Aircraft manufacturer Airbus will be laying-off 10,000 workers and selling up to six production plants across Europe over the next four years as part of the company's make-or-break Power8 restructuring plan.

Within this total, around 3,700 overhead positions will be slashed in Germany, 4,300 in France, 1,600 in the UK, and 400 in Spain. Four out of its eight production plants will be sold off or shut down over the next few years to establish 'transnational Centres of Excellence' to replace the existing national structures.

The company will immediately cut five thousand temporary or on-site subcontractors, while the remaining 5,000 lay offs will be Airbus employees. Management will initially seek to reduce the workforce through voluntary redundancies, however, if the scheme fails to achieve the desired level of reductions over the next 12 to 18 months, the company is not ruling out compulsory redundancies.

Job cuts are expected to cost the company EUR680 million (US$900 million) in the first quarter of this year. "The core objective of the programme is to make Airbus more efficient and competitive," said the CEOs of parent company, EADS, Tom Enders and Louis Gallois.

The announcement that the company will be cutting jobs has already been met by protests from unions, 14,000 of whose members stopped work for up to two hours at four French sites.

The action comes as Airbus will report a negative EBIT in 2006, owing largely to the A380 production delays. The company said it also faces "significant cash needs" relating to investments in current and future programmes, particularly the new A350 XWB.