UK economy: Halt the jobs massacre
Redundancies are escalating fast – a quarter of a million in the last three months of 2008 and most surveys expect more than 300,000 jobs will go across the UK in the next three months alone, as firms cut back further.
Manufacturing is taking the biggest hit, with jobs in February being shed at the fastest rate since records began in 1992. Firms in the motor vehicle sector and the related metal sector, who supply car makers, are leading the way down.
And the car industry is proving a classic example of how not to fight the scourge of job losses. In February BMW announced, without any warning, that it was laying off 850 agency staff at its Mini plant at Cowley, Oxford. This came hot on the heels of the announcement in December that 300 agency workers at the plant had no jobs to return to after the Christmas break.
At the Cowley plant, 30% of the workforce were supplied by temporary work agencies. They are cheaper to employ and easier to sack, so it is easy to see their attraction for the bosses. Many of them are migrants. But the union leaders too – despite all their rhetoric in support of agency workers – exploit the existence of agency workers. Instead of formulating a response that unites the workforce in a militant fightback, the union heads choose to set the workers against each other.
At Cowley, the Unite officials were aware of the lay-offs for three weeks prior to the announcement. It is probable they had been colluding with management in order to protect their base, the core workforce, at the expense of the “temporary” workers.
It is not unusual for union officials to view agency workers as a “buffer” to protect permanent employees, leading them to treat agency workers as a disposable workforce like the bosses do. In a recent case of involuntary redundancies, union reps explained to their members how they had, unsuccessfully, looked at all the other options to redundancies, including shedding the jobs of agency workers!
Elsewhere the union chiefs are bending over backwards to make us pay for recession. So, in Jaguar Land Rover, Unite officials are recommending a one year pay freeze for the recession and a four day week (in other words a pay cut) in return for no redundancies. This is a scandal. Workers must force the union movement to defend every job. The available work must be shared around with no loss of pay. If the government can find billions for bankers then they can find millions for workers to be kept employed, paying their mortgages and feeding their families.
This needs militant action not brave words. Factories that announce mass redundancies – whether agency or permanent – must be occupied and nationalised, with the workers taking over the running of the firm so that shifts can be rostered in a way to spread the work around.
But it has to be recognised that car production is not going to return to the old levels after the recession. That is why car workers should be offered retraining in green technology skills and spare plant capacity converted to produce clean public transport and the urgently needed renewable energy resources to halt climate change.
And it is not just car workers or those in the broader manufacturing sector. Construction workers have been laid off in their tens of thousands. Half built projects, abandoned by bankrupt builders, should be taken over and the builders put back to work building sorely needed homes for rent.
Workers must not pay for the bosses’ and bankers’ crisis through mass unemployment. There is no shortage of useful work that needs to be done. It is just this profit driven system that is unable to deliver – we must do away with it!
Thu 21, May 2009 @ 21:02
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Mon 25, May 2009 @ 15:38