When Remploy announced it was planning to close half-a-dozen factories in the region and make hundreds of disabled workers redundant, it caused uproar. In the first in a series, Catherine Jewitt looks at what has happened since and speaks to those at the sharp end, the employees for whom Remploy provides a lifeline.

TOLD they faced being made redundant, hundreds of disabled workers are now threatening strike action in a last-ditch move to save six North-East factories.

Last month, Remploy, the country's biggest employer of disabled people, announced plans to close half of its sites.

Factories in Spennymoor, County Durham; Hartlepool; Stockton; York; Ashington, in Northumberland; and Jarrow, on Tyneside, are among those to be closed or merged.

In the North-East and North Yorkshire, 351 people will be made redundant - including 328 disabled people.

Remploy bosses vowed no one would face compulsory redundancy and promised to quadruple the number of mainstream jobs it finds for disabled people.

But frightened workers say the proposal sounds good in theory, but in practice it is unrealistic.

Kenneth Stubbs, Remploy North-East GMB branch secretary, said: "We don't want to sit at home vegetating on benefits, but fear this will happen to a lot of us if Remploy goes ahead with its proposal.

"Most of us have tried mainstream employment because we don't want to be 'different', but it didn't work and I don't think it can for many of us. These are people's lives being torn apart and the uncertainty is unbearable."

The GMB, Unite (formerly the Transport and General Workers Union and Amicus) and Community unions are now threatening industrial action - from a strike to an overtime ban - at all 83 Remploy factories. A ballot of 4,500 members is expected to continue until at least mid-August.

Mr Stubbs said: "Industrial action is the only legal recourse for workers to protest so that is what we are considering."

A Remploy spokeswoman said any call for industrial action was premature as the company was in an early stage of formal consultation before finalising proposals to present to the Government.

She said: "It would put at risk those businesses we plan to continue and put even more jobs at risk."

Last night, Helen Goodman, MP for Bishop Auckland, in County Durham, chaired a meeting of concerned MPs and Remploy bosses. She plans to pressure managers to protect the workforce and raise concerns about the shortage of suitable replacement jobs available.