Ford closures: making workers pay for capitalist failure
In Britain…
The announced closure next summer of the Ford
Transit van factory in Southampton with the loss of up to 1,500 jobs, plus the
closure of part of Fords Dagenham site at the same time, is but the latest
convulsion in the global overproduction crisis, a crisis that is nowhere more
obvious at present than in the automotive industry. With the world car market
saturated and many European production lines running at only 70% of full
capacity, competition between rival producers is acute. In their desperation to
carve out market share, manufacturers seek to undercut rivals in a frantic
price-cutting war which it is anticipated will cost each of the major European
manufacturers several hundred million euros in lost profits this year.
Desperate to claw back these losses and hang on to
market share, the capitalist can see only one way through: slash labour costs.
The same overproduction crisis that drives down the price of cars thus also
drives down the price of the labour power sold by the worker. Increasingly the
worker is told by the capital: work longer, for less pay, with less pension and
degraded working conditions, then just maybe your factory can stay open and
your job be saved (for now).
Shamefully, rather than striving to unite the
working class behind the common struggle to defeat capitalism and spurning the
notion that workers should be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not
responsible, the trade unions routinely content themselves with doing sectional
deals over redundancies, wages and conditions in the hope of preserving jobs in
one place – at the inevitable expense of jobs somewhere else. Such deals, done
in the name of “pragmatism”, perfectly complement the divide and rule
strategy of the capitalist. It is true that sometimes such deals may
temporarily contrive to hang on to some jobs for some of the time, as for
example in GM’s Ellesmere Port plant last spring, where Unite sold its members
a two year pay freeze as the price for winning a fat order and “saving”
the plant. But this stay of execution for Ellesmere Port jobs, hailed by Unite
“militant” Len McCluskey as “extremely good news”, comes at a
cost. Workers everywhere will see the downward pressure on wages and
conditions intensify with each new such “pragmatic” sacrifice. As David
Bailey, Professor of International Business Strategy and Economics at the University of Coventry, told Channel 4 News at the time, GM had played a game of “divide
and rule”. “It’s classic for them: you announce you’re going to cut
capacity, you don’t say where – and then all parties compete in a race to be
the chosen plant.”
Of course, for the Labour party such cosy
class-collaboration is right up their street. Back in May Miliband’s shadow
industry minister Chuka Umunna kibbutzed on UCATT’s annual conference to cheer
on Unite’s performance at Ellesmere Port, urging this as a template for other
unions to follow. Vacuously warning that “the voice of protest is important”
but “the voice of progress must be heard as loudly too”, he extolled the
virtues of union members as “wealth creators for this country”, telling
delegates that “We must be shouting your success from the rooftops in
helping business to succeed, in helping people to get on, to meet their
aspirations. Like GM’s recent announcement that it will build a new generation
of Astra cars at Ellesmere Port – I went on television to say this was a
shining example of trade unions as a force for economic progress for our
country, working in partnership with management and the government.”
The craven message from Labour to workers could not
be clearer: sell yourself cheaper, create more wealth for the capitalist, and
pray that the capitalist will thank you for saving his skin by letting you keep
your job – for now. And what keeps the Labour party living in the style to
which it has become accustomed? Why, the subs deducted from millions of union
members. Not only are these hapless “wealth creating” wage slaves
expected to act as selfless saviours of capitalism, they are also expected to
go on funding the same social democratic racket that has more than any other
ideological instrument protected capitalist power.
Umunna rubbed the point home himself when he
thanked UCATT delegates for giving him his tawdry career: “let me say thank
you to each and every one of you for the support this union gave me in the lead
up to the 2010 General Election – I would not be standing here as a Member of
Parliament, let alone the Shadow Business Secretary, without yours and others’
help.”
Let the working class remedy this shameful
situation without delay, breaking the union link with Labour and forging unions
which will stop the class retreat preached by the likes of Umunna. Let Ford
workers raise the demand that the plants in Southampton and Dagenham be taken
into public ownership if Ford cannot run them successfully, and let that demand
be taken up on a class-wide basis.
…and in Belgium
The overproduction crisis which is driving the
capitalist class offensive is international, and requires a no less
international counter-offensive by the working class. A day or two before news
of Ford’s UK job cuts broke, a much larger massacre of jobs was announced at
Ford’s Genk plant in Belgium. Workers frustrated by do-nothing social democratic
union leadership in Britain could learn from the example being set by some
militants over there.
In a statement on 24 October, the Workers’ Party of
Belgium (PTB) explained that “4300 jobs at Ford will be eliminated, while
another 6000 jobs will disappear indirectly. The municipality of Genk is located in the Belgian province of Limburg, in the midst of a region that was already
devastated with the closure of the coalmines some twenty years ago.
“At the beginning of 2010, Opel announced the
end of its production in its Antwerp plant, resulting in the loss of 2600 jobs.
Four months ago, there was the closure of the PSA (Peugeot-Citroën) factory in Aulnay, France, and the elimination of 8000 jobs. Everywhere, the difficult situation of
the European automobile industry is invoked as the reason: too many plants for
too small a demand and too high losses.
“But the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) demands: ‘Why do the workers have to pay for this overcapacity? They are not
responsible for this crisis. They are not responsible for the anarchy of
capitalist production, based on the search for profit for the few rather than
on the satisfaction of the people’s needs.’
“For the Limburg chairman of the PTB, Stany
Nimmegeers, the situation is clear: ‘For years on end now, the workers have
made sacrifices of all sorts, supposedly in order to assure the plant’s future.
In the latest collective bargaining agreement of 2010, they even lost 12% of
their salary. It has been 50 years now that the workers of Genk have produced
cars of a very high quality, resulting in enormous profits for the
shareholders. In 2011, Ford realized a record worldwide profit of 8 billion
euro. Just like PSA and Opel, Ford wants to make the workers bear the brunt of
the crisis. With as a consequence the further decrease in their purchasing
power and thus less consumption, leading to even more overcapacity in the long
run… In 50 years’ time, Ford has received such an amount of State subsidies,
paid with the Belgian taxpayers’ money, and Ford has made such an amount of
profit with the sweat of the Limburg workers, that this plant in fact belongs
to the workers. The public authorities need to seize the plant.’”
Such an approach clearly strikes a chord with the
working class in Genk, where the party obtained 8.6% of the vote in recent
municipal elections, returning three communist councillors.
The party has declared its support for the unions’
fight, beginning with a 24 hour strike in Genk, the only Ford plant in Limburg that is still operational.