International

SP Member of Parliament Maarten Hijink is urging the government not to sit by and look on as mass redundancies loom at  Tata Steel in Ijmuiden, a town on the mouth of the North Sea Canal in North Holland. Indian parent corporation Tata Steel will shed as many as 2000 jobs as part of a merger agreement with Germany’s state-owned enterprise  ThyssenKrupp.  Hijink wants to ensure that the jobs and know-how at Tata Steel will remain in the Netherlands. 

Hijink believes that the government should be doing a great deal more to maintain jobs and strengthen expertise and innovation at the plant.  “It’s generally recognised that mergers and takeovers of this kind eventually misfire,” he says. “10,000 people work at Tata’s Dutch plant and the firm is a leader in new techniques for making steel more sustainably.  Those jobs and that know-how will be under pressure if part of the firm’s activity vanishes from the Netherlands for good.”

The SP is also curious to know what the consequences of the import of cheap Chinese steel are for the announced merger between Tata and ThyssenKrupp. “European steel producers have a lot of problems as a result of the dumping of Chinese steel on the European market,” Hijink explains. “If that’s one of the reasons for these mass redundancies, then we should be putting a stop to the dumping, and not allowing our enterprises to shrink.”