What Is To Be Done to Halt the Further Decline in the Steel
Industry?
It was announced yesterday that union leaders are holding a
special summit with the aim of saving thousands of steelworkers’ jobs.
This comes in the wake of Corus, Britain’s biggest steel producer,
recently announcing more than 3,700 redundancies.
The steel union, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation,
is to meet with local officials in Cardiff, as well as community leaders to
discuss what is to be done. On Friday, Corus confirmed that it is to make 1,300
workers redundant across Wales. The company said that the job losses would hit
plants in Llanwern, Port Talbot and Ebbw Vale. It refused to rule out
compulsory redundancies. Up to 450 jobs are expected to go at Llanwern, 500 at
Port Talbot and 300 from the tinplate operations at Ebbw Vale and Trostre. A
further 150 are to go from five smaller plants, four of which are in Wales.
Corus had already announced more than 2,500 job cuts across
England and Scotland over the last month, and the ISTC has held meetings to
discuss these threatened cuts in Yorkshire and the North East. Around 670 jobs
will be axed at Scunthorpe and 530 at Teesside. A further 10 workers will lose
their jobs at the plant in Dalziel, Motherwell. The redundancies include 1,400
announced in June. Most of these were at sites at Rotherham and Sheffield, but
they included 200 at Port Talbot with the closure of the research and
development centre.
ISTC general secretary Mick Leahy said: "We shall
strive to co-ordinate with the government and local authorities a coherent
national response to the industrial and community crises caused by the Corus
job cuts around the country. We are calling on the Chancellor to act to
accelerate the restoration of a realistic and sustainable exchange rate with
the euro, before the heart is torn out of the steel communities in the
industrial heartlands."
The company also blamed the strong pound, together with
cheaper steel overseas and a decline in steel demand by manufacturers in
Britain, such as Ford. Analysts have also said the problem is connected with
the costs of producing steel here as compared with in Holland. This relates to
the fact that the Corus Group was formed from the merger of British Steel and
the Dutch company Hoogovens last year.
However, Martin O’Neill, the Chairman of the Trade and
Industry Select Committee in the House of Commons, accused Corus of "asset
stripping". He dismissed the claim that the strength of the pound was the
problem and speculated that Corus had "bought some of these plants to
close them down – in order to consolidate production elsewhere".
The Newport MP and Arts Minister Alan Howarth said that the
firm should be strong enough to survive current market conditions. "A
failure by Corus to commit themselves to the long-term future of steel-making
in Wales would have seismic consequences." There still remains a threat to
the long-term survival of the giant Llanwern works outside Newport, producing
flat steel products for the car industry and for goods including washing
machines.
Among the union leaders, Bill Morris of the TGWU said that
Corus had not discussed with unions how "overcapacity" could be
tackled, saying, "This is another example of British workers being too
cheap and too easy to sack." GMB general secretary John Edmonds said,
"They are destroying the industry with a thousand cuts. Our members in the
Welsh communities affected are distraught and we are seeking urgent talks with
the company." AEEU general secretary Sir Ken Jackson said, "The
speculation is almost unbearable for many of our members. It has been a very
difficult week and workers are very angry that they have been kept in the
dark." He had said earlier of the cuts in the North-East: "Corus is
playing a short-term game of job cuts now but with less investment for the
future. It’s the wrong way forward." He added, "We’ve
delivered productivity, but the strong pound has wiped out all the gains.
Germany and other countries are increasing production, but Britain is cutting
back."
For his part, the First Secretary of the Welsh Assembly,
Rhodri Morgan, said that everything would be done to help those workers thrown
on the dole.
Amidst all the recriminations, it is not being mentioned
that not many years ago, the case of the British Steel Corporation was being
presented as "probably the biggest turnaround story in UK industrial
history". It was one of the first acts of Margaret Thatcher in her
neo-liberal programme of privatisations that she brought in Sir Ian McGregor in
1980 to become chair of the British Steel Corporation. Having been deputy chair
of British Leyland before, he then embarked on a massive programme of
"restructuring" and cutbacks in the steel industry, and went on to
become chairman of the National Coal Board at the time of the 1984-5
miners’ strike. His mandate in the steel industry had been to turn it into
a "profitable and sound undertaking that could hold its own in the
competitive private sector". The British steel industry emerged
"leaner and fitter". The watchword was competitiveness, and it
typifies the neo-liberal programme that this aim of making industry competitive
in the global marketplace has been made the only criterion of
"success", and that general benefits to the economy and society are
said to follow from this "success". It will be remembered that the
ideological battle was being fought by Margaret Thatcher on behalf of the
bourgeoisie at that time against "vast overmanning" by "highly
unionised labour". That "restructuring" was an
"inhuman" policy was ridiculed, and it was pointed out that such
nationalised industries were making huge "losses" and suffering from
low productivity.
So a similar story was played out in the car industry and
the coal mining industry. Hundreds of thousands of workers in these industries
have lost their jobs, while the drive to become leaner and fitter has resulted
in practically the extinction of these industries, the mergers to become
trans-national companies, and so on.
It would be as misleading to suggest that it was simply the
"policy" of privatisation that has caused the crisis in these
manufacturing industries as to suggest that the unseen forces of the global
marketplace hold the answer to the regeneration of these industries. What is
happening is that the bourgeoisie’s whole programme of privatisation and
neo-liberalism in response to the crisis of the social welfare state of the
1970s and 1980s is itself in crisis. The response of the financial oligarchy
has been to demand that the penetration of finance capital should be completely
unfettered, that the inward and outward movement of capital should be
accelerated in the name of globalisation. The conception of a national economy
serving the nation’s needs has been completely thrown on the scrap heap,
and the pursuit of maximum capitalist profit is being pursued under the slogan
of the "knowledge-based economy", as though production and
manufacturing were a thing of the past. Governments such as that of Tony Blair
have declared that they can only "manage" this trend, not reverse it,
while covering over that their whole programme is designed to put the state
machinery in the service of the rich. The whole of organised labour is supposed
to put its weight behind this programme of making the various enterprises
competitive in the globalised economy, while the whole people are supposed to
enter into partnership with the government in the furtherance of this
programme.
It is vital that the workers step up their struggles
against this whole programme. They cannot allow themselves to remain
ideologically disarmed by the ideological offensive that goes with the
globalisation programme of the rich and powerful. The decline in the steel
industry is not caused by such conditioning factors as the strength of the
pound, or that the labour market is "flexible" in Britain, to use the
jargon of the bourgeois economists. The fact is that the making of the maximum
capitalist profit by any means in response to the crisis of the falling rate of
capitalist profit is being made the whole aim of economic activity. This must
be addressed by the workers who should discuss what agenda to set for society
in the face of this capitalist agenda. At the same time, they must work to open
up the space for change, and unite in struggle for their collective rights and
interests.
