IMAGINE HOW TO FIGHT THE SLAUGHTER OF JOBS & WAGES!

“We’re All In This Together” declares the signage in one famous supermarket.

Far from it! The household name displaying those posters, Marks and Spencer’s, have just announced another tranche of job losses, tossing 7,000 workers onto the growing scrapheap of mass unemployment. 

Workers are being made to pay a heavy price for the Coronavirus. 

The government and capitalist employers are making us pay with job losses, pay cuts, slashed conditions, intensified exploitation, the massacre of sick benefits and, yes, loss of lives. 

Years of failure to invest - and consciously planned poverty pay – contributes to the slaughter of the innocents during this pandemic.

Care Home Carnage 

Decades of austerity left the NHS prone to being overrun when COVID-19 hit these shores, so both the Tory government and the SNP Scottish government prioritised clearance of bed spaces in our hospitals over securing the safety of elderly patients thrown into residential care homes.

Freedom of Information investigations have revealed at least 1,200 elderly patients in Scotland were transferred from hospital wards into care homes without being tested for COVID-19. And that is a gross underestimate, because five of Scotland’s health boards, including the two largest, refused to answer.  

Worse still, the same investigations revealed many others thrown in amongst the most vulnerable elderly population at the height of a pandemic had been tested positive in the hospital.

As professor Allyson Pollock commented “This was like throwing a lighted match into a tinderbox.”

This austerity-rooted regime helped trigger the care home carnage that accounts for half of all COVID-19 deaths.

Workplace Infection and Death 

As we repeatedly warned and denounced in recent months, whilst the governments told us to stay at home they also told us to get to work. They were driven by their preoccupation with upholding the profit margins of the profiteering rich.

The Health and Safety Executive this week reported 600 people in Scotland have caught the virus in their place of work, nearly two-thirds of them in care homes.

As the STUC points out, that figure is only the tip of a vastly larger iceberg. Especially given the notoriety of sectors that employ many of the lowest paid for not reporting accidents at work let alone infection with the killer virus. 

Now a new virus is sweeping the country, demolishing jobs, wages and family livelihoods.

Whilst their capitalist competitors in Germany have extended the wage subsidy furlough scheme for a period of 2 years, to mitigate redundancies, the short-sighted get-rich-quick brigade in charge of capitalist Britain are cutting off the life support machine of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, triggering mass redundancies. 

Those of us who remember Maggie Thatcher’s Dark Ages in the 1980s are suffering deja-vu; TV news back then always ended with a massive list of redundancies and closures, in part designed to browbeat workers into thinking job losses were an unstoppable force of nature.

In recent weeks, thousands of job losses have been announced daily: Boots, John Lewis, M&S, Debenhams, hospitality, airlines and even the public sector.

Fire and Rehire 

This relentless slaughter of jobs is not always purely based on companies suffering the economic impact of the pandemic.

It’s often something previously planned, but now implemented with maniacal zeal by company bosses under cover of Coronavirus, in a race to the bottom, making workers pay the price for sustained profiteering.

British Airways’ “fire and rehire” tactic is the best known of these assaults on workers with the excuse of COVID-19. An extremely profitable company grabbed public funds to furlough staff, but still fired all 42,000 and then bullied and blackmailed 30,000 of them into accepting wage cuts of 50-60% - or else join the 12,000 chucked out the door. 

Centrica Cowboys 

Centrica is not far behind BA in these criminal methods.

As one of their workers explained to me, 

“At the moment we get six months full pay for sick absence. Centrica want to abolish that entirely unless we opt into a taxable private health scheme. If we do that, 13 weeks will be on full pay and the next 9 months on two-thirds of pay. Otherwise if we refuse to opt into private health we're meant to survive on nothing but £95 a week Statutory Sick Pay. And it's even worse for those of us with less than 2-years service; just 10 weeks full pay if we go into private health, the rest on £95 SSP.

For the industrial staff, Centrica plan to increase contracts from a 37 hour week to 40, with no uplift in pay. So they want 3 hours a week free labour. Office staff are expected to gift them half-an-hour a week free of wages, with worsened opening hours. 

And the overtime rate is to be slashed from time and a half to single time, with a cap of 25 hours a year.

Centrica call centres seem to be the new Victorian mills.”

Pockets of Resistance  

Thankfully, pockets of resistance by workers to the slaughter of their jobs and theft of their wages is beginning to erupt, but urgently requires coordination and leadership from the wider trade union movement.

GMB union members in Centrica have voted by a whopping 95% for strike action, in a 68% turnout.

British Airways workers - cabin crew, baggage and loading staff alike - are poised to vote on taking strike action. 

Healthcare workers have got together and staged a series of marvellous rallies demanding pay justice and pay equality, many of them pushing for a 15% pay rise, after being slapped in the face by the government when they were excluded from the all-too-miserly public sector pay rise - after having put their lives on the line, face-to-face with COVID-19. 

Many other workers are furious at attacks on conditions, including sick pay entitlements, which is particularly outrageous and dangerous when COVID-19 has hit chicken factories, meat plants, textile factories and other workplaces.

For example, one multi-billioned retail giant has gone from stopping wages to workers with COVID-19 to slashing company sick benefit entirely after 3 days’ absence per year. 

Precisely those workers with underlying health problems, and therefore most vulnerable to the ongoing Coronavirus, are the same people most likely to be disqualified from anything more than £95 Statutory Sick Pay, because ill health has forced them off work for periods. 

Stark Choices 

Workers face harsh, stark choices, thrown into high relief by the Coronavirus and its economic consequences.

The road being travelled not just by the Tories but also the Scottish government involves mass redundancies as the subsidies to big business dry up, and the massacre of pay and sick pay. Which not only further endangers lives by dragging people into work despite being infected, but also blows to smithereens the previous nonsense talked by governments and some economists about a rapid V-shaped recovery.

With household savings at an all-time low, household debts at an all-time high, and wages being crushed down even further as a share of national wealth - in order to enhance the share that goes in profit - the consumer-led boom, which capitalist Britain and Scotland has been far too reliant on, has now turned into its opposite.

Far from being “all in this together”, the Corona crisis has highlighted the gaping chasm between the classes in this system of running society. 

Britain’s 45 billionaires increased their personal wealth by 20% in the months of March and April alone.

In neat, grotesque contrast, the average NHS worker has suffered at 20% pay cut since 2010.

Two-thirds of all care home staff are thinking of leaving their low-paid, insecure and dangerous jobs, in a new survey by the GMB.

Fighting Socialist Alternatives 

So what’s the alternative to this tsunami of job losses, pay cuts and life-threatening attacks on sick pay?

Scotland’s trade union movement embraces nearly 650,000 workers - and could recruit as many more if they demonstrated an iron determination to fight for immediate improvements in working conditions and organised action that would remove the fear factor that dominates the minds of many workers.

At the height of the pandemic the STUC and its affiliated unions called for an immediate £2-an-hour wage increase for all key workers.

That should not wither on the vine and become just an empty rhetorical flourish.

Turned into serious campaigning and collective action, it could be one part of unified demands for better wages across the board, underpinned by an absolute minimum, legally enforced wage of £12-an-hour for all at 16.

Such improved wages will transform the lives of hundreds of thousands and radically improve workers’ spending power, which in turn would make jobs far more secure in sectors such as retail, hospitality, tourism and entertainment. 

Minimum 16-Hour Week 

At the 2019 STUC annual conference, I proposed my union USDAW’s policy motion for abolition of all zero hours contracts and other forms of insecure, casualised labour, to be replaced by a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it. 

That pioneering policy was passed at the STUC without a single vote against. It now needs to be turned into a major plank of the trade union movement's alternative to low wages, rampant job insecurity, and the vicious spiral of job losses they both contribute to.

We live in a society where capitalist ownership of the core economy leads to monstrous levels of work-related stress, as the profiteers strive for greater output by fewer workers on lesser wages.

An epidemic of mental ill health has already been stored up and is now added to by the lockdown - and indeed new forms of physical and mental illness created by working from home.

Capitalism is a system which by its very nature puts profit before people; the health of bosses’ wallets before the health and wellbeing of the working class who produce society's wealth. 

100% Wages for Sick Workers 

An increasingly critical issue for the massed ranks of the trade union movement to struggle for is sick pay equivalent to 100% average wages, instead of the pathetic £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay and the rapid obliteration of company sick benefit schemes currently being witnessed.

That one measure could have prevented countless COVID-19 deaths by removing the financial pressure to go to work despite carrying the virus, thereby infecting others.

The Tories have severed the lifeline of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme despite the fact the deadly disease is still here and still as lethal.

They've thrown the sop of £1,000 grant for every worker not made redundant.

Plenty of big businesses will pocket that publicly funded grant to the benefit of their profit-and-loss accounts.

Means Tests for the Rich! 

The trade union movement should demand means tests for businesses, instead of the humiliating means tests to which the poorest people are subjected.

Let’s examine the secret accounts of every business. Where a small enterprise, doing useful work in safe conditions, genuinely cannot afford a minimum wage of £12-an-hour and retention of all staff, they should be granted state funds or loans to save jobs and pay decent wages.

No such largesse can be justified for big businesses, whose profits are measured in £millions or £billions. 

If they announce job losses or closures and they are involved in socially useful production or services, the unions should mobilise action for measures like a 4-day week on 5 days’ pay - and the takeover of their assets and operations by the government or local authorities, in order to sustain jobs and their workers’ contribution to the economy for the benefit of society.

4-Day Week on 5 Days' Pay 

Even the capitalist government of Germany is contemplating a 4-day week, after the giant 2.3 million-strong IG Metall union called for a 30-hour week to save jobs. 

We face a crossroads. What kind of economy, what kind of work and what kind of society do we want for the 21st century?

Vast areas of human life require work to be done, yet the system we live under means the optimists around the Bank of England predict 2.5 million unemployed by Christmas, whilst the economic pessimists warn of about 4 million, including one in every three young people.

Such waste of talent, energy and skills, and the attendant misery and poverty of mass unemployment, is a searing condemnation of a capitalist economy founded on the profit motive.

School leavers should be guaranteed either an apprenticeship on at least a £12 minimum wage, free further education with a living student grant, or a decent, meaningful, unionized job.

Society is screaming out for adequate numbers of highly trained workers in areas as varied as the NHS; social care; mental health services; education; council services; environmental improvements; house building and retrofitting; vastly expanded public transport; production and distribution of clean green energy and all the equipment that goes with it. 

150,000 Green Jobs 

The potential for a vast green jobs plan was illustrated in the recent STUC report showing where 150,000 new, green jobs could be created in Scotland.

But instead of fulfilling the verbal flourishes of “Scotland becoming the Saudi Arabia of renewables”, as declared in the past by Alex Salmond, the SNP government has utterly failed to challenge the system whereby growth in wind farms and other green energy projects has almost entirely bypassed any job creation in Scotland itself.

Instead, they preside over the obscene absurdity of wind farm construction and decommissioning of North Sea oil and gas installations being carried out abroad, as far afield as cheap labour Bangladesh and Indonesia, while fabrication yards and other facilities a few miles inshore lie idle. For example the BiFab yards in Fife and Lewis. 

Rubbing salt into the wounds of a country facing mass unemployment, the new Viking onshore wind farm on Shetland, the biggest of its kind in the UK, is now to be built and operated by the Danish Vestas company.

At least 400 initial construction jobs are therefore in the hands of an overseas profiteer, rather than being part of a Scottish public sector energy corporation which could provide tens of thousands of well-paid jobs, and apprenticeships for young people, giving them purpose, dignity and a secure future.

Why should the Scottish government leave the fate of Scottish workers in the hands of Vestas, the same company which in 2009 declared mass redundancies at its factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, leading to a factory occupation by the workforce, which the SSP built solidarity for in Scotland, as those workers rightly demanded nationalisation to save jobs? And they were spurned in their demands by the same Labour government of Gordon Brown which previously spoke eloquently of creating 400,000 green jobs. 

Green Socialist Recovery Plan 

Instead of a new 2020 Dark Ages that could make Thatcher's atrocities look mild and more resemble the 1930s, the collective potential power of the trade union movement and socialists needs to be mobilised in pursuit of a Green Socialist Recovery Plan.

Based on public ownership of key sectors like construction, public transport, energy, major industrial enterprises and the banking system, Scotland could lead the way by immediately creating at least 150,000 new green, well-paid jobs with full collective union rights, and workers’ control over health and safety and other day-to-day decisions.

Imagine what such a planned socialist recovery programme could mean for the construction of 100,000 social sector houses, built to the highest environmental standards, with varieties of stock guaranteeing gardens or other outdoor spaces for all who want it.

Imagine how household energy bills, which have rocketed during the lockdown, could be slashed through retrofitting and insulating existing housing stock, and removing the profit margin in a publicly owned energy sector.

Imagine the scale of green re-industrialisation Scotland’s shipyards and factories (including under-threat Dennis buses) could enjoy in the production of vast new fleets of ferries, buses and trains for a vastly expanded and integrated public transport network - free at the point of use, thereby combating poverty, social isolation and pollution.

Imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers could be liberated from the health-threatening drudgery of 12-hour shifts and more, by employment of new staff in areas of greatest need on a maximum 4-day week. 

Imagine – and Organise 

Workers and their unions need to imagine this and much more, but turn these entirely realistic visions of our collective future into reality by fighting for it.

Truly the choice we face is that posed by Rosa Luxemburg a century ago: socialism or barbarism. 

WIELD ORGANISED WORKERS' POWER FOR A SOCIALIST RECOVERY PLAN

As Billy Bragg sang, "There is power in a union".

Or at least, enormous potential collective power, provided leadership is given on the right issues.

Tens of thousands of workers have awoken to that in recent times, with a significant upsurge in trade union membership.

Surge in Union Membership

During 2019, 90,000 workers joined a union; that's over 200,000 new recruits in two years.

The biggest increase has been amongst women workers, who now constitute 3.6 million in the UK, the highest figure since 1995.

In Scotland,15,500 joined a union last year.

Of course, to keep perspective, that still leaves only 23.5% of workers unionised, with even lower density in the private sector and amongst those aged under 35. Less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35, whereas 40% of them are aged over 50.

Likewise, we've had several successive years of very low strike figures, and therefore low profile for collective action and the advantages of trade unionism for younger generations to observe and absorb.

That is the result of a cocktail of factors.

The most repressive anti-union laws in the western world - introduced by the Tories, sustained by Labour governments. A regime of fear, wielded by senior management buoyed up by this battery of anti-worker legislation. And all too frequently, weak, compromising leadership from the top of the unions, far too accustomed to cosy relationships with employers and a lifestyle more akin to that of the company chief executives than to the average worker who pays their union subs.

The Times They are A-changin' 

There are moments in history when sharp changes occur.

There is a tendency throughout history for workers to seek solutions to their daily privations and problems through collective industrial struggle when no political solutions appear imminent, and vice versa.

To take random examples: the 1880s were marked by a monumental surge into the unions by the most downtrodden, lowpaid, so-called unskilled workers,  previously neglected by craft-based trade unions, when they increasingly saw no salvation from the dominant Tory or Liberal politicians.

In turn, that industrial wave helped fuel the birth of independent working class political representation, creating the newborn Labour Party.

In the 1970s, disappointment with the 1964-70 Labour government and savage onslaughts by the 1970-74 Ted Heath Tory regime triggered the biggest modern wave of strike actions, increased union membership, a rise in workplace militancy, and through this showdown between rival class forces led to 1975 being the year with both the highest union membership in Britain and the lowest levels of inequality across society.

That stark statistic in itself is a profound lesson for today's young working class. Indeed 'there is power in a union', and correctly wielded it can not only combat poverty, unsafe working conditions, and bullying by management, but also reduce inequality.

Coronavirus Crisis: a New Turning Point 

The coronavirus crisis is poised to be a new turning point in trade union and working class history.

The experience of millions in recent months has taught many profound lessons.

It's demonstrated the simple fact but there's such a thing as a working class, an idea previously sneered at by the commentariat, including some self-styled lefts and socialists.

It's shown in action that the people essential to society's functioning, to the very existence of human life, are workers of multiple and varied occupations, and certainly not the remote, grotesquely overpaid company chief executives and directors or financial speculators.

More pertinent still have been the lived experiences and visible displays of the role of trade unionists in fighting for measures to save lives in the teeth of the deadly virus, often in conflict with employers and indeed governments slow or unwilling to put people before profit.

It took relentless pushing and demanding by workplace shop stewards and the best national union officials to eventually win basics like hand sanitizers, cleaning equipment, protective screens and of course PPE for the millions of workers who have sustained life and society throughout the crisis.

Unsung Heroes on the Frontline of Trade Unionism

The unsung heroes of these times, whom the Tories would never applaud on a Thursday night, are thousands of workplace union representatives who have fought for the safety of fellow workers. Often under intense pressure from senior management, and sometimes under threat of victimisation for daring to demand measures like shutdown of non-essential workplaces, with 100% pay; protection of workers' holidays; and rigorous Risk Assessments with the full participation of union health and safety reps, to help prevent a second spike in COVID-19 deaths as the lockdown eases.

It is the determined action of these unsung heroes, and the lobbying by national unions, which forced the government into the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

Observing this collective effort, thousands of new workers have joined unions in the past three months.

That is the experience of most major unions.

Unison have reported 65,000 new recruits since January. The National Education Union (NEU), engaged in frontline battles in England over premature reopening of schools, has had over 20,000 recent recruits.

Previously scattered, unorganised and heavily exploited sectors, such as fast food and hospitality, have also begun to unionise, with some spectacular localised success stories in reversing employers' plans to make thousands redundant, gaining furlough with at least 80% pay instead.

A Dangerous Phase for Workers' Health 

Currently we are living through potentially the most dangerous phase of the whole crisis, where UK and Scottish governments are to varying degrees declaring against mass outdoor gatherings, but encourageing or insisting upon mass indoor gatherings - by reopening non-essential workplaces, to revive production and sales for flagging profits.

The newly enhanced profile of the trade union movement - not seen for at least a generation - needs to be organised at both national and workplace levels to insist on proper safety measures, alongside a fully-funded and staffed regime of mass testing, tracing and isolation.

This moment should be seized to push for workers' control of workplace health and safety, through elected union reps.

The Capitalist Virus of Mass Unemployment 

The other virus about to sweep the country, rooted in capitalist production methods just as much as the coronavirus, is mass redundancies and unemployment.

Millions of jobs are on life support through the taxpayer-funded Job Retention Scheme.

Around 8 million workers were at least temporarily kept in a job, albeit with 10% or 20% pay cuts in many cases, through this state subsidy of businesses.

As that scheme tapers off, the greed-driven employing class are frequently poised to slash thousands of jobs and family livelihoods.

Daily announcements by the likes of British Airways, Rolls Royce, retail and hospitality firms are a deafening wake-up call to the devastation facing the working class in the months ahead.

The unions need to rise to the challenge, not only by consciously involving members and wielding the collective 'power in a union', but also by advancing concrete fighting alternatives to this capitalist blitzkrieg.

We cannot tolerate a re-run of the devastation visited upon the working class in the wake of the 2008 bankers' crisis; a lost decade of savage pay cuts, job losses and punishment of workers for a crisis they never created.

For a 4-day Week on 5 Days' Pay 

The unions have the potential power to spearhead an alternative Socialist Recovery Plan.

That could start with the immediate demand to share out the available work through a shorter working week, but critically, without loss of earnings.

The demand, for instance, for a 4-day week on 5 days' pay would evoke massive sympathy amongst workers who have either been enduring regular 12-hour shifts during the pandemic, or gained a taste of other things in life outside the drudgery of long hours at work.

That one measure could create and save tens of thousands of Scottish jobs.

Socialist Green New Deal 

A Socialist Green New Deal built on the foundations of public ownership of key sectors such as construction, transport, energy and banking must become the clarion cry of the organised labour movement.

A recent STUC study shows the massive potential for job creation in such a scheme.

Analysis by Transition Economics - in part based on information from post-2008 investment schemes in other countries - gives precise figures of potential job creation in 23 different clean infrastructure projects in Scotland.

Overall, they demonstrate that £13billion investment in a two-year infrastructure recovery plan could create 150,000 jobs immediately.

Examples of the schemes they cite include expansion of the rail network (including for freight) with 13,700 new jobs.

Other clean, green investments include construction of cycle lanes and pedestrianisation (nearly 18,000 jobs); low income residential retrofit programme (34,000); residential retrofit programme (over 14,000 jobs); and upgrade of ports and shipyards for offshore wind supplies (almost 6000 jobs).

Wield the Power of Organised Workers 

Socialists and trade unionists need to agitate and seek to organise the collective power of the trade union movement to demand precisely such an emergency green re-industrialization plan. It will require the social, class power of the organised workers' movement to translate fine ideas on paper into living reality.

The catastrophic impact of deindustrialization over the past 40 years led to a lack of equipment for hospitals, an inability to rapidly produce such equipment, which in turn meant both the UK and Scottish governments initially resorted to the obscenity of 'herd immunity', and then an emphasis on stopping our hospitals being overrun. Leading to such tragedies as over 1,000 elderly patients in Scotland being emptied out of hospitals into care homes without being tested, and the carnage that followed.

Housing, Public Transport, Jobs 

The housing crisis has been highlighted during the pandemic, with the huge differential between the experience of those in cramped or substandard housing during the lockdown, and people even with a decent house and modest garden.

In addition to the plans detailed in the STUC study, an emergency social sector house-building plan - with a variety of types of homes for rent according to demand, including gardens for all who want one - would solve both a housing crisis and the desperate need for decent, well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

As people return to work, the problem of ensuring social distancing on public transport serves to underline the case for democratic public ownership of all public transport and massive investment in fleets of buses, trains and ferries. Both to accommodate safe travelling and prevent a return to the appalling pollution caused by massive reliance on cars, which the lockdown has given temporary respite from, and given millions a glimpse of how better life could be if freed of both pollution and poverty.

Invest in NHS and a National Care Service 

There are plenty of other immediate areas requiring huge state investment. Not investment of public money to boost the private profits of capitalist enterprises, but public sector investment accompanied by democratic public ownership and working class control. With massive job opportunities created.

Two of many such areas are the NHS and a public National Care Service, to cut out the profiteering that kills elderly people. To instead construct a care service free at the point of need, with decent wages, conditions, and training for a vastly expanded workforce that is guaranteed collective union bargaining rights.

Underpinning this socialist recovery plan is a vast redistribution of wealth from the remote, grotesquely privileged capitalist elite to the working class, who have been seen with renewed clarity to provide life's daily essentials and all that makes for a civilised existence.

Not only those rightly classified as 'essential workers' during the pandemic, but every worker, needs to be guaranteed a £12 minimum wage rising with inflation - rather than another lost decade of pay cuts and reduced spending power, which in itself further undermines job security.

Battle Commences for a New Future 

COVID-19 throws up a profound challenge on what kind of future we want.

Nothing is predetermined in history. The future will be decided by a clash between rival living forces.

On one side the capitalists, bankers, landlords and their hired politicians, who want to return to the old abnormal, the inhumane pursuit of profit at terrible cost to peoples' lives and the planet we live on.

On the other side, the growing forces of an organised working class, who need to feel a renewed self-confidence and demand a Socialist Recovery Plan that rejects the obscenity of production for profit, and builds on the values of human solidarity touchingly displayed in thousands of small incidents during the Covid crisis.

Join the battle!

"WITH UNITY YOU CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS" - reflections on Belfast shipyard workers' victory

Thursday 3rd October, 2019, will become an important date in the history of Belfast workers' struggles, and indeed of workers well beyond the city limits.
That morning, a proud but emotional group of workers returned to work in the Harland and Wolff shipyard, nine weeks after they had faced total, permanent closure.

By seizing control of their workplace at the end of July, the 123 members of Unite and GMB trade unions prevented the devastating disappearance of this landmark workplace. They defied and defeated the owners who had run the yard into the sand; the Tory government of Boris Johnson who dismissed appeals for government intervention with the contemptuous remark "this [closure] is a commercial decision"; and the sceptics in our own trade union movement who habitually greet closures and redundancies with the refrain "there's nothing we can do to stop it." 

They fought like lions

If these brave workers hadn't taken swift, united, militant collective action, the hovering vultures would have swooped, asset-stripping, turning this shipyard, established in 1861, into yet another marina or other waterfront tourist attraction. 

Instead of caving in with whimpering resignation, these workers and their local union officials fought like lions, refused to give up their belief in the rich potential for the yard and its skills, and demanded renationalisation to build that future, highlighting especially their readiness and ability to contribute to a thriving green energy industry.

Where private capitalist ownership squandered workers' skills and the unique facilities of Europe's biggest dry dock, working men and women had a vision for the future - and fought for that dream. 

Whilst their central demand for nationalisation fell on the deaf lugs of Boris Johnson and his cabal, the nine weeks of relentless campaigning and the workers' case for a thriving future for the yard has won over a new owner, InfraStrata. Eighty of these fearless fighters returned to work on Thursday 3rd October, with confident predictions of that number rapidly growing to 400.

I spoke to Harland and Wolff's Unite shop steward, JOE PASSMORE, his first evening back at work. 

"It's been quite emotional today, Richie," said Joe, with classic understatement. "It's historic." 

I asked him where their determination to fight back came from. 

"Previous owners tried to run it into the ground, with contempt and mismanagement. There were community leaders,  including ex shipyard workers, talking to the company - going back years, we've now discovered - telling them about the possibilities and potential. But they were too aloof to listen. But we knew we had a successful industry in the making and we were not prepared to let it suffer a slow death. That's where our belief and determination came from."

Workers' Unity the Key to Victory

Their fighting spirit and determination inspired the solidarity of workers far and wide. Very significantly, the H&W workers were themselves united; not divided on sectarian lines. Nor did they allow any hard or soft border to cut across their working class unity; amongst the trade unionists who joined their solidarity rallies (usually with generous donations in hand) at the shipyard gates were strikers in Northern Ireland's civil service and health service, but also workers from Dublin and veterans of sit-ins at Waterford Glass. 

Occupation and Renationalisation

But how did they prevent closure? What lessons for workers facing similar threats - whether the Ballymena Wrightbus workers, or others across Ireland and Britain? 

Joe is keen to inform and inspire others:

"The first key to our success was how we let everyone know what was happening, with use of social media. That meant we didn't have to hold meetings every day. Our members knew everything we were doing, including the crises we faced and the brick walls we ran into. 

The next key was our use of the press to reach everyone. The first ten days especially we were headline news in every paper and TV, making sure we were in everyone's thoughts. 

Social media and the press are vehicles, but the key to it all was preparation and organisation. Even while we were in negotiations with the previous owners we set up our own Cobra Committee,  where we looked at the worst case scenario,  and planned to occupy the plant. We took on board the lessons of previous situations where they'd done this, like Visteon and even in Scotland.  

"Our intention was to lock the gates and let nobody in. But what we actually did, without pre-planning it, was that we took control of the gates, and with people we judged were good for our cause, we applauded them through the gates. Control of the yard gates was key, not locking the world out. 

"We needed the forest of flags from all different trade unions at the gate, and our visible presence. We even had Belfast tour buses being detoured to visit us, a tourist attraction, with tourists standing up waving to us! We had to be in the public eye, to get our case across."

"You Can't Buy Commitment Like That!"

I suggested the relationship between workers and their union is a critical factor in any battle. Joe told me of his pride in the workforce and the union. 

"Each time we got coverage in the press it gave our people confidence and the belief grew that we would get an outcome. We had people covering the nightshift on the gate every single night for nine weeks. They never got a penny pay for doing this, don't forget. That's an incredible level of commitment. You can't buy that. They never stopped believing. They knew where we were, even the setbacks in the campaign, and they still believed in us."

So where are they up to now, after gaining a new owner, InfraStrata? Joe explains:

"All along our vision was about saving the jobs, but by getting back inside to then relaunch the yard. "We've had nine weeks of sitting in the wind and cold, having earnest discussions about the future. We have a strong union to deal with any issues that arise. Our job is to reeducate them into leading the company from the bottom up. The guy who's taken over has promised the union, through our reps, will be part of decisions.

"The core of Infrastrata's current work is controversial, it's building gas storage facilities. But he says his long term interest is in repairs and green energy,  and that's our realm. 

And the other thing that inspires our confidence in the future is that he's looking at apprenticeships and reskilling. We didn't even have to tell him. We are skilled tradesmen, but all of a certain age. If only we can get hold of young people and teach them the skills - even enough to be semiskilled steelworkers or welders in the interim before apprentices start - that would be a huge boost. We are hopeful for the future. 

And the new owner's hopeful of 400 jobs in the yard."

Joe sees their own battle in its broader context. 

"Our situation is a microcosm of the whole UK. There's big possibilities in green energy, but to build on those opportunities we may not have the people and that's scary. 

It's contradictory when the government give the orders for green energy but haven't been responsible enough to build up the workforce, with the skills. A Labour government would face the same. We really have to look at infrastructure as well as orders. We need skilled employment to be the absolute priority before we lose it."

In another sense too, Harland and Wolff is a microcosm.
Joe explained to me how the government sets budgets and prices for green energy, "so private companies look for the cheapest possible option. Big companies cut to maintain profit, so when it gets down to small companies they won't take on work that won't make a profit. The likes of H&W just about break even. The government won't subsidise, they are trying to do it on the cheap. They don't seem to see the bigger picture and the effect of their actions, behind the political headlines." 

To me that underlines the absolutely justified central demand of these workers' campaign, for nationalisation of H&W. 

But not in isolation; as we've repeatedly written throughout this battle for survival, we need public ownership of all the shipyards and the entire energy sector (alongside transport, construction and the banks) to plan and invest in a clean, green, sustainable future, with full involvement and input to decisions by the shopfloor experts: workers like those who've just saved the Belfast shipyard. 

Replace the Orange and Green Politicians

Fighting for future generations will have been a steep learning experience for every worker involved. Amongst many other lessons, the role of Orange and Green politicians will have been exposed. 

One memorable moment in their campaign was the announcement by Unite that they would stand workers' candidates in East Belfast and elsewhere, a challenge that certainly concentrated the minds of the foot-dragging DUP politicians, who had done nothing to wield their leverage over the Tory government to pursue workers' demand for government intervention, for renationalisation to the save the shipyard. 

Speaking to me the night the victorious trade unionists had returned to work, Joe was blunt in his appraisal.  

"The politicians played little or no part. Even those we met at the TUC Congress, it was all words of sympathy, not saying what they would do for us, not one of them saying how they'd go about it. But it's action that wins struggles, not sympathy."

Writing as a socialist who grew up amidst the destructive Orange and Green politics that curses the working class in N Ireland, I hope the threat issued by Unite will grow into an anti-sectarian, united working-class challenge in elections, with worker candidates backed up by the unions and cross-community groups, taking up the class issues that unite ordinary people.
That would be another massive monument to the united victory of the Harland and Wolff workers of 2019. 

Moving Mountains!

This heroic battle, and particularly the fact it won the jobs back, has sent ripples out across workplaces. As Joe told me, "Every dispute now the first thing workers say to the union officials is should we occupy?!" 

When I asked Joe for his core message to other workers facing job losses or closures, it was the same solid, inspiring one that he has carried with him at meetings throughout the past nine weeks.

"If you have a cause and believe you are right, don't be afraid to speak out. 

"A voice among a couple of friends is great, but when everyone stands as one, united, that's real strength. That's when you get publicity, and the bigger your noise the bigger your chances of victory. 

"There's incredible strength in unity and people have to realise that with unity you can move mountains."

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP TO PROTECT PEOPLE AND PLANET

Those who deny the urgency of action against climate change are as rare and as ridiculous as members of the Flat Earth Society. A plethora of reports pour out, and millions witness climate-based human disasters across the globe, both confirming the need for emergency action against global warming and associated chaos.

But the central question is how to make a radical, rapid transition to a clean, green economy that benefits the working-class majority, rather than measures that punish us with mass job losses, punitive carbon taxes and increased inequality. All the evidence, including in Scotland, proves that ownership is at the heart of what is dubbed a ‘Just Transition’.

For at least 200 years, western capitalism has relied heavily on carbon to build its wealth and power, plundering people and planet alike. The carbon emissions have helped create the crisis where the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we only have 12 years to take emergency action to keep global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or else it will be too late; irreversible. 
The same study concluded pollution from carbon emissions must be eradicated by 2050, not 2075 as suggested by previous world summits.

Oxfam has identified that climate-based disasters have increased four-fold in the short ten years from 1995-2015. 
The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths each year, due to malnutrition, malaria, heat stress, and diarrhoea - mostly in the global south.

Droughts, landslides, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, creeping desertification, extinction of species...all these and others are common symptoms of the system we need to confront. But at whose cost?

Class and Climate Chaos

Every disaster, itself the product of the reckless, ruthless profiteering system that is capitalism, also serves to remind us of the class divide inherent to that same system. When wildfires erupted in California last November, millionaires hired private firefighters to shield their sumptuous homes, whilst working class communities were burnt to the ground.

Equally, if we rely on the capitalist rich to ‘green’ the economy, every hopelessly inadequate measure they take will be at the expense of the working class: regressive ‘green’ taxes, reduced services, slaughter of jobs, etc.

In the words of author and pioneering environmental activist, Naomi Klein, “neo-liberal climate action passes on the costs to working people, offer them no better jobs or services and lets the big polluters off the hook. People see it as class war, because it is.”

Scotland is prone to boast of being a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, by 49% since 1990. But there are two other sides to that encouraging fact. 
One of the reasons is the closure of mines, steelworks and other deindustrialisation, which has left the devastation of mass poverty, alienation, rising crime and drug dependency in whole communities. Hardly a ‘just transition’!

The other sobering fact is that much of Scotland's carbon emissions have simply been shipped abroad, dumped on other peoples, as part of capitalist globalisation. Taking total carbon emissions generated at home and abroad in the production and transportation of goods and services for consumption in Scotland, the reduction is a far more modest 8.6% from 1998-2014. 
It's not just jobs that have been offshored, but pollution too. 

The Market Won’t Provide

Capitalist ownership gives no comfort nor guarantees of a stable future for workers in the existing high-carbon sector, let alone the population of Scotland as a whole. 
The cut-throat competition between privately-owned North Sea companies has meant worsened terms and conditions, lengthened shift patterns for offshore workers, use of cheap labour overseas workers, and 160,000 job losses in 2014-17. 
The one-man dictatorship of capital, in the form of INEOS owner Jim Ratcliffe, owns 4% of Scotland's GDP. He used this to bully and blackmail the workforce and Scottish government with threats of total closure at Grangemouth, wiping out effective union recognition for several years, and squeezing millions of public funds in subsidies from Alex Salmond's government, in Ratcliffe’s pursuit of fracking.

But capitalist ownership is no route to a just transition to a clean, green economy either. 
And the reliance of successive Scottish (and UK) governments on the market economy has led to an utter failure to carry out the necessary measures to combat climate chaos and simultaneously protect the jobs and living conditions of workers.

The STUC have published a devastating report exposing the gaping chasm between promises of massive job creation in the low carbon and renewable energy economy (LCRE) over the past 15 years – by successive Labour-LibDem and SNP governments – and the paltry reality of less than 2% of jobs being in this sector...which, in any case, includes nuclear power!

Promises in 2004 of 7,000 new jobs by 2020; 35,000 by 2020 (in 2004); 130,000 by 2020 (in 2010); 40,000 in renewables by 2020 (in 2011). The soaring visions of a green and pleasant land have crashed to earth with a shudder; taken together, all forms of renewable energy (onshore wind, offshore wind, hydropower, renewable heat, bioenergy and alternative fuels) only account for 7,600 direct jobs in Scotland (17,600 direct and indirect). 

Scotland’s Natural Potential

Mother Nature provided Scotland with 40% of Europe's onshore and offshore renewable energy potential. Not to even mention the copious hydro-power sources. Yet Scotland is a net importer of low carbon and renewable energy goods and services – to the tune of £229m trade deficit in 2017, including £165m in the case of onshore wind! Why?

Despite nature’s gifts, Scotland builds virtually nothing for this sector, even though Howdens of Glasgow manufactured the UK’s first ever wind turbine in the early 1980s; removal of government grants, and failure by British capitalism to bother investing, opened the way to Danish companies to carve out a profitable niche.

The lack of a publicly owned energy industry, with planned and integrated investment in research, production and development, has meant a complete lack of an industrial strategy for transition to clean energy production that could tap into nature’s advantages for the benefit of workers and the environment. 
Instead, piecemeal developments have been handed over to networks of overseas, profiteering capitalist firms – who often lack expertise, have dodgy track records in the sector, but are often heavily subsidised by their own governments in their pursuit of global markets.

Lunacy of Globalised Capitalism

At the Moray East Windfarm, off the Caithness coast, 100 turbines are being built by a consortium of firms from Portugal, France and Japan. The blades are being made by a Danish company, the wind turbine jackets by a Belgian company that subsequently handed the contract to Lamprell, of the United Arab Emirates.

Kincardine Offshore Wind Ltd is developing a floating wind farm south-east of Aberdeen; contrary to its name, KOWL is Spanish owned. In turn it's contracted Navantia, who build the Spanish Navy's warships, but made a whopping loss when they diversified into renewables.

Meantime, the BiFab yards in Methil and Burntisland are mothballed! So much for the Scottish government's pledges a decade ago of ‘a Saudi Arabia of renewables’.

Even the massive, lucrative decommissioning sector of the offshore industry is a victim of the same capitalist ‘logic’, the lunacy of globalised profiteering at the expense of workers’ jobs, workers’ conditions, and the climate.

Bountiful tax relief is being handed over to the oil and gas companies for decommissioning, while some of them have been exposed for paying below the legal minimum wage to overseas workers. 
North Sea rigs have been towed across the oceans to be decommissioned on the beaches of Bangladesh and India, without environmental protection or workers’ rights – sailing past several sites with the capacity to do the work up the east coast of Scotland. 

Just Transition Through Public Ownership

We need the trade union, socialist and environmental movement to demand democratic public ownership of the entire energy industry to seriously tackle climate change and ensure a just transition to clean, green energy production - with not only the protection, but vast expansion, of decent jobs and conditions.

A recent House of Commons report brutally declared that “green investment has collapsed”. The capitalist market will never save the planet that it has despoiled for profit.

The SNP government’s talk of a Publicly Owned Energy Company is a lame, timid half-step, miles short of the bold move required. It is designed to be merely another energy retailer in a crowded marketplace, competing with the capitalist sharks – but not in any way involved in the actual production of energy supplies. 
But public ownership of oil, gas, hydro, wind-power, all forms of renewables, is precisely what is needed. With unions representing energy workers and the wider working class - alongside scientists, local and national government, colleges and universities - having a full voice in planning the urgent transition to green energy without loss of jobs or skills, with retraining, investment in research and development, and expansion of education in the sciences of the sector. We already have world-leading academic expertise in offshore wind, wave, tidal and carbon capture techniques – all squandered by a system based on short-term profit maximisation.

Full public ownership of all forms of energy could then be integrated with an expanded public transport network that tackles pollution and poverty through investment in fare-free public transport. 
And with a nationalised construction industry, local councils and social sector housing, to retrofit and insulate homes; build 100,000 new homes for rent to the highest environmental standards; cut fuel prices and eliminate fuel poverty; and in the process, create at least 100,000 well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

Public ownership is at the very heart of the solution to pollution, replacing the private plundering of our planet for profit by capitalism. 
Tackling the emergency of climate change requires urgent system change – to a socialist democracy where it’s not a false choice between jobs and the environment.