Time to say no further

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Time to say no further

(Friday 28 November 2008)






CAPITALISM'S self-generated crisis has not only claimed the jobs of City bankers and speculators, despite the bewailings of the bourgeois press.



Increasingly, decent working men and women up and down the country are paying the price for a crisis that they had no hand in provoking and no say in how it is handled.

And their jobs are vanishing with the casual brutality that is typical of capitalism at its worst.


No notice, no redundancy payments, no consultation and no care whatsoever for the fate of the families that are being consigned to the scrapheap which is unemployment in crisis-ridden and heedless free-market Britain are the hallmarks of industrial relations during this period.


When a firm becomes insolvent, the interests of the employees take a back seat, both in the minds of managers who merely say, "that's your lot" and shut down, and in terms of workers' rights to whatever assets the companies have left.


If there was ever a time for trade unions to spend some effort rethinking their priorities when exercising their influence with the Labour government, this is it.


Workers in the public sector, who are being made the target of Chancellor Alistair Darling's misnamed and absurd "efficiency savings" of £5 billion in his pre-Budget statement - which will be added to the £30 billion already announced in the 2007 spending review - are in for a hard time if the Chancellor gets his way and those mindless and ill-considered cuts are going to have to be fought to a standstill.


An economy faced with near-collapse can ill afford the burden of the levels of unemployment that those so-called savings imply, let alone the restriction in administrative capacity which would go with them.


Workers in the private sector who are employed by big companies which are cutting back will also take it in the neck, despite having at least some leverage when it comes to redundancy pay.


However, large redundancy payments are a thing of the past and are, anyway, of little use when there is no prospect of other work on the horizon.


But, for workers in the small to middle-sized companies that are shutting up shop almost daily now, the prospect of a bleak Christmas and an even bleaker new year is all that they have.


And all of these different types of workers require a far different strategy than that which has been adopted of recent years.


The cry used to be: "No redundancies." Then, almost imperceptibly, it slipped to: "No compulsory redundancies," as trade unions lost confidence in their ability to confront and face down big business, due to the anti-union laws and the silence of new Labour when it came to reinstating workers' rights and ability to organise effective resistance to predatory capitalism.


It is time now for the trade unions to use all their influence with the government to force the removal of these laws and to tell new Labour that their members have every bit as much right as bankers to have their livelihoods saved and will fight for that right.


"No redundancies" must again become a rallying call of the trade unions and no closures a policy demand made to the government.


Unions cannot allow the survival of business to be dependent on the loss of trade unionists' jobs and, if the anti-union laws get in the way, they must become the dead letter which the prison officers have already demonstrated that they can be.

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