BRASILIA: Payrolls in Brazil’s motor industry shrank about 7% in 2014 as domestic vehicle sales fell the most in a dozen years.
Workers at a Mercedes Benz truck factory outside of Sao Paulo voted on Wednesday to stop work for 24 hours in a protest over fired colleagues, the second such strike in as many days as car makers cut payrolls in anticipation of a third straight year of slumping sales.
The local metalworkers union said Mercedes Benz, a unit of of Germany’s Daimler, had cut 244 workers at the factory and about 750 others remained on paid leave through April out of about 11,000 employees at the plant.
A Mercedes representative said some of the laid off workers had taken voluntary buyouts, but did not confirm how many. She had no immediate response to the union’s announcement of the strike beginning on Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday workers at a Volkswagen plant in the same town, Sao Bernardo do Campo, declared an indefinite strike after the company cut 800 workers and warned of a pressing need to further trim staff.The high-profile job cuts point to rising tensions in the vehicle sector, which produces a quarter of Brazil’s industrial output, after a slow burn of buyouts and paid leave over the past year.
