The list of job cuts in the car industry is getting longer week by week. After Land Rover, Jaguar, Toyota and Nissan, it was Ford's turn last week with the announcement of 850 job cuts. Then on Monday came the news that 850 BMW agency workers at Cowley in Oxford had been sacked at the end of their weekend shift, with no warning. This made the headlines for once, not so much because of the job cuts themselves but because of the brutal way in which they were implemented.
But then, of course, this is only the visible part of the much bigger iceberg of unrecorded job cuts. How many agency and other temps have already been thrown out of the plants by the car giants - just as in every other major industry - without any redundancy pay of any kind and without a chance in hell to find another job?
The profit sharks have got away with too much for too long!
For years the car companies have been riding roughshod over our conditions. They have been allowed to use all kinds of tricks to save on wages, from outsourcing to part-time, fixed-term or agency work. They knew what they were doing. Not just cutting their costs in the short term, but preparing themselves for times when it would be vital for them to be able t split our ranks by using all these divisions against us.
Such was the true nature of the "flexible labour market" that Blair and Brown boasted so much about. They claimed they were "fighting joblessness" when, in fact, they were only out to push the jobless out of the unemployment count. Of course, right across the economy, the bosses were only too willing to oblige.
Millions of workers were forced into casual jobs of all kinds. In fact, these jobs were often non-jobs, with no guarantee whatsoever, particularly no guarantee to provide even a minimal living income. Many workers who were chucked out of benefits had to work a few hours here and a few hours there, just to be entitled to family credits, without being really better off than when they were on the dole. The only winners were the bosses, who were allowed to boost their profits by turning the employment legislation on its head.
All the big companies, including the car giants, seized the opportunity offered by the government. Only they did not even have the excuse of the hard time faced by many small businesses. With blatant cynicism, they just cut the number of permanent jobs they offered to a trickle, forcing an increasing part of their workforce into precarious employment. BMW topped the league of the car industry offenders by resorting to record levels of agency work. But it is only one among many companies in the economy as a whole, which felt they could get away with it and made a packet out of such practices.
Yet, it would have been possible to oppose the introduction of such schemes at the time. But union leaders preferred to retain their cosy relations with the bosses. Instead of offering workers ways of resisting the bosses' profit drive, they signed up willingly to all these dirty deals.
Today, the BMWs the Fords, the GMs and the Nissans of this world are exploiting the advantage bestowed upon them by the union machineries' refusal to fight. And by an even more cynical twist, they are being subsidised by the government out of our taxes in order to do just that!
It is time for workers to turn the screw on the profiteers!
But this does not mean that workers are disarmed. The companies still need us to make their products - whether parts, engines, or whole cars, in the case of the car industry.
There are immediate solutions which could stop the growing flood of redundancies. Because all these big companies still have enormous assets which they could use to pay the full wages of existing workers without cutting any jobs.
As for the work - if there is less of it, that is no bad thing given the current long hours and line speeds, not to mention the apparent "need" for working at night! No, there is every reason to share work out among us so that everyone can work a more reasonable number of hours - i.e., a lot less - without any loss of pay!
Companies which do not use their assets to avoid cutting jobs and wages could be taken over by the state without compensation for shareholders and run on a non-profit basis instead of being subsidised to maintain their profits!
To impose these demands, however, we cannot rely on union leaders who have endorsed every past attempt of the bosses to squeeze ever more profits by cutting our conditions. We can only count on our own determination to stop the job-slashers. It is within our own ranks that will find the fighting leadership we need.
There was never any stake for us workers in helping the companies to make profits by giving up our rights. Nor is there any stake in helping them to get subsidies from the government, as union leaders at present claim. Our interest - on the contrary - is in making the bosses, their mates in banking and their big shareholders, pay for the crisis they have caused to the very last penny, by using the enormous profits they squeezed out of our labour over all these years. And we can only do that by fighting them collectively. All the way.