MORE than 30 senior staff face the axe from Motorola's Swindon operation.

They hold key positions at the company's Groundwell plant, which has already been decimated by job cuts. Earlier this year, 500 of the 3,000 staff employed at sites in Swindon lost their jobs, and in September it was announced that a further 550 would be gone by Christmas.

Now the Evening Advertiser has learned that another 36 employees will go. They are significant because they are believed to be among the first highly skilled engineers to lose their jobs. They make up 15 per cent of the 240 strong skilled engineering workforce that faces being laid off because the latest technology called the GSM technology for mobile phones is not taking off.

One Motorola engineer, who asked not to be named, said workers were told of the latest redundancies at 11.45am on Friday.

He claimed the company had "tacked them on" to the original job losses announcement and that the news had taken the workforce by surprise. He said: "These are the first skilled engineers jobs to go and it is very worrying for the future. Nobody really knows what is going on but of course everyone fears for their jobs."

Spokesman Andy Rogers, account director at Motorola, said: "We are continuing to consult directly with our employees and the consultation forum at Swindon and while that is going on we have no comment to offer to the media other than to say again that we remain committed to Swindon as a significant contributor to Motorola Cellular Infrastructure business."

He added that about 80 employees in Swindon had so far volunteered for the latest programme of redundancies.

Motorola has four sites in Swindon.

The bulk of the staff are at the manufacturing plant in Groundwell, but there are also support and administration centres two in Blagrove and one in Elgin.

At the beginning of this year, Motorola employed 147,000 people worldwide, but around 39,000 of those jobs will have been shed by the beginning of next year.

A Motorola plant in Bathgate, Scotland, closed with this year's first wave of cuts, taking 3,000 jobs with it. The shutdown left the firm with plants remaining in Basingstoke and East Kilbride as well as Swindon.

In the third quarter of the current financial year, Motorola showed a global loss of £963 million.

When the 500 redundancies were announced in September, another Motorola spokesman, Mark Durrant, said: "Before we took any firm action, we wanted to consult our employees to look at ways we can achieve our reductions in the workforce with the minimum impact. We will continue to talk with employees to try to reduce the need for compulsory redundancies."

September's bad news from Motorola was the latest in a series of redundancies and closures announced by various firms throughout the town over the last year or so. The gloom has covered industries ranging from traditional ones to the high technology which was the main plank of Swindon's economic rebirth after the closure of the Railway Works in 1986.

The R&K Wise cake factory closed with the loss of 500 permanent and more than 200 temporary posts.

The 7C call centre in Blagrove shed about 120 jobs as a result of the global downturn in the electronics industry. Other job cuts have been announced by firms such as Lucent Technologies and Zarlink.

But the news hasn't been all bad.

Asda Walmart is taking on 900 people at its huge new store in Haydon Wick, and Honda, which recently opened a new plant near its existing one at South Marston, has created 1,000 jobs over the last 12 months.