Ellesmere Port faces GM axe
WORKERS, JUNE 2006 ISSUE
Nine hundred jobs are set to go at Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port plant – a third of the workforce. The sight of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling going cap in hand to General Motors pleading for a future was pathetic. If they had not entrenched themselves in the European Union, had not reinforced and kept in place the Thatcher anti-union legislation and had not overseen the destruction of British manufacturing at an accelerated rate during the past nine years, then they may have had harsher words for General Motors. Instead they whinge and grovel.
Amicus and the TGWU are forthright in calling for resistance to the job losses and redundancy offers. The walkout by Vauxhall workers was a good start, not rolling over and dying like at Rover, but it has to go further – such as boycotting General Motors, campaigning in new ways against the greatest attack on civil liberties – the enshrined anti-trade union legislation.
Vauxhall dealership: the axe hangs over British workers Photo: Workers
There are currently five Vauxhall plants producing Astras. The older ones are in Ellesmere Port, Antwerp in Holland and Bochum in Germany. The new ones are in eastern Germany and Poland where labour costs can be about a third of Dutch, British and west German rates.
Citroen–Peugeot recently decided to transfer its Coventry production to Slovakia, tipped to become the motor manufacturing centre of Europe. As for Rover, the Chinese ran off with the intellectual rights to the brand, and we can expect to see identical vehicles imported from China in years to come. Workers at the Astra plant know that they cannot compete with labour this cheap. They know that the reduction from three shifts to two is the run-up for the five plants to compete against one another for the right to build the Astra's replacement at two or three plants at most.
Another battle faces Liverpool. The Ellesmere Port workers are being urged by their unions to reject the voluntary redundancy invitations that will shortly be issued, and if the long term future of the plant cannot be guaranteed, based on production of the new model, then a boycott of General Motors vehicles should be organised to deny them its British market.
The root of this destruction of British manufacturing lies in the European Union, and only by taking it on can we defend manufacturing. All the traditional methods that a government could take to protect its national industry – import controls, ban on export of capital, government assistance to industry, etc – are now illegal under the EU rules.
We have to learn how to take control of our industry, and we could start by reasserting control of our unions to make them stand up to the EU.