A new wave of "big industry" job cuts has been announced. Ford is cutting 4,000 jobs across Europe, including 800 in Britain; 14% of its European/British workforce. This is on top of the 1,300 white-collar redundancies, which it announced last year.
Stellantis, the world's 4th largest car maker, is closing the historic van-making plant in Luton - with 1,200 job losses, while moving some of its production to Liverpool's Ellesmere Port.
To add to this, are knock-on effects from closures elsewhere. Volkswagen kicked-off the car-industry job cuts last month, by announcing it was shutting 3 factories in Germany. Bosch, the world's biggest parts' supplier is cutting 5,500 jobs. Three other big suppliers to engineering and car-making, Valeo, Michelin and Schaeffler are cutting at least 3,000 jobs between them - and shutting plants. They all blame the fact that the electric vehicle market never took off.
At the end of September, however, construction giant ISG collapsed into administration, which meant some 2,200 building workers were made "redundant with immediate effect. In October, JCB laid off several hunderd workers due, it said to the "slump in the construction industry"...
So, when Starmer's Work and Pensions minister, the former hard-Blairite, Liz Kendall, says she wants to "get Britain working" and is targeting the unemployed and the "record" 3m on long term sickness benefits, one can only wonder where on earth those who are taken off benefits are actually meant to find work!
Already sacking worn-out workers
In the meantime, the bosses of all companies whether private or public, are pushing worn-out senior workers out of their jobs, after a lifetime of overwork (12-hour shifts, nightwork, overtimel), many of whom have contracted long-term, chronic medical conditions. To make matters worse, the bosses are currently cutting the period of time that workers can receive sick pay and pressurising those who might need lighter duties to resign, on new, minimal redundancy terms.
In fact, as everyone in a job knows, management of whichever industry, even the railways, is constantly trying to replace senior permanent workers with cheaper temps, who at best are given fixed-term contracts, but always on lesser terms than their permanent counterparts.
This is nothing other than a systematic "jobs-kill" by the bosses. And itis happening while at the same time the unemployed and disabled on benefits are being blamed for swinging the lead and refusing to get back into work! Says Liz Kendall, there will be no more "free handouts" to those who "refuse" to work or are suffering from poor mental health! She'll offer specie measures (behaviour psychotherapy ike in the Clockwork Orange movie?) to "help" the "reluctant and work-shy" into jobs..?
A debilitated "former" workforce
In November the ONS said there were 800,000 (so not even a million) job vacancies - 2 total which hasn't changed much in over a decade, except during the pandemic. So which jobs can the apparently "fraudulently-ill" actually be placed into?
There are still 107,865 vacancies (latest figures) in the NHS alone, of course, but these mostly need the qualified staff which public sector bodies under government control have failed to train up for decades! Hence the need to poach foreign skilled workers, even while Home Secretary Cooper ramps up anti-immigrant rhetoric to play to racist prejudices!
On Monday night, Channel 4's Dispatches featured right-wing journalist Fraser Nelson's "expose" of what he calls "Britain's Benefits Scandal". He writes, "more than half of [Grimsby's] working-age population claims out-of-work benefits" and shock-horror, "no fewer than 33% are on sickness benefits".
This video "exposes" very well the fact that almost all those who Nelson interviews are unfit to work and could not in any way help solve the so-called employment crisis! In fact his real motive is to "prove" that the welfare bill can and must be cut.
Behind this reactionary nonsense, however, the reality is that the number of sick unemployed can only increase. Britain, the oldest of all industrialised countries, has one of the unhealthiest populations. It has the most polluted, derelict environment, providing, at best, old, damp, mouldy council tenements for working class people. In Grimsby, (but this goes for most of the North) life expectancy is 12 years below the national average!
Quite obviously, deprived working class communities need far more benefits, not fewer! But no government has ever provided the cash and expertise to rehabilitate the working class and the slums of the North. It's a "job" governments under capitalism will always be unfit for, since it's their system which is long-term sick: unemployment is intrinsic to it - and as capitalism degenerates further, it will only get sicker. There is only one cure: overthrow it.