The possible closure of Tata Steel's main operations in Britain means that the jobs of up to 40,000 workers are under threat - 15,000 employed by Tata and another 25,000 by its suppliers.
This attack on steel jobs is the latest in a long series. Already, back in the 1980s, almost 2/3 of the industry's 156,000 jobs had been cut in the run-up to privatisation, in 1988. And the job cuts carried on. So much so, that by the time Tata Steel bought most of what remained of the privatised steel industry, in 2007, the workforce was down to a grand total of 29,000.
Then, last October, SSI's Redcar steel plant closed down, with 2,200 job losses, followed by Caparo's facilities, with 1,700 redundancies. Meanwhile, Tata Steel was slashing 2,250 jobs. And if this new round of closures goes ahead, there will only be about 9,000 steelworkers left, all in all.
Real causes and red herrings
What are the real reasons behind these massive job cuts? Today, almost everyone - from Cameron's ministers to Corbyn and the union leaders - blames the steel industry's crisis on China, which is accused of dumping its excess steel onto the world market at bargain-basement prices.
The real cause, however, is much more fundamental. In fact, it is linked to the workings of the capitalist system itself.
For a long time already, there has been an overproduction of steel across the world, partly due to massive (and very profitable) speculation on commodities and partly due to the slow-down in world trade which took place after the banking crisis broke out. Today, the excess of production capacity over demand is estimated to be 600m tonnes a year worldwide. Compared to this figure, China's exports of just over 100m tonnes a year can hardly be considered a decisive factor!
What this worldwide overproduction does, however, is to create cut-throat competition between the big steel companies. In order to protect their profits, they use every trick in the book. In particular, they cut investment to the strict minimum while cutting the wage bill to the bare bone. And when, despite this, a plant does not produce enough profits to their liking, they just close it down.
The reality is that the capitalist economy is in the middle of an on-going crisis. Being based on the permanent competition between rival capitalists, its inability to plan its production according to need is already, in and of itself, a cause of chaos. But the fact that, in addition, the capitalists are able to make huge profits by speculating on everything that can be bought and sold - thanks to the sophisticated tools made available by financial markets - only results in an exacerbation of this chaos on a colossal scale.
Beware of blind alleys
This is why the joint statement issued by the steel unions on April 4th does not make sense.
In this statement, they outline a plan supposedly designed to make the British steel industry "viable" and demand that "the government must invest in our steel industry to give it a future".
As if it was in the steelworkers' interest to make this industry "viable" - that is, profitable for the capitalists! Indeed, going down this road has a dangerous logic of its own: profits only exist because exploitation does and offering to make an industry "viable" for the bosses is just another way of volunteering to be more exploited!
The same is true of the use of phrases such as "our steel industry" or "save our steel". As far as we, workers, are concerned, the steel industry (like the whole economy) belongs to the capitalist class - and it still would if it was nationalised, as some have suggested. If it did belong to us, there would be no job cuts in the first place and, above all, working in a steel mill would not be one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs, as it is today!
Of course, if the Tata Steel workers lose their jobs, it will be a disaster for them, but also a devastating blow for communities whose lives have long revolved around steel production. But does this mean that the only prospect they can have is to hang on at all costs to an investment-starved steelworks and to their dangerous jobs? Surely not!
Instead of begging the government to bail out Tata as the union leaders do - and using the bank bailout as an example (as if the whole working class was not still footing the bill for it!) - why shouldn't Tata pay its debt to the workers who filled its coffers over the past decade? Closing down its plants was its decision, so why should workers suffer? And, with £5bn profits last year on assets worth £82bn, it could easily pay all its workers their full wages for as long as it takes for them to find another job or retire on a generous pension!