Back page - Steel, Vauxhall: stop the rot! Fight now for jobs!
Back page Steel, Vauxhall: stop the rot!
Fight now for jobs!
AS CORUS, the AngloDutch firm that took over the remnants of British Steel in a 1999 merger, unveiled plans to sack 6,000 British steelworkers, its share price shot up.
Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the ludicrous New Labour notion of a "partnership" between workers and the companies that employ them.
Corus bosses have never made any secret of the fact that they are not in the business of making steel, but making money – for their shareholders.
That’s why they are determined not just to get rid of their plants at Llanwern and Ebbw Vale, but to ensure that nobody else takes them over to produce steel, which would then be in competition with Corus.
And it’s why Corus bosses celebrated the 1999 merger with a massive £800 million handout to shareholders, clearing out the company’s reserves, only to follow up with a continuous series of redundancies and cutbacks as they attempt to maximise profits – at the expense of their employees.
The pattern has been exactly the same as we have seen in the car industry and elsewhere: management come to timid union officials demanding concessions and redundancies in exchange for a promise to safeguard a smaller number of jobs. The unions concede – and a few months later, the bosses come back for more.
That is how the British steel industry has dwindled from its previous 300,000 workforce 30 years ago to just 22,000 if the new wave of redundancies go through. The impact on local areas around the steel plants will be brutal: whole communities will be devastated as well-paid, apparently stable jobs disappear.
More to come
Nor is there any chance that the latest round of redundancies is the last. Corus chief executive, accountant Brian Moffat, may be strutting around in a hard hat talking about drawing "a line in the sand", but steel unions have been told that Corus will invest no new money in its surviving British plants, making it likely that more closures will follow – especially if these sackings are not resisted.
Hypocritical Labour ministers bleat that they were not consulted in advance on the closure. But they know that they have already rejected the only policy that could make a difference to the company’s decision – to renationalise the British steel industry, without compensation to the shareholders who have already gobbled up billions in government handouts since the plans were flogged off by Margaret Thatcher.
Unions who have mounted no concerted opposition to steel bosses since the historic national pay strike in the first year of the Thatcher government have called no mass demonstration to challenge the redundancies, and avoided any call to occupy the affected plants. They have talked only vaguely about industrial action.
Instead they have apparently been discussing among themselves and with the government a new "package" of concessions that would cut Corus losses, and reduce the numbers of jobs lost – again at the expense of Corus workers!
Europe-wide
This would be a monumental error, especially at a time when the Vauxhall workers have shown the possibility of mobilising mass support and tapping in to solidarity in a Europe-wide fight for jobs (see Luton article ).
And with the prospect of an election looming, it is also the best time to pile pressure on the government. While British unions have dithered, and even scandalously called for some of the steel redundancies to be "shared" with other countries, the Dutch steel unions have offered a positive lead, pledging that they will not take work diverted from British plants.
A real fight could be launched, side by side with the Vauxhall workers. The possibility of building international solidarity depends upon a firm stand being taken here in defence of the threatened jobs.