Challenges facing the unions in 2009
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
January 2009
Over the past few weeks, working people are as likely to have been wringing
their hands in anxiety at job losses as listening to the ringing of jingle
bells.
Daily news reports and pundits’ commentaries harshly confirm two central truths:
capitalism doesn’t work, and the working class are being pounded with the devastating
consequences, to make us pay for the crisis created by the capitalist elite.
For years we were told – by New Labour politicians in particular – that the days
of boom and bust were over; that the government’s fiscal ingenuity, extended
credit and the inherent glories of the market system would guarantee a rosy future.
Now economists are competing for who can come up with the gloomiest forecasts
for 2009 and beyond.
Typical headlines and predictions are: “600,000 jobs to go in 2009 – 1,600 a
day”; “100,000 Scots to lose their jobs”; “Worst level of redundancies in 30
years”; “Employers hold back on redundancies until after Xmas”…
The Scottish Council for Development and Industry has just predicted the first
year of ‘negative economic growth’ in Scotland since 1980.
Closures
Recent weeks have seen closure of the iconic Woolies stores on every
High St, with 27,000 workers thrown on the scrapheap after a century
of trading.
Other household names in retail, the finance sector and the car industry
have seen equivalent levels of job decimation and threats to workers’
futures.
The merger of HBoS with Lloyds threatens up to 40,000 finance workers’
jobs.
The retail sector is poised on the brink of a slaughter: Experian forecast
1,600 retailers will be driven out of business this year, leaving one
in ten shops empty.
Yet that was precisely one of the areas that mopped up previous mass
unemployment, replacing it with mass low pay for hundreds of thousands
of retail workers struggling to survive on pay just pennies above the
pathetic minimum wage. Now it’s back to mass unemployment.
In the car industry, workers suffer mass lay-offs, job cuts and enforced
down time. Toyota, Honda and Nissan have shut down production for two
months. Vauxhalls have ‘offered’ their 2,200 Ellesmere Port workers a
9-month ‘sabbatical’ – on 30 per cent pay!
Pay Cuts
The other favoured trick of employers being deployed is pay cuts. In
JCB, for example, they told the workforce in November that unless they
took a 10 per cent pay cut there would be further redundancies – on
top of the 600 since August 2008. The GMB union lay down and accepted
this demand, which cut pay by £50 a week through reduced hours… and
then JCB bosses proceeded to impose another fresh bout of 400 redundancies,
plus announcements of zero pay rise for 2009, and removal of the profit-related
Xmas bonus (which was £1,000 in 2007). A classic proof that weakness
invites aggression, as the bosses pile the crisis of their own creation
onto the backs of workers.
Public Sector
The private sector may be first in line for the wave of closures and
job losses, but the public sector faces the same future. Behind all
the hype around the government’s November pre-Budget, they kept hidden
their plans to cut public expenditure by £5billion a year from 2011.
That spells a devastating assault on public sector jobs and the services
they provide – and will be even more deep-cutting given that public
spending on unemployment benefits is set to rocket meantime.
The trade unions and socialists face their biggest challenges for decades, in the face of the destruction of communities, workers’ lives and living standards through capitalist crisis. In fighting mass redundancies and closures, there are never any cast-iron guarantees of victory. But one thing is certain: weak-kneed acceptance of the bosses’ demands guarantees terrible defeats for workers and their families. Talk in some union circles about a Social Contract between unions, employers and the government is a cruel road to ruin, which has been travelled before, particularly in the 1970s.
Class divide
Instead of pretending that workers and their bosses have a common interest
that should be turned into some kind of ‘Spirit of Dunkirk’, we need
to expose the gulf dividing the interests of these two classes. For
example, the top seven directors in Fords last year had salaries and
pensions totalling £100million – whilst they refused to invest that
same amount in their Southampton plant to build the new Transit van.
Low-paid workers would spend the extra money gained if the minimum wage
was boosted to two-thirds male median earnings – that would be a minimum
of between £8.50 and £9 an hour currently – whereas the same bosses who
echo Gordon Brown’s talk of setting aside ‘prudence’ and spending our
way out of the recession are also calling for a freeze on the derisory
£5.80 minimum wage.
Pay cuts at JCB did nothing to stop further redundancies – but boosted
the employers’ profit margins.
Instead of covering up the truth behind the recession, the mighty potential
power of the organised working class in the unions should be mobilised
around a massive campaign to halt mass redundancies. They need to fashion
an armoury of fighting demands that could rally workers in united action
for an alternative to job losses and pay cuts.
35 hour week – without loss of earnings
Instead of pay cuts through lay-offs, they should demand the work be
shared out without loss of earnings.
The unions should resist the calls from Brown and Cameron to allow the
UK continued opt-out from the European Working Time Directives, which
is only a mild-mannered protection from being COMPELLED to work more
than an average 48-hour week (workers can still waive this right and
work it ‘voluntarily’ under the opt-out clause). And instead put on a
‘drive for 35’ – a united union fight for a maximum 35 hour working week,
which would create vast numbers of jobs … but critically demand this
be without any pay cuts.
This would raise the whole issue: where have all the profits gone… and
where have all the state subsidies gone? Companies have been bailed out
with taxpayers’ money, development grants etc, but now want to protect
their profit margins at workers’ expense (as NCR did in Dundee last year).
The unions should demand open, public scrutiny of the accounts of any
company threatening job losses – to expose the fact many of them have
enjoyed an orgy of profiteering for years, dividends to the big shareholders
and obscene bonuses to the top bosses – whilst leaving thousands who
created that wealth without a source of income.
Seize company assets
The unions should also demand that the government seize the assets of
companies threatening closures, to stop corporate asset strippers,
many of whom shift their production to slave-wage economies abroad.
By taking over their assets the government could then employ the skills
of workers to produce for social need.
Production for social need
Back in the 1970s many fighting union leaderships – particularly at shopfloor
level – devised alternative schemes of useful production for their
workplaces. In the 21st century this becomes even more vital as one
of the fighting weapons against mass unemployment: the skills and machinery
are often there, available for adaptation to socially useful and environmentally
sustainable production.
For example, rather than rely on the bubble of crazy credit and artificially
created consumer spending – both of which are now in freefall – the unions
could advance a programme of useful public works and green production
around public transport, social housing, universal insulation of homes,
alternative sources of energy, etc.
Public ownership – not bailouts of profit
The government has bailed out the bankers. Demands are growing for government
investment in the ailing car industry. But instead of subsidising the
profits of the capitalist gangsters who have ruined people’s lives,
the unions should campaign for public ownership of the machinery, buildings,
production and distribution, under democratic control.
Such a socialist alternative, combined with militant forms of struggle,
would encourage workers that there is something can be done in the face
of the capitalist recession.
There is no one-size-fits-all method of struggle, but workplace occupations
may arise again as a viable way of halting closures, provided union leaderships
encourage a fight rather than whip up surrender. Otherwise the danger
is that many will be overwhelmed, feeling that they are being devoured
by a Juggernaut that cannot be halted as it closes down workplaces and
smashes jobs.
The recession throws down the challenges: socialists in workplaces and
unions need to encourage a vision of ways of halting the slaughter of
livelihoods and shaping a socialist future in the process.