Britain is bankrupt – and not just financially either. The obscene bidding war that is going on about public spending cuts confirms that all the major parties have gone bust too as they fall over themselves to offer more pain than their rivals.
The Liberal Democrats are, of course, neither liberal nor democrat but a version of Toryism that goes back to the 18th century. So leader Nick Clegg can pledge “savage spending cuts” while Vince Cable wants a public sector pay freeze.
New Labour’s Ed Balls is offering up deputy head teachers galore as ministers begin to wield the axe while the Tories say they will take drastic action to stabilise public finances if they win the forthcoming general election.
Now the election could produce a hung parliament, with the possibility of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition the outcome. How this might work out in practice is being rehearsed in Leeds, where the city council is under the control of just such a coalition. The council leader is Lib Dem Richard Brett.
The council is cutting the wages of refuse collectors by up to £6,000 a year. More than 500 refuse and street cleaning workers have vowed to strike indefinitely against the plan. The council is presently using private contractors to try and break the strike.
Behind the panic over spending cuts is the fear of the ruling classes that the British state could become insolvent. The Sunday Telegraph yesterday spelled out the disaster scenario, noting that the national debt was equivalent to more than £25,000 for every family in Britain. Interest payments alone are heading towards £60 billion every year.
The paper held out the prospect of a Lehman Brothers debacle where the investment bank went bust after lenders refused to extend further credit, warning: “Something similar could easily happen to Britain. If foreign investors lose confidence in our ability to repay our colossal debts, we will go bust .. Such a crisis, if it happens, will make the present one look positively kind.”
So what’s on offer is a nothing less than an alliance between the state and the bankers to punish working people for the madness of capitalism. The state under the Tories and then New Labour embraced wholeheartedly the creation of an unsustainable debt-driven economy. When this crashed last year, the banks that stoked up fantasy finance were bailed out with taxpayers’ money. Now services and pay have to be slashed to the bone so that the same bankers can stay in business.
Yet none of this will do the trick anyway. As George Parker, the Financial Times’ political editor, remarks today: “No other big country has seen its public finances wrecked by the financial crisis in quite the same way as Britain. The next election will be dominated by questions about when and where to cut a deficit amounting to one-eighth of the country’s income.”
In other words, the sums are simply too huge for a cut here or there to make a difference. At the same time, the financial system itself is on life-support. The magnitude of debts still out there mean that most banks are insolvent, lacking the assets to cover loans that are “non-performing”.
What is unfolding is an historic crisis of the capitalist state and the financial system which won’t be solved by a general election. What is demanded is a total reconstruction of the political and economic system along democratic lines, which involves the repudiation of debts to bankers and the closure of financial markets. Campaigning along these lines would have the merit of seizing the initiative rather than leaving it to Brown, Clegg and Cameron.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label pay cuts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pay cuts. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Car workers abandoned by union leaders
Toyota car workers at plants around the country yesterday voted by more than two to one to accept a 10% cut in pay and hours, which was recommended to them by UNITE and GMB unions on the spurious grounds that the negotiated “deal” was better than redundancy.
Peter Tsouvallaris, the UNITE representative at Toyota, argued that the deal would mean that workers would not suffer the fate of the 1,000 workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), 850 at Mini and 1,200 at Nissan who have their jobs cut recently. But taking a pay cut won’t save Toyota. Predictions are that the company will face an operating loss of £3.4 billion by the end of March due to sharp falls in global sales. Sales of new cars in February in Britain were 22% lower than a year earlier.
And while the unions betray their members by peddling hours and pay cuts as the lesser of two evils, 1,000 jobs are disappearing each week in the Birmingham area alone in companies supplying the major manufacturers. And union leaders are doing nothing about it.
Other car manufacturers are in the same position as Toyota. General Motors introduced a three-year wage freeze for Canadian workers earlier this month. GM Europe, Vauxhall’s parent company last week warned that it was about to go bankrupt. GM spokesman said that "everything will fall over" if support for the company was not forthcoming. This includes plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton, which employ 4,000 people. GM is seeking huge bail-outs from European governments as a price for keeping plants open.
Is there any help forthcoming from the Trades Union Congress about how to cope with the threat of the sack? Well, actually no. In two booklets, called Coping with the Downturn and Facing Redundancy, pains are taken to explain the difference between the “sack” and “redundancy”, claiming that “redundancy is a fair reason for dismissal”.
Clearly the TUC believes that unemployment is inevitable and that people must accept the “fate” that capitalism is dishing out to them. It sees its role as mediating between workers, their employers and the government to convince workers that there is no alternative and that they must accept the pain and find ways to live in poverty.
The stark fact is that no amount of pay freezing and shorter hours will resolve the massive over-capacity that has built up in the industry over past decades, not to speak of the ongoing collapse of the global capitalist economy. As to the claim by union bureaucrats that their “solution” is the lesser of two evils, well, as someone once said, the lesser of two evils is still an evil.
Instead of accepting the demands of the global corporations, there has to be an organised resistance to the economic slump. It’s not going to come from UNITE and GMB leaders, who have run up the white flag, nor TUC bureaucrats. If Toyota and other corporations are going bust, it is because the economic system they are part of has fallen off a cliff.
The real way forward is for global car business to be run on an entirely different, not-for-profit way in a re-shaped transport industry. In any case, what is the point of the vast over-capacity in the motor industry, which churns out unneeded metal boxes while carbon-induced climate change takes the planet to hell on wheels?
It’s time for the biggest industrial and social change ever. Toyota and GM workers could be making really useful, ecologically-sound forms of transport. The first step towards that goal is an occupation of threatened plants and an ousting of the executives whose failed policies have brought the company to its knees and the removal of union officials who have absolutely no intention of leading a fight back.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
Peter Tsouvallaris, the UNITE representative at Toyota, argued that the deal would mean that workers would not suffer the fate of the 1,000 workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), 850 at Mini and 1,200 at Nissan who have their jobs cut recently. But taking a pay cut won’t save Toyota. Predictions are that the company will face an operating loss of £3.4 billion by the end of March due to sharp falls in global sales. Sales of new cars in February in Britain were 22% lower than a year earlier.
And while the unions betray their members by peddling hours and pay cuts as the lesser of two evils, 1,000 jobs are disappearing each week in the Birmingham area alone in companies supplying the major manufacturers. And union leaders are doing nothing about it.
Other car manufacturers are in the same position as Toyota. General Motors introduced a three-year wage freeze for Canadian workers earlier this month. GM Europe, Vauxhall’s parent company last week warned that it was about to go bankrupt. GM spokesman said that "everything will fall over" if support for the company was not forthcoming. This includes plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton, which employ 4,000 people. GM is seeking huge bail-outs from European governments as a price for keeping plants open.
Is there any help forthcoming from the Trades Union Congress about how to cope with the threat of the sack? Well, actually no. In two booklets, called Coping with the Downturn and Facing Redundancy, pains are taken to explain the difference between the “sack” and “redundancy”, claiming that “redundancy is a fair reason for dismissal”.
Clearly the TUC believes that unemployment is inevitable and that people must accept the “fate” that capitalism is dishing out to them. It sees its role as mediating between workers, their employers and the government to convince workers that there is no alternative and that they must accept the pain and find ways to live in poverty.
The stark fact is that no amount of pay freezing and shorter hours will resolve the massive over-capacity that has built up in the industry over past decades, not to speak of the ongoing collapse of the global capitalist economy. As to the claim by union bureaucrats that their “solution” is the lesser of two evils, well, as someone once said, the lesser of two evils is still an evil.
Instead of accepting the demands of the global corporations, there has to be an organised resistance to the economic slump. It’s not going to come from UNITE and GMB leaders, who have run up the white flag, nor TUC bureaucrats. If Toyota and other corporations are going bust, it is because the economic system they are part of has fallen off a cliff.
The real way forward is for global car business to be run on an entirely different, not-for-profit way in a re-shaped transport industry. In any case, what is the point of the vast over-capacity in the motor industry, which churns out unneeded metal boxes while carbon-induced climate change takes the planet to hell on wheels?
It’s time for the biggest industrial and social change ever. Toyota and GM workers could be making really useful, ecologically-sound forms of transport. The first step towards that goal is an occupation of threatened plants and an ousting of the executives whose failed policies have brought the company to its knees and the removal of union officials who have absolutely no intention of leading a fight back.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
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