Another 1,050 jobs are to go this month in the steel industry, after the 4,500 which went in the last three months of last year. This time, it is the country's largest steel plant, the Tata-owned Port Talbot facility in South Wales, which will be hardest hit, losing over 10% of its 7,000 workforce.
Of course, Tata pulls out the usual tired excuse. It claims that this is "necessary" because, due to a drastic fall in the world price of steel products, Port-Talbot is "losing £1m a day". As if anyone could take this seriously! Didn't Tata's profits reach a huge £7bn last year? What would it cost the company to share the work out between all existing workers without any redundancies or pay cuts? Just 5% of its profits - a pittance!
But, never mind. Everyone, from union leaders to Labour politicians, seems to take Tata's claim at face value and is now demanding that the government should "rescue" the steel industry.
Not a penny for the shareholders!
In fact, no matter how much wealth the steel companies accumulated in the past, thanks to sweating their workforces, neither union leaders nor Labour politicians even dare suggest that these companies and their shareholders should be made to pay the cost of saving these jobs.
No, what they all agree on, is that the government should come up with some sort of magical "rescue package" for the industry, which would help to protect the steel bosses' profits and their shareholders' dividends. As if, in and of itself, this could protect workers' jobs!
For instance, there are those who argue that the steel industry should benefit from a state-funded rescue package similar to the bailout enjoyed by the banks over the past 8 years. Of course, the banks' profits more than recovered. But this was also at a huge cost for jobs: well over 100,000 disappeared in banking - and not among the kinds of jobs linked to the mad speculation of the pre-crisis period, but mostly low-paid clerical jobs!
Similarly, there are those, particularly among union leaders, who argue for the government to spearhead what they call an "industrial plan" designed to make the British steel industry more competitive on the world market.
For a start, they join the steel bosses' calls for reducing the tax and energy costs that the steel industry has to pay. But, in fact, Cameron has already obliged without much prompting. Deals are being negotiated with electricity providers to reduce the bills of large industrial consumers. And, at the end of last year, Cameron said that the environment levy the steel companies had been paying to offset their contribution to global warming, would be refunded. As if it wasn't only right that polluters should be made to pay for their pollution!
In it together with Chinese workers
So what else do union leaders want the government to do in order to protect steel jobs? Quite simply, they want Cameron to stop foreign imports, especially from China, which they accuse of flooding the world market with cheap steel products sold below their production costs.
Ironically, though, slapping huge import tariffs on Chinese steel would be self-defeating. Indeed, the odds are that China would then stop buying the 15% of Britain's steel exports it buys today!
But, in addition, under the pretext of protecting Britain's steel industry, this really amounts to claiming that workers here can only defend their jobs - that is, their right to a decent income - by depriving other workers, in China, of theirs.
Despite being portrayed today as the world's largest economy, China remains a poor country. What's more, it is going through a deep economic crisis. This is mainly due to the economic slowdown in the rest of the world and, to a lesser extent, to a domestic banking crisis.
Since 2007, the Chinese working class has paid dearly for the world crisis - with 890,000 jobs cut in coal and 550,000 in steel among others. But the Chinese workers have been responding in kind. Despite a very repressive regime, strikes doubled in 2015 compared to the previous year, reaching over 2,700. Two-thirds of these strikes were over unpaid wages, often following job cuts.
Is it in our interests, as workers, here, in Britain, to support a policy which would result in more job cuts for our class brothers and sisters in China?
Surely not. We should leave such narrow nationalism to union leaders who don't seem to be able to make up their minds as to which side they're on. But our side is that of the international working class to which we belong - and our only enemies, those who should pay for this crisis, are the capitalists, whoever they may be.