HP supports support in Scotland
31 August 2010
Hewlett Packard announced last week that it is to create 700 technical support jobs at its Erskine plant near Glasgow. This set me off on two trains of thought.
The first was that it could be taken as further anecdotal evidence supporting the overall trend in the UK to abandon manufacturing in favour of service industries – it was only just over a year ago that the same facility announced that it was to shed 700 production jobs.
However, I am sure that some of the lost manufacturing expertise, and knowledge of HPs products, will now effectively be transferred to technical support. On the whole it has to be better that technology jobs are still being created in Scotland and I am sure that staff at the plant are feeling pretty pleased that the ‘highly-skilled’ reputation of the plant has been recognised by the company in this latest announcement.
My second train of thought concerned the overall message that such an announcement brings and how it fits in with other economic indicators. 700 new jobs is great news and you can add that to inflation coming down, overall jobless figures better than expected, economic growth ahead of schedule. Even the Corus steelworks might have a lifeline!
We know the coalition’s austerity programme will gradually start to take more effect – particularly in terms of public sector jobs but it will obviously filter through all supply chains as spending is frozen or cut. And yet the above indicators indicate that the country and industry are comfortable enough with this to be able to move forward with a spring in our collective step.
And then the US factor kicks in. Recent murmurings of double-dip recessions, something that has been largely dismissed in the UK, have been gathering in volume across the pond. Last week’s growth figures showed significant slowing in the rate of recovery, and jobless figures are also showing no signs of subsiding. Such reports start the money markets twitching and banks ever more over-cautious. Once again there is a danger that the UK, and many other countries, will be dragged into a financial pit that they have not dug for themselves.
The way around it, as so many economic and political commentators have said in the recent past but have been ignored by the financial markets, is to have confidence in our own economy and industry. Perhaps the downside of having a financial sector of global influence is that we don’t have the luxury of letting this happen.
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