Three Card Monte, Airbus Style

CNN informs us this day that MT Aerospace, the folks who are the designated heirs slated to "purchase" three Airbus sites in Germany (Varel, Nordenham, and Augsburg) in conjunction with Airbus' plan to "downsize" itself out of trouble figure they can do all this with no staff cuts.

Interestingly enough, the IHT tells us that the German government has offered to front the money to MT for this 'acquisition'.

We also learned that GKN is getting a helluva deal on Filton as one of our correspondents deduced a few days ago from a little strategic reading. It's been announced that there will be no 'compulsory redundancies' (layoffs to you) at Filton, and there are rumors afoot of incentives there.

No word as yet from France, but Europe being what it is, the story's likely to be somewhat similar.

The Trib also tell us that the number of people affected all by these 'transfers' of plants is 9,400 workers-right about what Power8 staff reduction numbers suggest they should be.

Putting these things together, the picture's clear.

The worker bees are being transferred to other employers, who will be captive suppliers responsible to direction from Toulouse, they're off the Airbus payroll thus giving Power8 the gloss of 'meeting its objectives', Airbus will get some seed money to get the A350XWB off paper and into development and the governments in question are going to foot the bill for the entire project, WTO be damned.

Three card monte, anyone?

For the information of our patrons, Three Card Monte is a con game disguised as a game of chance that is played on the street.

The dealer holds three face cards, one of which is the queen of hearts. The dealer shuffles the cards and places them face down. The gullible rube, or mark, thinks he knows where the red queen is placed and bets his roll, but he invariably loses because the game is rigged and the dealer is a master of legerdemain. Nothing is as it seems, and the other players and bystanders are part of the choreographed illusion of chance. On the rare occasions that the rube wins the play, it is because that was the intended outcome. If by some chance a particularly knowledgeable rube guesses the play, it is quite likely that a "bystander" will cover his bet or "inadvertently" knock the table over.

Unaccountably, the rube walked away from the table with his roll intact.

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