Disabled workers' jobs saved

More than 1,000 disabled workers' jobs have been saved following the reversal of the policy of factory closure and redundancies by Remploy, Britain's largest employer of disabled people.

A year-long campaign by the trade unions involved, the GMB, T&G, KFAT and GPMU, led to an agreement to keep nine threatened plants open.

Remploy, which has 10,000 employees, had planned to merge the nine factories in England and Wales as part of its strategy for moving disabled workers into mainstream employment.

However, the trade unions put forward alternatives, based on a comprehensive strategy of expansion, and their arguments were finally accepted by Remploy and the government. Len McCluskey, chair of the trade union consortium, said: "The combination of our imaginative high-profile campaign and sound alternatives has won the day".