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Trade unions claim huge job losses announced are not all due to downturn

Yesterday the jobs market took another massive battering with the announcement of more than 3,200 redundancies across the manufacturing and financial sectors.

The announcements of job losses at Bombardier in Belfast, Swiss Re and Aviva have sparked anger among trade unions.

Commenting on the 1,100 job losses at Aviva, Derek Simpson, Unite joint general secretary, said: "Today we have a scenario where a company that is continuing to deliver positive results is slashing the staff that have enabled them to weather the current financial storm.

"We are angry Aviva is repeating what appears to be an annual exercise of cutting thousands of staff. It is unacceptable that once again shareholders received their full dividends while the workers who brought the company this success are rewarded with job losses.

"Unite has been told these job losses are unrelated to the economic downturn."

Find out who else is hiring and making redundancies this week.