A severe impact following the COVID-19 crisis is the temporary or permanent suspensions companies within the shipping industry move towards to, in efforts to deal with the huge economic impacts. Now, German shipyard Meyer Werft’s Finnish subsidiary began talks to lay off up to 450 of its employees.
Specifically, Reuters informed that the company began discussions of laying off up to 450 of its roughly 2,000 employees because of a hit to business from the coronavirus pandemic.
Although the company firstly discussed about temporary lay offs, they said that the market situation that arose after the pandemic forced them to move to permanent cuts.
The company issued a statement, noting that “These negotiations will include the permanent layoff of 450 people and another 900 are affected by other measures. These include temporary layoffs of different length, work time adjustments and other arrangements.”
In addition, instead of delivering one to two large ships per year until 2023, the assumption is now that the Turku yard will build just one large cruise ship per year.
Many are the companies that are laying off a number of their employees in efforts to balance during these times. For instance, Stena Line recently announced 950 planned job redundancies in Sweden, while Maersk Drilling, following the same path, announced that it intends to stack a number of the company’s North Sea rigs.
