THE giant German car maker, BMW, has written to every one of its 8,000 employees in Britain making the thinly veiled threat that in the event of Britain voting to leave the EU they will lose their jobs.
An email to all staff from BMW bosses lays it on the line: ‘The BMW Group believes that the UK is better as a member of the EU than it would be outside it. You will see in the media this week an open letter supporting the campaign to stay in the EU, signed by around 200 business leaders, including Member of the AG Board, Ian Robertson.’
It then goes on to say that ‘our employment base’ would be affected by tariff barriers, and any end to the ‘easy movement of our people’ across Europe amongst all the other dire effects of an exit. BMW’s threat is nothing more than an attempt by the bosses to intimidate and blackmail workers into voting to stay in the bankers’ and bosses’ club of the EU.
By issuing this naked threat to jobs they are moving down the path of trying to impose a dictatorship over the working class – if you don’t do as you are told then we will destroy your jobs and livelihoods.
This was exactly the same threat used by the bankers to impose the dictatorship of the Troika (IMF, European Central Bank and EU) over the Greek working class who were told they must accept savage austerity cuts to pay off the bankers’ debts or face being thrown out of the EU and bankrupted.
This attempt by the monopolists and bankers to impose a similar dictatorship on the working class in Britain using the same methods of threats and blackmail – ruling by fear – is a sign of the desperate crisis of the capitalist class across Europe.
In February, five of the EU’s biggest banks – Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Santander, Barclays and RBS – were among the world’s banks whose stocks crashed to historic lows sending shock waves throughout the financial world, leading one financial expert to warn that the EU was on the brink of a ‘terrifying crisis’.
This view has been reinforced by the ex-governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, who in his recently published book pronounced that the Eurozone is ‘doomed’. Speaking this week at a book launch, King, enjoying the benefit of having retired from trying to manage a bankrupt British capitalist system, was even more blunt saying that weaker countries in the Eurozone like Greece and Ireland had ‘little choice’ but to leave the Eurozone before they are destroyed by the dictatorship of the banks.
By extension this would mean being thrown out of the EU and its inevitable destruction. In his book, King further warns that dictatorship over the working class by the bankers has ‘sowed the seeds of division’ and will ‘lead not only to an economic but also a political crisis’.
The political crisis King is warning against is the revolutionising effect this crisis is having on the working class across Europe and Britain. There can be only one answer by workers to the bully-boy tactics of the employers and bankers.
The threats to sack workers if they do not submit to their diktats must be met by nationalising these industries without compensation and placing them under the control of the working class.
This demands that there must be a real campaign not just for a NO vote in the referendum but a campaign for a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government.
A workers government that will nationalise the car industry as well as all the banks and other major industries, put them under workers control so that it will be possible to keep all jobs and receive decent wages. This will be a planned socialist economy.
A workers government will organise to join with the working class of Europe and struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe, without borders, and where the capitalist class is driven out and production is for the needs of everyone.
