By Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
Hardly a day passes without new announcements of devastating job losses, sometimes outright company closures, at levels not seen since at least the 1980 recession.
Workers’ lives are being made misery after years of being told by those in charge of the boardrooms and the Labour Cabinet that all was for the best in the best of all possible systems.
Household names like Woolworths has shut up shop with 27,000 redundancies – on bare minimum state redundancy packages of a few hundred pounds.
MFI, Adams, Arran Aromatics, Findus Foods … the food and retail sector is in meltdown, with forecasts of one in ten shops being empty by the end of the year.
That spells disaster for tens of thousands eking out a living on wages mere pennies above the minimum wage.
Bankers – and bank workers
The finance sector has been bludgeoned by the chaos caused by irresponsible, profit-crazed bankers, who made incomprehensible fortunes by gambling on the capitalist markets. The government’s bailout of the bankers has prevented complete collapse, but has not eased up credit nor boosted the spending power of the working and middle classes.
So now taxpayers’ money is to be raided further for a second, even bigger bailout. But this does little to protect finance workers’ jobs; 47,000 have already been lost, with another 10,000 redundancies expected in the next three months.
A familiar scene over the years when companies go into administration or liquidation is the intervention of financial services giant KPMG. Now this outfit is ‘offering’ its 11,000 staff the glorious ‘choice’ of three months ‘sabbatical’ on 30 per cent pay, or a 4-day week, with accompanying pay cuts.
As the bottom falls out of the housing market, construction workers face mass layoffs. We have the obscene contradiction of a Scottish building worker joining the ranks of the homeless on the eve of Christmas because he lost his job and couldn’t keep up the mortgage!
Car industry crisis
Another major sector facing the worst crisis in at least 30 years is the car industry. With a slump in sales and production, car workers are made to pay the price through a cocktail of pay cuts and job losses.
Honda has just extended its two-month shutdown by a further two months: the Swindon plant won’t re-open for production until June! The 4,200 workers in the factory are to survive on 50 per cent wages for those four months.
In Sunderland, Nissan is chopping 1,200 of its 5,000 workforce. The same outfit recently got £6.2m of government funding for production of a new model; they have shifted production of the Micra to slave-labour India.
Manufacturing industry is in freefall. Factory output collapsed at an annual rate of 22 per cent in November. And there is little prospect of rapid recovery. For instance, the collapse over 2008 in the value of the pound against the Euro (down 30%) and the US$ (down 27%) will not on this occasion lead to an export-led recovery in the UK, because recession is blighting the USA, Japan and the whole of Europe.
Public sector slaughter
Right now the private sector is in the front line of job losses. But on top of the tens of thousands of jobs already lost in the public sector in recent years, a devastating new round of Thatcher-like cuts confront the NHS, local authorities and civil service in the next year or so. As the Scotland on Sunday recently reported:
UK Ministers have already warned that the tax cuts and fiscal stimulus plans being put into place to offset the worst of the downturn will have to be paid for – and soon. The pain will begin, say many, at the end of the next financial year, in April 2010.
SNP Ministers fear that as the Treasury starts to rein in spending, its budget will drop by £500m a year. Scotland’s NHS and councils are heading for a repeat of the 1980s cuts enforced by Thatcher.
Leadership needed
In the face of these devastating blows to entire communities, cities and regions, one of the most disappointing features is the lack of decisive, coordinated calls for action from the leadership of the trade union movement – through the likes of the TUC and STUC.
It is hardly surprising that many of the workers facing the scrap heap are initially shocked and stunned, rather than confident of taking action to save their jobs and livelihoods. But to change that and turn shock into anger and action requires leadership.
Too many of the union leaders are like rabbits mesmerised by the headlights of a lorry bearing down on them. Too often they merely echo the employers’ fatalistic words about the global crisis, without offering any radical alternative that would save and create jobs. In the case of a regional official of UNITE who organises the Nissan car workers facing 1,200 job losses, he stated “One firm can’t ask for a bailout; every firm would want one”!
Instead of portraying themselves as powerless in the teeth of the capitalist crisis, union leaders need to rally their members with events and arguments that give individual groups of workers some confidence that they are not on their own, that there is a point in fighting back.
Union rallies
In 1980, within months of Maggie Thatcher’s axe-wielding government being elected, the unions and Labour Party mobilised some of the biggest demos in the UK’s modern history, against unemployment. Hundreds of thousands marched, and this gave a boost to the fighting spirits of individual workforces facing mass redundancies.
As a minimum first step, the STUC, TUC and national unions should call national demos and rallies against unemployment; in defence of jobs; for a 35 hour week without loss of pay to create jobs; and for an increased minimum wage.
The combination of big united rallies, and fighting policies that point to a different alternative, would begin to turn the tide against the working class being made to pay for the capitalists’ crisis.
It would give courage to workers to use every means possible to save their jobs for future generations of workers – including workplace occupations to combat asset-stripping by bosses who often shift production to slave labour economies abroad – after getting £millions in grants off the government to set up shop in the first place.
Socialist alternatives
Socialist measures are not a luxury for May Day speeches; they are an indispensable weapon that should be wielded by the unions to mobilise their millions of members and their communities, and to answer people’s widespread fear that there is no alternative to mass redundancies.
For example, there is a drastic need for public sector house-building and renovation – and for universal home insulation to cut fuel bills and help combat climate chaos. Tens of thousands of jobs could thus be created, if the governments of Westminster or Holyrood had the political will. To carry out such a plan of public sector housing, the unions should argue for public ownership and democratic control of the construction industry.
If there is a glut in the car market that causes shutdowns and lay-offs, the unions need to fight for socially useful alternative production. For example, the developing world needs agricultural machinery that car plants could build. Closer to home, a vastly expanded free public transport system would create tens of thousands of transport workers’ jobs and cut poverty in the communities, as well as helping the environment. But it would also require building fleets of buses, trams, ferries and trains – a source of jobs for many facing a shaky future right now.
The bankers have been bailed out to save their skins – and those of their pals in the wider system. So the unions rightly call for investment to shore up the car industry. But why not call for public ownership and democratic control, instead of for subsidies to the bosses’ profits and debts?
The unions need to call public rallies that rouse the confidence of workers to fight back, but equally they need to expound measures that go beyond the straitjacket of capitalist production for profit. Public ownership of the banks, big retailers, energy, oil, transport, construction and manufacturing would be a means to plan the production of goods and services for public need.
Struggle – or starve!
Scotland faces an exponential growth of unemployment, with the Centre for Economic and Business Research predicting an 88 per cent rise in the numbers unemployed this year – from 121,000 to 227,000.
The Scottish economy is plunging towards its worst contraction since 1931. The rich elite who rule and ruin our lives are determined to make the working class pay for the crisis, driving us back to the 1930s if needs be.
The time is rotten-ripe for the unions and socialists to champion a different future, where work is shared out under a shorter working week, but without loss of pay; where the assets of companies that have been built up through generations of workers’ labour and taxpayers’ subsidies are taken into public ownership – but with democratic control.
A future where real jobs and training are restored, with new environmentally-friendly manufacturing a part of the answer. A socialist future where democratic needs and wishes are paramount, instead of millions being tossed in the dustbin for the protection of profits.