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A gravy train for politicians... Job losses and pay cuts for workers
Stop the jobs slaughter!
23 May 2009
Politicians from all the main parties, including the Northern Ireland parties, have their noses deeply buried in the Westminster and Stormont feeding trough. Not content with high salaries and expenses they have been busy defrauding the taxpayer making claims for everything from home refurbishment, fixing their private tennis courts to buying plastic carrier bags.
Meanwhile workers are being asked to accept job losses, wage cuts and attacks on services. At least 1500 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last month and many other service jobs are also being lost. Many – like the 87 workers laid off by Nortel – are being defrauded out of redundancy entitlements.
The Visteon workers have shown that we do not have to lie back and take this. It is possible to resist and resistance can get results. At the end of March - when faced with the administrators and given six minutes notice to leave the plant – they decided to occupy the factory and fight for their jobs and rights. Alongside their colleagues in Basildon and Enfield who have been picketing the Visteon plants there, the Belfast Visteon workers have won an important victory.
They have taken on two major multinationals – Ford and Visteon – and have forced them to come up with a significant redundancy package. Although the workers would have preferred to keep the plant open and retain the jobs and skills the fact that they have forced Ford/Visteon to pay money they were initially refusing to pay is a significant achievement. Their action will inspire other workers to fight back against the wave of redundancies and closures.
The unions now need to take up where the Visteon workers have left off by launching a real campaign to save jobs in both the private and the public sector. Any companies that lay off workers should be forced to open their books and allow their accounts to be inspected by the labour movement. Let’s see where the profits they made off our backs have gone!
Any company that threatens either significant redundancies or closure should be nationalised and placed under democratic workers’ management. The Assembly should have stepped in and nationalised Visteon; if necessary retooling the factory to make alternative products. It is not enough for the politicians to wring their hands about job losses and then do nothing – they should be made to act by taking over firms and using them to produce goods that are needed.
Instead of acting decisively in this way, the politicians have been too busy with their expense forms and their elaborate schemes to rip us off. It is time to take away their gravy train. We need a completely different kind of political representative.
The unions should stop financing New Labour and stop propping up the local parties. Instead they should assist in building a new party to represent the interests of working class people and young people.
Members of such a party who are elected to any public position should be paid only a workers’ wage. Only expenses that are necessary to do the job should be paid. Then we could have representative who could use their time and energy fighting on our behalf, not working out ways to rip us off.