Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

"Extraordinary times require extraordinary actions" said the Prime Minister on Monday. Two days later the people of Maesteg find out to their cost what he means.

The late shift at Budelpack COSi - or Revlon as many in the town still call it - walked into work today to find the cosmetics factory had gone into administration. The Dutch owners had already been laying off workers and talking about "restructuring the business" after what sounds like a dramatic drop in sales. The spa and well-being cosmetics for Clinique and Body Shop were coming off the Maesteg production line. We just weren't feeling flush enough to buy them.

Now there are four hundred jobs on the line in a town that's home to some twenty thousand people. It's no wonder one of the workers says the news has knocked them for six.

Last Autumn must have seemed less extraordinary but no less bleak for some of the same workers who lost their jobs when the car parts factory next door shut its doors. A few found work at Budelpack. Others got jobs at in Llantrisant. That makes redundancy twice in just over a year a real danger for them - not extraordinary, just reality.

And then came the news late afternoon that up to another two hundred jobs could go in Llantrisant at the Serious Food Company. They make juices, smoothies and soups - a company spotted by the Welsh Assembly Government and put on their client list. KB4B? Knowledge Bank for Business, a Government initiative and "a top ten manifesto commitment of the Welsh Assembly Government, [is] designed to provide coherent and tailored support to companies with high growth potential".

That was 2005. In 2008 there's no talk of growth potential, only of working with Budelpack and Serious Food to "mobilise all available support for their continued operations."

The Labour AM and MP representing Maesteg will be hoping that Gordon Brown's "extraordinary actions" - the promise to raise taxes on the better off, the attempts to put money in the pockets of the less well off, for now, the gamble of borrowing billions to pump into public spending and avert catastrophe - will convince the people they represent to stick with Labour; that the "do nothing" taunts at the Tories will be heard - and believed.

Or they might simply decide in the ordinary homes, shops and pubs of Maesteg that it was Gordon Brown and Labour who got them here.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?