Mettis continues to operate within the guidelines and recommendations provided by the UK Government, Public Health England and the World Health Organisation. Paramount is the health, safety, wellbeing and welfare of our people.
With air travel still heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, shockwaves continue to work their way through the aerospace supply chain and we are having to proportionally scale our operations in line with the significant reduction in demand that could last for several years.
We are doing everything we can for our people, in partnership with our trade union, Unite, while we make the changes we must in order to make it through these challenging times. This includes some changes to ways of working, a reduced working week and an extended summer shutdown, matched to customer demand.
Short-term, we are furloughing 20 to 30% of our people but, longer-term, we are unfortunately having to release over 100 of our employees. We have made as many efficiencies as we can in other areas, reducing fixed and variable overheads, and accelerating the development of new products to generate new demand where we can to protect as many jobs, skills and capabilities as possible.
Extensive measures remain in place to shield all our people while on site including, but by no means limited to, the provision of additional personal protective equipment and sanitation kits, rigorous cleaning regimes carried out by a full-time taskforce, robust communication and restrictions to travel and meetings unless business critical. We are also now carrying out a Covid-19 screening programme and have tested a random sample of 25% employees.
These are unprecedented times and we are sad that we are forced to scale back proportionally but we are determined to survive the challenges created by the pandemic and bounce back.
