The redundancy terms on offer to the Freescale workers at the company's East Kilbride plant are 'exceptionally high', according to Freescale CEO Rich Beyer.

Freescale management has been accused by the Freescale union bosses of reducing the redundancy terms of workers shortly before announcing plans to sell or close the factory making them redundant.

"As I have learned of the situation", (Beyer has been in the job six months and all this happened before he joined), "the redundancy agreement at East Kilbride was quite high and it was determined that it was so uncompetitively high that something should be done", Beyer told Electronics Weekly.

"That happened pretty significantly prior to any discussion of a shut-down. It was a couple of years ago when demand on fabs was quite high. Then demand dropped off dramatically," added Beyer.

"The events looked like they were connected but they weren't", said Beyer, "the process to complete this (i.e. the negotiations about the reduction in redundancy terms) took over a year. The terms are still exceptionally high."

"The process from the time we negotiated to reduce the redundancy terms to the time that we completed the talks, was about a year", stated Beyer, "so when we decided to seek other alternatives for the fab, it seemed that there wasn't much time between them. But there was."

See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.

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