Caterpillar Slashes Jobs Overseas

American firm Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) announced on Thursday that it would be cutting roughly 1,400 jobs from its Gosselies plant near Charleroi, in Belgium.

“Though they are painful, these measures are indispensable to allowing us to be competitive and giving a chance of survival to our factory,” Caterpillar Belgium CEO Nicolas Polutnik said in a statement. He added, ”the proposed measures aim to give the Gosselies site a chance to exist in the future by positioning it as the indispensable source of production for machinery for Europe.”

Charleroi was once a booming industry region in Belgium, but companies have been consistently pulling out their workforce in the area, leaving a one in five rate of unemployment — double Belgium’s national average. Caterpillar is the latest in a string of companies, many of which are American (or traded in the American markets) to pull or shrink operations in the region…