West Australian meat exporter Harvey Beef won't rule out more job losses after sacking 160 workers from its plant south of Perth.
The redundancies will be made at the company's Harvey plant 140 kilometres south of Perth while boning operations at Fremantle will be leased out.
General manager of operations Dean Goode said the restructuring process wasn't over and that other areas, including logistics, sales and marketing needed to be looked at in view of the financial crisis.
Harvey Beef received a more than $3 million in a bailout from the state government four years ago and blames the economic downturn for its decision.
The dire news at the iconic company comes as figures released this morning are expected to show the jobless rate jumped to 5 per cent last month for the first time in nearly three years.
The market forecast at the start of the week was for the nation to have lost 20,000 jobs in February on top of January's jobless rate of 4.8 per cent.
The number of job ads in major metropolitan newspapers fell 55.4 per cent in the year to February, the quickest pace of decline on record.
The job ads were lower in all states and territories with the largest falls in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and the ACT.
Internet job ads slipped 9.4 per cent in last month for an annual pace of decline of 38.6 per cent.
