary for vehicle building at the Unite union. "They totally ruled out offloading Jaguar or building Land Rovers in India." "There’s a couple of clarifications we still need from Ford, but I don’t see any issues arising from that," he added.
He also said Tata had given assurances that engines would still be taken from Ford and that UK manufacturing would be maintained. Jaguar has about 10,000 employees at sites in Coventry, Birmingham, and Liverpool, while Land Rover employs about 9,000 in the West Midlands and Warwickshire. Unite is the main union representing workers at Land Rover and Jaguar, and has about 12,000 members there.