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. 

BRANSON THE BILLIONAIRE BEGGAR: nationalise, don't subsidise!

I don't think I'm unique in feeling increasingly irritated by attempts at guilt-tripping the low-paid and average-paid worker to cough up for all sorts of charity drives for the NHS. 

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying: the NHS is a cause that cannot be matched for its worthiness, especially in these times of horrendous, fearful crisis, when NHS staff (along with millions of other workers) are risking their own lives to save others. 

But since when did it become a charity? 
Is that what the Tory government have in mind for it after the current pandemic fades a bit? 
Sell even more of it off to private profiteers, cut taxes on the rich even further, slash funding even more than they've done for several decades already - and have incessant charity appeals, which those on modest incomes tend to pay far more towards proportionately than the rich do?

It's especially annoying when you look at what else is going on in this lockdown, with the wholesale bailout of big business by the same working-class and middle-class taxpayers who are being shamed by charity appeals.  

One of the most grotesque sights in the Covid-19 crisis is the queue of begging billionaires asking for bailouts from the public purse, in the form of government tax breaks and other grants.

Near the front of the queue is Sir Richard Branson. 


He's the 312th richest person in the world, and the 6th richest in (?) Britain, with a personal fortune of £4.2billion.

Branson lives on and owns the private 30-hectare Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Islands archipelago. 

Branson on his private Caribbean beach: is this his idea of social distancing?

But he recently reassured us he does so“to take advantage of the weather rather than the tax breaks”! 


Not entirely true. 


Last month Branson shifted his $1.1billion stake in Virgin Galactic Holdings - his business for space tourism for billionaires - from Delaware in the USA to the Virgin Islands. He did so on the very same day (16 March) as share prices on the USA Dow Jones Index collapsed at the worst rate for any single day on record. 


Over the past 22 years Branson has collected £306million in dividends from Virgin Trains, and by getting those dividends sent to him on his island, he's had it entirely tax free. 


From the safety of his island, Branson now has the audacity to demand £700million in a bailout from the Australian government and another £500million from the British government.

He's backed in these demands by the bosses of Airbus which makes Virgin planes and Rolls Royce which makes its jet engines.

Meantime, Branson laid off 8,000 Virgin Atlantic staff, telling them to either take extended unpaid leave or take voluntary redundancy. 

Branson's Necker Island house: that reminds me, I must do the hoovering!

This brass-necked billionaire beggar has paid no income tax whatsoever in Britain since moving to the tax-free British Virgin Islands 14 years ago. 


In the spirit of entrepreneurship, his portfolio also includes Virgin Care, who were awarded £2billion worth of NHS and local authority healthcare deals.

You've guessed it: Virgin Care have not paid a penny in Corporation Tax and is ultimately controlled by Virgin Group Holdings in British Virgin Islands, one of the world’s main tax havens. 


Health campaigner Dr John Lister earlier this year accused Virgin healthcare of “playing a parasitic role in the NHS, fragmenting services, poaching NHS-trained staff and undermining nearby NHS Trusts." 


Now the Blairite billionaire is shamelessly rattling his begging bowl, demanding public subsidy for his private profit.

Branson is but one grotesque example of the queue of similar big business beggars who expect the working class to endanger their lives at work or take a 10% to 20% pay cut - if they're lucky enough not to be made redundant.

Bird's eye view of Branson's house: I could do lockdown in that space! 

Instead of subsidising private profit for the parasitic rich, we should demand democratic public ownership of their assets. 


The airline industry should be nationalised – not subsidised - to integrate it into a modernised public transport system, which can plan free public transport, reduction on reliance on air travel. 
Alongside democratic public ownership of rail and bus services - including Virgin Trains. 

Measures to not only combat the growing climate crisis - which they vastly contribute to - but also create hundreds of thousands of skilled, well-paid, unionised jobs in a socialist Green New Deal.

NATIONALISE TO SAVE SPRINGBURN RAILWAY DEPOT!

Workers at the historic railway depot in Springburn, Glasgow, are battling against its closure, with the loss of nearly 200 highly skilled jobs and 160 years of railway history.

The RMT and Unite unions have launched the Rally Roon the Caley campaign,  and marched to the Scottish parliament when the issue was being debated last week. Public support is widespread, but time is short to save this depot, which carries out service, maintenance, repairs, overhaul and upgrades for the entire Scotrail fleet.

The unions have rightly condemned this as an act of industrial vandalism. In a society suffering a desperate shortage of skilled jobs and apprenticeships, with a rail service that provokes public  uproar for its inefficiency, it's outrageous that the profiteers are allowed to threaten a railway depot that has been a feature of life for 160 years. It's another instalment in the horror story of rail privatisation, and the fragmentation that goes with it.

Springburn was historically the world hub of the railway industry. Up until 1995, the Caley was part of nationalised British Rail, a major part of BREL (British Rail Engineering Ltd). Last August, Knorr-Bremse Rail Services sold it to Gemini Rail Services. Five months later, on 17 January, Gemini declared a 45-day consultation period for its closure, apparently with plans to centralise their operations in the south of England.

This is a classic example of vital services and infrastructure, and people's livelihoods, being sacrificed on the altar of profit, as one gang of profiteers passes it on to another. It's also a classic case for public ownership, for the Scottish government to go beyond worthy words of condemnation and sympathy.

In response to claims by Gemini that the St Rollox depot is unsuitable and unprofitable, the unions have demanded on-site electrification and a link to the Glasgow/Edinburgh line. They have highlighted that the cost of this modernisation would be less than £1million, whilst the Scottish government has been allocated £4.8billion for railway infrastructure by Westminster. 

The Scottish government should step in, take the depot into public ownership – as they did with Prestwick airport – and integrate it with a publicly owned Scottish railway service, rather than let an array of capitalist vultures rip up a service for profit, particularly given the urgency of expanding public transport as one concrete measure against environmental pollution and climate chaos.

Time is running out. The unions should consider all options, including a workers’ and community occupation of the depot to prevent asset stripping, whilst escalating the pressure on the Scottish government to ‘stand up for Scotland’, as they pledged to do in past election campaigns.

NATIONALISE TO SAVE OUR STEEL JOBS, SKILLS & PRODUCTION!

The timing could not have been more obscenely appropriate, as a symbol of the cold class warfare facing working class people under Tory rule, and indeed under the rule of capital over labour in general.

Hot on the heels of the destructive closure of SSI steel plant in Redcar, shedding 2,200 jobs, came the devastation of Tata Steel's closure announcement, slashing 1,200 jobs in Scunthorpe, Motherwell and Cambuslang. These closures threaten the permanent end of the steel industry in Scotland.

In both cases, SSI and Tata owners blamed a flood of cheap Chinese steel on the world market for their decisions to wipe out livelihoods for whole communities. 

Royal Banquets for Rich - the Bullet for Workers 

Meantime, Cameron's upper-class regime hosted and banqueted dictatorial Chinese President Xi Jinping at Buckingham Palace. Venison from the Queen's Balmoral estate, west of Scotland Turbot, lobster mousse and 1977 vintage port were some of the items on the menu at the royal state banquet - with callous disregard for the thousands of steelworkers' families who meantime face the prospect of not being able to put a meal on the family table if these closures are not resisted and defeated.

Steel Town - Not Ghost Town

Lanarkshire used to be one of the world centres of steel production, with highly skilled, proud workers, who fought through their unions to conquer relatively good conditions.

Ravenscraig was once the biggest hot-strip steel producer in Europe. Now it does not exist. And plans to build a new town on its former site have been abandoned, but only after £230m was spent on the first phase!

The Dalzell Steel and Iron Works opened in Motherwell in 1872. Clydebridge steelworks in Cambuslang has been there since 1887, and produced steel plates for many of the Clyde-built ships of fame.

They were once part of the nationalized British Steel Corporation, which Thatcher's government targeted in their early crusade to smash the unions and privatize public property for the benefit of the profiteering class. First Corus, then Indian-based Tata Steel took over the plants now facing closure. At their peak, 12,000 workers produced vital supplies and profits in the two plants; as one worker told journalists, they used to allow 15 minutes at either end of the shift to get to and from their place of work in the plant, such was the crowd. Now the remaining 270 have been given 45 days' notice of closure.

A Desert in the Making

These workers and their families face the devastation of lost jobs, in an area turned into an industrial desert by the conscious destruction of manufacturing by Thatcher's pro-finance capitalist regime, added to by this week's announcement of 1,100 council job losses in North Lanarkshire. These two jobs slaughters combined threaten to double the numbers unemployed in the Motherwell district. 

But the area, and indeed the whole of Scotland, also faces the danger of losing the accumulated skills of these workers, in a nation already suffering a skills shortage of monumental proportions.

So it is crucial to the next generation - and this one - that a determined fight is waged to save every job, save the skills, and save production at the steelworks. The SSP will do everything in our powers to combine with the unions and anyone else willing to fight to 'save our steel'.

Steel Glut - Crisis of Overproduction 

The capitalist rich and their Tory puppets spout all the usual platitudes about sympathy for the workforces, whilst excusing the closures. 

Cameron took a break from banqueting the Chinese dictator to crush hopes of a UK government rescue by spelling out that there's a world glut of steel production. According to the figures he used, the surplus global supply of steel is 50 times larger than the UK's entire steel production. 

That explains the catastrophic collapse of steel prices on the world market, to half their previous levels. And that of course is a central feature of the system Cameron and his likes defends to the hilt - capitalism. Because it's a system based on competition between rival capitalist corporations battling for the biggest possible share of the market at the highest possible levels of profit for each of them, the system goes through a phase of massive production, until it goes beyond what can be sold. A crisis of overproduction. 

The current steel crisis is a classic example of this rotten, unplanned system, where the private profits of a few owners comes first and always - whilst workers, families, communities and whole nations are thrown to the wolves.

Rigging the Market

Other specific factors have added to the catastrophe facing steelworkers in this country. The massive growth of the Chinese economy includes huge output of steel. As part of their drive to become the biggest economic world power, their steel corporations are quite prepared to dump dirt-cheap imports on competing nations, including at prices below production costs, so as to win greater world market domination. 

And Chinese steel companies have pulled off tax-avoidance tricks by adding alloying elements to their steel reinforcement bar, such as boron and chromium, despite boron being notorious for causing severe welding failure, but providing no benefits to the rebar. Why do they do this? Because it earns these companies a tax rebate of 9-13% from the Chinese government. 

Chinese Workers not to Blame

That of course is not the fault of Chinese workers. Chinese workers have as much right to jobs as anyone else on the planet. It's the fault of the system. It's the very nature of capitalism. It's part of the DNA of profit-seeking, tax-dodging corporations the wide world over, not just in China. As is the ruthless exploitation of Chinese workers by their employers.

Additionally, the British state has done precious little to support its own steel industry, refusing for example to match the subsidies for energy costs issued to energy-intensive sectors by the governments of other European competitors. The steel union, Community, for example is demanding that the UK government fast-tracks the £220m per annum fund they have for this subsidy.

Tasks for Steel Task Force

The Scottish government has swiftly set up a Scottish Steel Task Force. Nicola Stugeon has repeatedly pledged that the SNP administration "will leave no stone unturned" in their efforts to save Scottish steel, a phrase imitated in every comment by every SNP Minister since. The SNP government is focusing on finding "a new commercial owner". 

As the STUC rightly said, it would be totally unacceptable if the Task Force was deployed to just find alternative jobs for redundant steel workers. It must instead pursue ways to save the industry and the skills of the workforce. 

This issue has a history in previous closure situations. For example, when Motorola shut down its West Lothian plant, instead of finding ways to integrate the expertise of these electronics workers in a government industrial strategy, they were instead 'supported' by a Task Force in pursuit of other job vacancies outwith electronics. As the SSP's Colin Fox often tells me, the next time he met the Motorola workers' representative (they didn't have an actual trade union) he was sweeping the forecourt in Harthill service station. 

Another Private Owner?

No socialist or trade unionist would hesitate to warmly welcome a new buyer for the Tata steelworks, provided they kept every worker in a job, with no loss of pay, terms and conditions. It has now emerged that in their desperation to hold onto their jobs, workers offered to accept pay cuts and reduced conditions to Tata Steel. But why should workers pay the price of a crisis in steel that is not of their making? 

However, putting the entire focus of a rescue mission on attracting another capitalist firm is fraught with pitfalls, to put it mildly. If that's all the Scottish government and its Task Force looked at for the remainder of the 45 days consultation period, it could end in a slow death for the industry and its skilled workers, if no such buyer steps forward. 

This health warning is necessary, because such a buyer wouldn't be investing in the steel plants as an act of charity; in keeping with every capitalist firm, they'd be doing so on the calculation of making a hefty profit. 

And if the world steel glut cuts off the path to such profiteering, what private sector buyer is likely to emerge? Already, Scottish billionaire Jim McColl, who took over Ferguson's shipyard in Port Glasgow when it faced closure last year, has ruled out buying the steelworks. He made the point that if a major outfit like Tata Steel couldn't make it work, he sees no scope for "smaller entrepreneurial Scottish involvement".

Nationalise Steelworks!

The human, social and symbolic importance of saving the steelworks demands urgent, radical action by the government. Whilst pounding the Westminster cabal to save our steel is right to do, the unions and communities affected shouldn't store much faith in that producing favorable action. 

But in contrast to Cameron's government of, by and for the rich, the Scottish government has a sweeping mandate to 'stand up for Scotland'. When the First Minister promises to 'leave no stone unturned' there is one glaring exception so far: the option of the government stepping in and taking ownership of the Tata Steel plants is one 'stone left unturned', at least so far. Yet that is the key and most practical solution.

They did so with Prestwick airport, buying it for a penny. If, as I heard one economist on the BBC object, Tata Steel wasn't inclined to sell the Lanarkshire plants for the token penny, so what! 

They've profited as a capitalist enterprise long enough, with virtually no publicity over the fact that in the quarter up to June 2015, Tata Steel Ltd doubled their profits compared to the same quarter in 2014 - to £76.6million. But now they want to up sticks and run, leaving an industrial desert behind in Lanarkshire.

So the Scottish government should take ownership of the steelworks, as a public asset, with public ownership rather than public funding of the profits of another profiteering capitalist 'entrepreneur' - even if one that is interested actually exists!

A Plan of Production

In turn that throws up the issue of how the steelworks could survive, as a public asset, if the globe is flooded with a glut of steel, a capitalist crisis of overproduction. 

I don't pretend to be a steel technologist! But surely the expertise of the workers involved, their trade union, plus industry experts could be urgently pulled together to devise a plan of production? Surely the Scottish government could use the Task Force to fully involve workers and unions in drafting a plan of what types of steel products the existing technology and skills set of the workforce could be used to link up with a wider industrial strategy? 

Options for Socially Useful Production 

For instance, to produce steel for a desperately needed public sector house-building programme, to tackle the crime of 157,000 families in Scotland being stuck on the housing waiting list? Or production of equipment for flood barriers? Or marine engineering equipment, as part of developing a huge public sector green industry? Or steel products to build the fleets and infrastructure for a vastly expanded public transport system?

Nationalisation of Scotland's steel industry, with a plan of production for local, socially useful need, would help bypass the obstacles of the global glut of steel, created by a system that produces purely for maximum profit.

Energy Profiteering 

Wider questions also arise from this catastrophic situation, including the socialist case for democratic public ownership of not just steel, or the construction industry, or transport - but also the energy industry, renewables included. One of Tata Steel's excuses for closure is high electricity prices - which in turn is largely caused by the profiteering of private capitalist ownership of energy supply. So the longer-term solutions to the human tragedy of workers being chucked on the scrapheap - when it suits the balance sheets of capitalist employers -would require democratic planning of industry, energy and services - something only possible with democratic public ownership.

Solidarity and Socialism 

We need to rally round the workers, their families and the communities faced with ruination by the threatened wipeout of an industry with over 150 years' history in Scotland. 

And the best contribution those of us not directly employed can make is to help popularise the rational alternative of nationalisation to save all steel jobs, skills and production - and put pressure on the elected government to wield the powers and authority they have been invested with by voters to carry out this measure before the furnaces cool and die.