How to fight job losses

The reinstatement of the sacked 647 Lindsey oil refinery (LOR) workers, with offers of work for the 51 whose redundancies sparked the walk-out at dozen of energy plants around Britain, is a triumph of rank-and-file solidarity over trade union bureaucrats, who have allowed mass unemployment to develop virtually unopposed.

Not far from the LOR plant in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire, are the Corus steelworks in Scunthorpe, Sheffield and Rotherham. Last week, the company announced the loss of another 2,000 jobs on top of the 2,500 made earlier in the year. All that the steel union Community could say was that workers were “devastated” by the news. Of any plan to resist the redundancies, which will destroy communities if they take place, there was not a word. And there won’t be.

As for the position of the union leaders in general, their craven position was summed up by a press release from the Trades Union Congress, which declared “Barber to tell Berlusconi to put jobs first in run up to G8 summit”.
This was a reference to a meeting involving TUC general secretary Barber and the deeply reactionary Italian prime minister, urging the forthcoming G8 summit chair to build “on the positive proposals in the London G20 summit declaration”. Not a spoof press release, simply shocking but true.

The outcome of the LOR strike itself only guarantees work for the 51 who were made redundant for just four weeks on the extension of the refinery owned by the oil corporation. Other details of the deal struck by union officials are not clear. There were reports during the strike that Total and its sub-contractors had broken an agreement made during the winter strikes that there would be no redundancies while Italian and Portuguese workers remained on site.

What is unambiguous, however, is that 25% of workers normally involved in oil refinery construction are out of work and that the dole queue is lengthening hour by hour throughout the country. Warnings that the British economy is lurching towards a deeper crash as the banking crisis intensifies, will lead to even more rapid job losses, short-time working and demands for pay cuts and, as at British Airways, working for nothing at all.

The LOR strike showed that workers will fight back, given half a chance, and that anti-union laws that ban solidarity actions are no deterrence to the rank-and-file, even if they remain sacrosanct as far as the union leaders are concerned (who declined to make the walk-outs official for fear of being taken to court).

Ultimately, however, the cards remain stacked in favour of corporations like Total because they will still decide who works and who doesn’t, based on considerations of profit and nothing else.

Answering that, and to fight unemployment in a serious way, means challenging the ownership and control of the means to work. It requires a plan to transfer economic power into the hands of ordinary people, mobilising those in and outside the trade unions. Then a strategy could be developed to reorganise the economy in such a way that unemployment is eradicated, something that is not possible under capitalism generally and even more so at a time of global slump.

At the centre of this perspective has to be a campaign to remove the discredited and reactionary New Labour government from office now, rather than waiting for a general election and the seemingly inevitable return of the Tories. That would open up important issues about political power itself. Building a movement along these lines would build on the success of the LOR strike rather than waiting for the employers to strike back.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

'Creative destruction' order of the day

Despite the G20’s attempts at confidence-boosting rhetoric, the interdependent components of the global economy remain locked in a deadly embrace, wrestling with each other as they plummet to the ground. 

Ever more desperate attempts to resuscitate the fantastic but failed world of credit and debt dilute the value of currencies and further worsen the health of the global corporations as demand falls for the goods they produce, sending their share prices down.   

In Britain, all talk of a “recovery” later this year has disappeared and next week’s Budget is in fact a crisis measure as public finances spiral out of control. European steel production is close to collapse and a trade war with China is looming over its dumping strategy. 

The Irish government is the first to admit in practice that neither additional government borrowing, nor expanding the supply of money can help its country withstand the impact of the global crisis of dwindling production and consumption. It won’t be the last. 

In measures designed to forestall the looming threat of state bankruptcy, its emergency second budget looks like the flailing autotomised arms of a threatened octopus, when a limb is severed by the endangered creature. 

In a so far maverick response to the shock forecast that economic activity in the Republic is forecast to shrink by 8% this year, a dramatic worsening of last year’s 3% contraction, finance minister Brian Lenihan warned of "a serious decline in national living standards: the sharpest fall on record.” 

Taxes will rise, though not on corporate profits, and spending on services will be slashed. In the public sector pay will be hard hit affecting a large part of the population. 

Nevertheless, with already the worst government deficit in Europe, and the entire financial sector in a state of collapse, a new Irish agency will be provided with funds to buy up the banks’ property and land-based bad debt. The catch here is that no-one knows what its real value is, nor what the price should be.

Elsewhere in Europe, rather than taking the route of printing money to add to the trillions already given or promised to the banks, Germany and France have been giving away €2,500 vouchers in a new-for-old car scrapping scheme. 

Demand for Germany’s scheme has been hugely successful. Far more people have applied than expected, and concern is rising about the public anger that will erupt when the money runs out. Angela Merkel’s surprised government has added a further €3.5bn taking the total available to €5bn. 

Sales of brand new small cars have soared, but there’s a catch here too - it doesn’t seem to have increased consumption overall. The second hand market has collapsed completely and what spending there is, is transferring from other products like TVs and sofas. 

As the crisis enters historically uncharted territory, governments are exhausting all the weapons they can use in their attempts to rescue the capitalist way of life. The Irish pioneers have opened the doors to a new phase. 

Joseph Schumpeter, an economist high priest of capitalist business cycles, and an opponent of Keynes, described the process in his famous book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, when he wrote: “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”

 

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

 

 

 

G20: the state flexes its muscles

“We are ready to challenge orthodoxy and we foster a spirit of critical enquiry and innovation to achieve our goals.” So reads part of the “Our values” section of the University of East London’s website. Click through to the home page, however, and we learn that the university, which is near the venue for the G20 summit, will be closed for 48 hours from tonight. And the authorities have simply cancelled the Alternative G20 summit scheduled to take place on the campus tomorrow, citing “security concerns” at “such a sensitive time”.

As usual, the reasons cited for this draconian attack on democratic liberties are only remotely connected to the real thinking behind the decision by UEL’s “corporate management team”. The website claims that “uncertainty about transport and possible disruption around the G20 Summit at Excel” is the cause for the campus shutdown– as if anyone seriously believes that this is a valid excuse for shutting a whole university down and cancelling a conference that had attracted a wide range of academics, writers and activists to debate the notion that another world is possible.

A protest petition calling on UEL to reverse its decision, notes: “The past three decades have seen public spaces such as universities hollowed out by the state and by corporations, as more and more of our common resources are transformed into sterile commodities, valued only in cash terms.

“In universities this has led to a policy regime which increasingly sees ‘employability’ in the ‘creative industries’ or in ‘business and finance’ as the only benchmark of success by which a university education can be judged; which sees research separated from teaching; which sees ‘knowledge transfer’ to the commercial sector as the only legitimate destination for the fruits of inquiry.”

The petition insists correctly that there “is a deep connection between this process and the ones that have led the world to its current state of social and economic injustice and climate chaos”. Breaking this relationship “ cannot be done if spaces for debate, questioning and social invention are closed down”. None of this is likely to cut any ice with UEL’s authorities, who are an adjunct of the state. They have undoubtedly been lent on by the police and the Home Office and quickly jumped to. Gordon Brown’s meaningless showpiece summit must take place without any disruption, protected by hundreds of armed police and soldiers. Such is the popularity of the leaders of global capitalism that they can only meet in a sterile zone, physically as well as mentally.

As British “democracy” swings into action, residents near the summit venue in east London are also facing arbitrary action by the authorities. Here the police have taken it upon themselves to demand photo ID before people are allowed to reach their own homes near the summit.

The police have no lawful authority for doing this – but, hell, those world leaders are too important to let the rule of law and other niceties stand in the way. One of a series of angry (and amusing) responses included this from James Elliott: “If the police have no legal right to demand ID, should not our Home Secretary drag herself away from her taxpayer provided TV and get the Met's house in order. No doubt the G20 requires security measures, but I cannot see why we should tolerate the Met. behaving outside the law.”

What we are witnessing around the G20 summit is the state flexing its muscles for the social unrest that is building as the out-of-control economic and financial crisis takes it toll on people’s lives and aspirations. The future will be decided by whoever holds and deploys state power. At present, this power is in the hands of a minority of economic, financial and political elites, protected by their boot boys. Transforming this relationship to one where the majority hold power has to be our goal.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor