Unity!
Communist Party Bombardier special
A conspiracy against working people by Bill Greenshields The threat to Bombardier workers in Derby comes from an international coalition of privatisers, politicians and fatcat investors. Crazy conspiracy theory? Let’s look at the facts… Our town and our country is threatened with the effective destruction of our railway engineering industry as the government awards its £1.4billion Thameslink rolling stock contract to the German firm Siemens, rather than to Bombardier. The “ripple effects” of the destruction of 1400 Bombardier jobs will be disastrous in Derby and the Midlands, with a further 13000 subcontractor and supply chain jobs likely to go. It seems inexplicable that the British government, presiding over an economic crisis, would seek to invest abroad. But it is entirely in line with their determination to make ordinary working people pay for the crisis – and ensure that the
bosses of the transnationals get even richer. It’s also in line with the Government enthusiastically toeing the line of international financial, economic and political organisations - notably the European Union – which demand both “austerity measures” and the operation of the “free market” – designed to force workers internationally to compete for jobs in what has been rightly called a “race to the bottom”, accepting ever reduced working conditions and pay in order to attract investment. It is the European Union’s “public procurement” and “liberalisation” rules, which allowed government to willingly declare Siemens as being the “best value for money” and put 1400 Derby workers on the dole – with the additional effect of abandoning apprenticeships, undermining the future of individual young people, and the country’s skill base “Public procurement” – government spending on services and industry etc accounts for huge amounts of money… around 40% of global
spending. The big transnational investors see this as a massive source of profit, rather than a way of meeting the needs of ordinary people. So they have demanded that all government contracts in the EU be opened up to international competition, and have had this written into law as the “European Union Procurement Directive” Many EU governments have ignored these rules. The German government has consistently awarded just under 100% of all rail contracts internally – notably to Siemens! The French government awards 100% of contracts to French firms such as Alstom. As a result they now dominate the industry in Europe. The European Union Commission wants to impose their rules, with a “Directive establishing a single European railway area” imposing privatisation on remaining state railways in Europe, and forcing governments to award contracts to the lowest bidder internationally – the “race to the bottom” in terms of quality, workers’ conditions and pay. continued overleaf
July 2011
On the dole! The continuing scandal of unemployment in Britain was highlighted in July with new official figures showing 2.43 million workless. This is a slight decrease on the earlier figure but the seriousness of the full picture was underlined with the news that the number of people claiming Job Seekers Allowance rose to 1.49 million. Part of this is people forced by new draconian benefit rules to seek work where none exists or where they are incapable and part by people thrown out of work through cuts in public services. The governments official figures are based on the number of people currently claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance.The real figure is much closer to the record number of economically inactive people of working age, currently around 8.2 million if the million plus people who are working part time is taken into account. What this shows is that to separate official ‘unemployment’ from temporary, part-time, casual and so-called flexible work is to misrepresent the situation facing an increasingly large proportion of the working class. A tiny fall in the youth jobless rate will vanish when the current crop of students graduate this summer and when the thousands who cannot afford to go to college now that the fees have rise to £9,000 annually enter the jobs market.