Geneva --

China, India and Eastern Europe will take more jobs away from the Western world's car workers over the next 10 years, as the automotive industry moves its parts-making operations from industrialized countries, the United Nations labour agency said yesterday. Factories in Japan, the United States and Western Europe are becoming assemblers of finished cars from parts made in other countries, where labour costs are a fraction of those in the West, said the International Labor Organization in a 144-page study. Many Western automobile producers "have begun to treat Chinese component costs as the global benchmark for their suppliers elsewhere," where auto industry workers make anywhere from 60 cents (U.S.) to $1.30 an hour, ILO said. The North American automotive manufacturing labour market shrank by 140,000 jobs or 2.6 per cent between 2000 and 2003, with 70 per cent of the losses borne by auto parts workers, according to the report. AP