Friday, 18 September 2009
Decent work... pay... conditions...life! NOT profit!
Richie Venton speaks about how the bosses are piling their debt blackhole onto the workers and how they are saving their millions by casting workers into the misery of long working hours, low pay and ultimately, unemployment.
Richie elaborates in these articles HERE and HERE
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
DIAGEO: time for action
The Diageo bosses have booted their workforces at Kilmarnock and Glasgow right in the teeth. These profit-hungry capitalists have spat in the face of mass public opinion – expressed through 20,000 marching in Kilmarnock, and 500,000 email protests to Diageo shareholders – by confirming closure of the 200-year-old plants. And they didn’t even pretend to consult; they announced this on day 71 of a 90-day consultation period.
The Scottish Socialist Party has from day one warned that multi-nationals like Diageo have only one care in the world: profit! They don’t give a toss about chucking 900 workers and their families on the scrapheap, virtually closing down the town of Kilmarnock in the process. And we have equally warned that any belief that such greedy profiteers can be persuaded by arguments into saving the plants was dangerously delusional – that the only language they will listen to is decisive action that wallops their wallets.
With this callous, arrogant announcement that they are forging ahead regardless, the time is rotten ripe for the unions to lead workers in a campaign of industrial action, to hit Diageo’s profit margins.
This could be accompanied by a truly international appeal for a mass consumer boycott, which would potentially have a devastating impact on a company that relies overwhelmingly on overseas markets, and its overseas image.
Already the campaign of protest emails and online petitions has garnered widespread support in the likes of the USA, one of Diageo’s prime markets, and the Teamsters’ Union has offered to support action by UNITE the union.
A tremendous publicity campaign has been conducted over the summer, on the streets, at football matches, and at golf and other sporting events sponsored by the world’s biggest drinks company. But unless the national union leaderships give confidence to workers to hit back with action that damages the production of profits for Paul Walsh and his cronies in the boardroom, there will soon be nothing left to fight back with.
Diageo’s chief executive Paul Walsh has just had another obscene boost to his wealth, at precisely the time he struts the world stage handing out redundancy notices to families who face a future of not knowing where the next meal will come from.
His ‘wage’ actually went down last year compared to 2008 – when he took home £5.1m. That previous income should help cushion him from having to exist on £3.5m in the year up to 30 June 2009 ... the very day before the closure announcements!
That means a ‘salary’ of £67,300 a week! And if that is not vomit-inducing enough, his pension pot more than compensated for the “fall” in salary: it rose by £3.4m to £11.7m during the past year. So if this arrogant prat decides to retire, he stands to draw a pension of £637,000.
Walsh assured the SNP government-led Task Force – in an interview on BBC Scotland – that, “I will be very open-minded when I look at the content” of their alternative business plan. But in real life he didn’t wait even the derisory six days that elapsed between receiving the governments’ proposals and publicly shattering the fate of these workers who have given a lifetime to creating his obnoxious levels of wealth.
Within a couple of hours of declaring his “open mind”, Walsh was in the midst of a conference call to his cohorts in the USA, where he boasted: “A lot of the restructuring we’ve announced over time will help gross margin. They may invoke some letters to our shareholders, as we close plants in Scotland. But it’s the right thing to do for the future, and we have firmly grasped that nettle in order that we do not see gross margin slippage.”.
This arrogant contempt buries all the hopes of the SNP government, Ayrshire and Glasgow councils, and some in the leadership of the unions that – as Alex Salmond put it – “we are looking for something that reconciles Diageo’s financial objectives with Scotland’s social objectives.”
They are irreconcilable! Diageo has just announced another 4 per cent rise in their profits, to £2.6billion. But that is still not enough for these greedy parasites, so they want to cut back from three to two bottling and packaging plants in Scotland, chucking 900 families into despair, to save themselves £42m a year.
And if they get away with this butchery without a real shot being fired, how long will it be before they try to ship whisky across the high seas to be bottled in India or China by slave labour, closer to one of their huge markets?
Whilst the unions need to build members’ confidence for swift industrial action, and appeal for supportive consumer boycotts internationally, the government should drop it’s grovelling pleas for Diageo to accept public money and save maybe half of the 900 jobs; it’s not going to happen! Instead, they should seize the assets that have been built up by two centuries of workers’ skills and labour, supplemented by public subsidies to Diageo in the past, and turn them into public property, sustaining all jobs, embracing the know-how of workers in creating a genuine alternative plan for a publicly-owned drinks and food industry.
The time for action has arrived. Vast public support exists for the Diageo workforce in their plight. That could easily be channelled into a movement to halt the closures, with calls on the governments of Edinburgh and London to step in and bail out these workers, the way they were both so keen to do for the bankers who wrecked the economy in the first place.
Friday, 4 September 2009
SAVE JOBS, NOT PROFITS!
Sunday, 2 August 2009
NEW WAVE OF WORKPLACE OCCUPATIONS

A rash of factory and workplace occupations is spreading across the globe as workers defy the brutal consequences of the recession.
Instead of surrendering to mass redundancies and outright closures – sometimes at a few minutes’ notice, often without even redundancy packages – workers are occupying their workplaces as a central method of struggling for justice.
Every example that wins concessions is boosting the belief of other workforces that there is an alternative to just resigning to the butchery in the boardrooms – that belligerent, militant class action can win at least something where workers have nothing to lose.
VICTORY TO VESTAS
Currently the sit-in at Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight is creating a storm of international publicity and sympathy for the 600 workers who face the dole, at the same time as the Labour government recently pledged to create 400,000 new green jobs over 5 years.
The 25 Vestas workers who have staged this factory occupation, supported by a mass rally outside every night, have shown tremendous courage in the face of numerous separate attempts by the bully-boy, anti-union Vestas bosses to evict them.
They tried to starve them out, blocking food supplies being sent in by supporters. They threatened the sack and removal of redundancy payments from the workers staging the sit-in, to intimidate them. They took out an injunction to gain re-possession of the factory – in order to close it and move production to the USA and China! The RMT took up the workers’ legal defence and won at least a delay in the possession order being issued – primarily because of the visible display of widespread solidarity outside the factory gates every night and on several demonstrations.
The factory was due to close on 31st July – but the seizure of the factory by workers has just won an indefinite extension of that deadline. Vestas had no union recognition. Some workers joined a union and started organizing others. A group of them established a campaign committee and organised the sit-in from 20th July. This bold action won the active support of hundreds others – Vestas workers, other trade unionists, environmentalists, the local community – on an island where there are no other jobs to go to.
Vestas workers have gone further than any of the other recent factory sit-ins in terms of the demands they are making from their ‘campaign headquarters’ inside the factory: “Gordon Brown – Nationalise This!” declared the banner from day one.
A statement from the workers’ occupation declared, “If the government can spend billions bailing out the banks - and even nationalize them - then surely they can do the same at Vestas”.
EVERY VICTORY ENCOURAGES ACTION
As well as organizing solidarity for these heroic fighters for jobs and the protection of the environment, we have a duty to learn from workers’ experiences of sit-ins as a method of struggle, particularly as redundancies and closures sweep the land like a pandemic.
Vestas is only the latest in a series of workplace occupations in the UK. And Thomas Cook workers in Dublin, members of the TSSA union, have just (31st July) occupied in defiance of job losses through closure of 100 offices.
The recent outbreak of factory take-overs in Britain and Ireland began with Waterford Glass workers occupying the plant on 30th January, in opposition to the employers’ announcement of an immediate end to production and 480 job losses.
After 8 weeks’ struggle, they reluctantly accepted a deal that saved 176 of the 480 jobs.
VISTEON OCCUPATIONS
But their example fed the appetite of other workers facing savage closures under brutal terms and conditions. On 31st March, over 600 workers at three Visteon (ex Fords) plants in Belfast, Enfield and Basildon occupied and picketed when they were declared redundant at a few minutes’ notice, without any redundancy pay and with their pensions frozen. A month later, appropriately on May Day, the workers won enhanced redundancy terms, payments in lieu of notice, and holiday pay.
As Kevin Nolan, UNITE union convener at the Enfield factory put it, “People ended up with a year and a half’s worth of salary. That’s a victory when you consider Visteon were hiding behind the recession as a way of completely abandoning all responsibility for 600 UK workers and just dumping them.”
Prior to that high-profile sit-in, a small group of non-unionised workers at Prisme in Dundee occupied their workplace, encouraged by Waterford Glass workers, (who subsequently visited the Dundee sit-in). They had been sacked without notice and without any redundancy pay. Fifty-one days later, the sit-in beat off the redundancies by establishing a cooperative.
VITAL PART OF HISTORY
Workplace occupations are not a new form of struggle, of course, but this new wave of sit-ins follows many years of the method receding into the background.
Italian car workers seized their factories in northern Italy in the 1920s. What were dubbed ‘sit-won strikes’ swept countries like France and the USA in the mid-1930s. Closer to home and to the present, the most famous workplace occupation was the 1971-2 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) ‘work-in’ - in reply to the Tory government’s closure of the yards with at least 6,000 redundancies. This triggered a mass movement, saved many of the jobs after the Tories were forced into a U-turn, and was the impetus to at least 200 sit-ins across the UK in the first half of the 1970s.
For a time such audacious actions receded, although Lee Jeans (mostly women) workers in Greenock occupied in 1981; Caterpillar workers in Uddingston in 1986; and Glacier Metal workers in Glasgow won an outright victory after their seven-week occupation in November-December 1996.
Now, as the global capitalist crisis bites, with even more catastrophic closures and cut-backs on jobs looming, this form of struggle could come back into its own.
POWERFUL WEAPONS OF STRUGGLE
Sit-ins are a powerful weapon, paralyzing production; psychologically bringing the battle into the bosses’ ‘own territory’; preventing them from stripping the factory of machinery and equipment that they may want to shift to other production sites, including abroad, in their hunt for subsidies and cheaper labour; preventing bosses from bussing in scabs past picket lines that are hamstrung by anti-union laws and deployment of the police (as seen, for example, at Timex in 1993).
But a sit-in ‘with folded arms’ can still be defeated, or at best win shoddy concessions far short of the potential victories on the agenda if workers’ occupations are accompanied by concerted campaigning outside the sit-in.
When workers facing closures consider a sit-in they should also try to prepare for a campaign of seeking solidarity from fellow workers and local communities – or at least put that into action as soon as they occupy. Such outgoing, concerted campaigning is critical, firstly to help prevent employers evicting them, secondly to enhance the prospects of outright victory for their demands. That was the advice we put into action from day one of the Glacier Metal occupation in 1996. It is clearly what the Vestas workers are ably applying right now.
Touring other workplaces; taking to the streets with leaflets, bucket collections and megaphones to explain the case behind the sit-ins; organizing solidarity mass pickets, rallies and demonstrations – all this and more was done in conquering outright victory for the 1996 Glacier Metal workers sit-in, and is the method being applied at other current occupations to one extent or another.
DEMANDS FROM THE SIT-INS
The other key question that remains is: what do workers demand whilst they occupy their workplace? Of course that depends on what they are fighting against! In the case of Glacier Metal it was mass dismissal of the entire workforce in the drive to smash the union and rip up hard-won conditions. So full re-instatement of every worker, with continuity of terms and conditions, and continued union recognition, were the demands of the sit-in. And that was what was won!
In the case of Visteon, workers occupied to win redundancy payments and protection of their pensions. They won substantial concessions, though they still lost their jobs.
Vestas workers, as stated earlier, have made the most far-reaching demands – and absolutely appropriate ones to the situation, occupying in support of nationalization of the factory. With the need to save jobs and simultaneously save the planet from catastrophic climate change, the best route is public ownership of the UK’s only wind turbine factory, as part of the call for public ownership of the energy industry as a means of democratically planning clean, green energy production.
Most occupations arise from closures or mass redundancies. So defense of every job is the starting point. And instead of pouring a fortune from the public purse down the throats of profiteering bosses who are hell-bent on racing across the globe in pursuit of super-profits, workers and their unions shown champion the demand for public ownership of the assets, under democratic working class control, to sustain jobs.
REVERSE THE TIDE OF CLOSURES
Workplace occupations are not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ method of struggle, applicable on every single occasion. They should not be turned into a fetish. But they are an enormously powerful weapon of struggle that should be utilized far more widely in the teeth of closures and mass redundancies, and in the vast majority of cases have won huge concessions or outright victories. On the other hand, in some conditions, strikes in the face of closures can sometimes allow the employers to just walk away, leaving whole communities wrecked. And in stark contrast to both, appeals to the employers’ good nature to ‘change their minds’ about closures are a pitifully weak response to the boardroom boot-boys, who will only ever ‘change their minds’ when they know the alternative is carnage for their reputation and profit levels.
Many workers will increasingly see they have nothing to lose in the teeth of mass redundancies, and a lot to win by taking up the cudgels. As Visteon’s UNITE convener Kevin Nolan recently told Labour Research magazine, “We just thought: ‘What do we have to lose?’ So we just went for it. If anyone else is in the same position I’d say weigh everything up and if you think there’s a chance of winning something back or improving your situation by occupying the place, then go for it.”
By seizing control of the company assets, including valuable machinery, plus halting production, whilst using the workplace as a huge campaign headquarters, occupations provide workers with an unprecedented platform to take on the bosses who want to heap the crisis they have created on the shoulders of working people.
We have a duty to concretely assist every group of workers who take such action; every victory won is a boost to the generalized struggle to save jobs, not profits, to reverse the tide of closures and cut-backs endured for far too long.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Campsie Branch Join march to save Diageo jobs in Kilmarnock

Campsie Branch SSP, along with SSP members from across Scotland, joined thousands in a march and rally for Diageo workers fighting to keep their jobs after the company announced 900 job cuts across plants in Scotland including the historic Johnnie Walker packaging plant in Kilmarnock.
Reports from the demonstration on the SSP main website www.scottishsocialistparty.org/
More on the BBC Website HERE