ANOTHER 24 workers will walk off the job at Portland's aluminium smelter today as the city's major employer steps up its efforts to cut costs. The latest round of voluntary redundancies comes on top of more than 350 people who lost their jobs in the blue-collar town this year.And there is expected to be more redundancies sought at Portland Aluminium in coming weeks. The Alcoa-operated smelter has embarked on the job cuts as it tries to cope with reduced international demand for aluminium and the global financial crisis. In April, Portland Aluminium announced a 15 per cent curtailment in production and set a target to reduce overall costs by 10-15 per cent. The curtailment was completed earlier this month when 68 pots were taken offline, reducing annual production from 358,000 to 305,000 tonnes. Yesterday's announcement came after the company anticipated six weeks ago that as many as 39 jobs would be cut.More packages will be offered to staff, tradespeople and contractors as the smelter works to meet its cost-cutting target by late next monthPortland Aluminium operations manager John Osborne said the business had worked with employees, unions, contractors and suppliers since April. "The redundancies have been selected from expressions of interest received from members of the Australian Workers Union earlier in July." "There's been a great deal of work undertaken to reduce costs but there is still more work to be done," he said. An Australian Workers Union spokesman said it had agreed to an "orderly process" to seek the redundancies in accordance with the enterprise agreement the union had with Alcoa."That means that employees will all be paid their full redundancy entitlements," he said. Meanwhile, Portland Aluminium revealed yesterday that on-site contractor Silcar had been suspended from the site due to its "unacceptable safety performance". Mr Osborne said safety was "the operation's number one priority and Silcar's performance recently had not met the standard required"."We have asked Silcar's management to develop a plan to improve their supervision and performance in relation to safety," Mr Osborne said.The plan is due today and will be reviewed by management early next week.