BIG BUSINESS should be given the right to dismiss unproductive workers without explanation or warning, declares a leaked report to the coalition government by venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft.
The report has the support of the Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer Osborne.
It says that the UK’s ‘terrible’ unemployment laws are preventing economic growth and should be scrapped so that ‘idle workers’ or any workers that the employer does not like can be dispensed with, without any legal complications.
In this utopia for the ruling classes there is to be no such thing as an ‘unfair dismissal’. Using it, ‘slackers’ who will not work are to be disposed of, opening an alleged bright future for the British bankers and bosses.
As propaganda it is laughable since ‘slacking workers’ have got nothing to do with the current crisis of the capitalist system.
Growth has been destroyed by the collapse of the banks and the ensuing situation – combining hyperinflation and a collapse of production.
However, the Beecroft plan is not propaganda, it is a programme of action.
It was Mrs Thatcher who described the future of the UK as belonging to the banks, and that the City of London would carry the country on its back, making superprofits, with the crumbs from the table trickling down to the workers in the service industries.
The manufacturing of commodities was thought to be beneath British capitalism. Industries, such as the coal mining industry, were shut down.
There was a rush to globalisation as Thatcher’s heir Blair urged the bosses to re-site their factories abroad where labour was cheap, while we would live off of the ‘knowledge economy’.
However, Thatcher did not leave any idea about what to do when the banks collapsed, taking the UK and the EU onto the rocks.
This is what the ruling class is now grappling with.
They have decided that there must be a return to commodity production, but since it will have to be in competition with cheap labour economies, the price of labour power – wages – in the UK will have to be slashed.
The plan is that as unemployment is built up the established workforce, with its standard of a living wage and its protection against unfair dismissal, will be sacked and the unemployed brought into work for cut wages without legal protection against dismissal, the kind of situation that recently produced a wave of suicides in western factories sited in Chinese New Economic Zones.
Going forward by returning to 19th century wages and conditions is what Beecroft is all about.
His report is about sacking workers, smashing trade unions and bringing in a reign of terror against ‘replacement’ workers, so that they will work till they drop, encouraged by the fact that there will be no benefits to survive on.
This Tory onslaught at home will be allied to a return to international piracy as we have seen in the case of Libya.
It is clear that the trade unions must act against the Beecroft plan, and the government that wants to bring it in.
They must call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government that will put capitalism where it belongs, in a museum, and bring in a socialist planned economy that will give the workers a future instead of a Tory return to the dark ages.
Trade union leaders who will not carry out this policy must be replaced by a revolutionary leadership that will.