More than 900 workers facing redundancy at the Seagate plant in Limavady hope to bring in outside negotiators to meet management today to begin talks on a severance package.
The workforce at the disk drive components plant were told at a meeting yesterday that production would move to a plant in Johor, Malaysia, next year on grounds of labour costs. The company's 1,381 workers at Seagate's nearby plant in Derry city are unaffected.
"There is no question over the Springtown plant at this time," a senior management representative said. The sister facility makes read-write heads for computers, a highly specialised process. Unit labour costs there comprise a lower portion of the overall product cost and are already the lowest available globally.
Dr William O'Kane, plant manager at the Limavady operation, told The Irish Timesthat there was work in Limavady for "at least the next two to three quarters", at which point Seagate would start to scale back its operation.
"The decision simply came down to cost," he said. "It was simply no longer viable to continue to challenge an equivalent operation in the Far East, where they have a significant cost advantage relative to Limavady."
The plant produces "substrates", a core component of disk drives. Some 200,000 are produced daily, about 20-30 per cent of total company requirements. The rest are bought on the open market.
The local workforce, Dr O'Kane said, were "fantastic" and had "contributed significantly to the success of the Limavady facility over the past 10 years". Everything had been done to try to save the plant, he said.
Seagate is the largest private-sector manufacturer in the northwest, with workers drawn from a large catchment area including counties Antrim, Derry, Tyrone and Donegal. Some employees travel across Lough Foyle by ferry to work at the plant, which has been supported heavily by Invest Northern Ireland, the North's foreign direct investment agency.
Some plant and a number of specialist employees will transfer to the Johor facility in the near future, a company representative said.
It is understood the decision to close was deemed inevitable about two weeks ago and Invest NI was formally told on Friday. The public announcement, including the calling of a meeting to tell the workforce, was not made until yesterday afternoon because of "market sensitivity", a Stormont source said.
The workforce were advised at the weekend to attend a meeting today, scheduled to coincide with the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, where Seagate is listed.
The decision marks a serious blow for the Stormont Executive's programme for government, unveiled at the Assembly last Thursday.
That had placed the creation of 6,500 manufacturing jobs and the establishment of a vibrant private, wealth-creating manufacturing base as its first objective.
Dr Paisley emerged from emergency talks with Seagate management last night to insist that the policy imperative had been underlined by the job losses in Co Derry.
The small Northern manufacturing sector was vulnerable through its relative dependence on low-skill, low-wage jobs, which were likely to migrate to lower-cost environments, he said.
"That's our great difficulty and therefore we have to get our people trained in skills that will hold out against pressures like that," he said. "That cannot be done in a day." In the meantime, he pledged that the Executive would do everything possible to "soften the blow" for Limavady.
It was estimated locally that such was the scale of the Seagate job losses that the local unemployment rate could double at a stroke.
In Belfast, the European Commission office said Northern Ireland would receive £114 million (€163 million) from the European Social Fund to help create jobs over the next six years.