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Workers at drugs giant Glaxo-SmithKline will become the latest victims of the jobs bloodbath.
The company is expected to announce plans to axe up to 10,000 worldwide jobs on Thursday, when it publishes its latest financial results.
Glaxo, the world's second-biggest drugs company, employs about 18,000 workers in the UK, who are likely to be hit hard by the cuts.
Cull: Drugs company GlaxoSmithKline is expected to announce plans to axe up to 10,000 worldwide jobs
The move comes just days after its rival, AstraZeneca, said its job cutting programme, which began in 2007, will total around 15,000 by 2013.
On Sunday a Glaxo spokesman refused to comment on speculation of a massive jobs cull at the firm, equal to about 10 per cent of its global workforce.
It comes as a report warns today that more than 70 per cent of firms expect to axe workers this year in the hope of surviving the recession.
Despite making jobs cuts last year, many fear they will be forced to introduce a second round of redundancies as the downturn continues.
In a further blow, the report, from the pay specialists Industrial Relations Services, said desperate bosses will resort to other cost-cutting measures.
These include cutting back on hiring agency or contract staff, imposing recruitment freezes on permanent staff and not replacing those who retire or quit.
The report's author, Noelle Murphy, said: '2009 is going to mean job cuts on a wide scale.' She urged bosses to communicate with workers as early as possible if they need to make redundancies.
But some are trying their best to avoid redundancies by making other changes, according to the research which received responses from 268 firms.
One in five said it was looking at pay cuts or pay freezes to avoid making redundancies. Recently, Virgin Atlantic said it was forcing all its 9,000 workers to take a pay freeze this year 'to help protect staff from any redundancies'.
Every day, the number of casualties in Britain is growing, from tiny firms with a handful of workers to corporate giants cutting thousands of jobs.
The Federation of Small Businesses said it feared 110 small and medium- sized firms would fail every day this year with the loss of around 150,000 jobs.
The recession is hitting every part of the economy, but some are worse hit than others, with the car industry one of the biggest casualties.
Last week, Honda workers finished their final shift before a four-month halt in production. The 4,200-strong Swindon workforce will collect full basic pay for the first two months, then 60 per cent for the rest of the shutdown.
There was speculation at the weekend that Jaguar Land Rover is considering a company-wide pay cut to avoid further layoffs in the UK.
On Saturday, a CBI survey showed that small and medium manufacturers in the UK were laying off workers at a faster rate than at any time since the early 1990s.
In total, 38 per cent of UK firms surveyed cut jobs during the final quarter of
2008. The latest figures show 1.92million jobless in the UK between September and November last year, the highest level since September 1997.
- Homeowners should brace themselves for the biggest-ever fall in house prices this year, a report warns today.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research says prices could plunge 20 per cent this year to an average of just £132,000.
It describes the crumbling housing market, which dropped 16 per cent last year, as being at the epicentre of 'the biggest economic crisis for a generation'.
The report warns prices could end up collapsing a total of 40 per cent from the peak in 2007 to the trough in 2010. It said this was the worst-case scenario which assumes the Government's attempts to stimulate mortgage lending fails.
Its most gloomy forecast is that house prices, which peaked at an average of £196,000 in 2007, will fall to £122,000 in 2010, a drop of £74,000.
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