Vote seals Ryton's fate
WORKERS, JULY 2006 ISSUE
The rejection by the Peugeot workers at Ryton in Coventry of a campaign to defend their jobs by 847 votes to 640 votes, in a high return of 72% of the workforce, effectively sees the closure of the Ryton plant in Coventry.
The transfer of work to Slovakia, where weekly wages will average £75, will ensure that cheap labour replaces the skilled labour of Ryton. Ryton, and the 206 range produced there, was profitable for Peugeot; all that the transfer ensures is that the profits on the 207 will be greater. Amicus and the TGWU are to campaign during the World Cup period for British goods to be made in Britain by British workers. A boycott of Peugeot Citroen vehicles is similarly called for. But a consumer boycott requires a high level of awareness of the issue and what is to be achieved. Workers voting to sell their own jobs give a negative message to those from whom they seek support.
The critical issue of defending British manufacturing industry and the continued refusal to link it to withdrawal from the EU is the greatest weakness the trade unions have. Stay in the EU and industry will die. To blame government anti-trade union legislation for the unwillingness to fight has a ring of truth, but ignores the suicidal vote of the Ryton workers themselves. It probably ignores the deeper ideological weakness in that workers appear no longer to believe in themselves or manufacturing.
Built in Britain by British workers needs to be the new strategy that the manufacturing trade unions must hammer out – not a lobbying campaign hat in hand at the EU court, but an imaginative strategy to seize the minds of workers from a defeatist strategy of closure to one of identity through skill, pride in our work and unity at the point of production.
• One million manufacturing jobs were lost under the Tories in the 18 years from 1979 to 1997. And, according to figures from Ernst & Young Item Club, business consultants, one million more have now been lost under Labour in the nine years from 1997 to 2006. Ernst & Young are quick to place the blame for this doubling of the rate of destruction: rising wage costs.
It is the same litany capitalists have rolled out for the past 250 years. They ignore that Blair and Brown have pursued the anti-manufacturing policies of Thatcherism. They ignore the transfer of industry into the Far East and the EU. They ignore the deliberate government policy of the last 30 years, wave after wave of imports, which have destroyed swathes of industry. They ignore the non-investment in British industry. They blame interest rates, though they are the lowest in 30 years. They blame everybody other than the capitalist system, which just doesn't work!