TOULOUSE, France (Reuters):

Troubled planemaker Airbus confirmed 10,000 job cuts and announced plans to sell all or part of six factories yesterday, as workers protested and European politicians hailed a hard-fought compromise.

Airbus chief executive, Louis Gallois, gave a stark vision of a Franco-German company needing to find billions of euros in savings and end nationalist infighting he deemed "poison".

"We need to be interested in the future of Airbus and for that we need to be one integrated company," he said of a firm whose push for reforms dominated a recent Franco-German summit.

Gallois told reporters Airbus will cut 5,000 staff and 5,000 workers contracted from other firms over the next four years.

Some 4,300 jobs in France, 3,700 in Germany, 1,600 in Britain and 400 in Spain are expected to go. Shedding 5,000 of its staff would cut the Airbus workforce of 55,000 by nine per cent.

This does not include some 3,000 staff at sites due to be sold at St. Nazaire in France and Varel and Laupheim in Germany.

There were protests at Airbus factories in France at Meaulte and St. Nazaire and unions warned of wider walkouts. Several hundred assembly workers also downed tools at the Toulouse headquarters.

German Airbus workers expressed a mixture of disbelief and fear as they left the Varel plant, where they walked off the job along with workers at Laupheim.

"Before Friday, nothing is going to happen here," said Michael Eilers, head of the workers' council at Airbus in Nordenham, announcing a spontaneous walk-out at the factory.

Shares in parent firm EADS closed up 1.8 percent as investors welcomed the plans to cut euro2.1 billion in annual operating cost from 2010 and a further euro5 billion cash.

Gallois said Meaulte as well as Filton in England and Nordenham in Germany were sites where Airbus will look for investors to take partial stakes GKN Plc, mooted as a possible investor in Filton, declined to comment.

The shake-up comes after a two-year delay in delivering the A380 superjumbo put a euro5 billion (US$6.61 billion) hole in expected earnings at EADS. It also needs to speed up work on the A350, which is already lagging rival Boeing's development of its 787 model by five years.

Power8, as the restructuring is known, was first mooted in October and sparked a split between France and Germany over the distribution of job losses, and the placement of future ones.