THE week long closure of the two remaining GM owned Vauxhall plants in the UK at Luton and Ellesmere Port which started yesterday marks a new and decisive stage in the collapse of the European car industry under the impact of the world crisis.
It is also a forceful and savage lesson that the drive by the leadership of the trade unions to sell workers’ rights in the hope of securing jobs is both futile and treacherous.
The background to this week of ‘downtime’ is the collapse of demand for cars across Europe, a collapse that effects not just Vauxhall and GM’s German operation, Opel, but the French car giants Renault and Peugeot as well as the massive Ford company who have already imposed temporary shut downs because of overproduction.
GM, whose parent US company had to be nationalised by the Obama presidency to save it from bankruptcy and closure, announced earlier this year that its profits had plunged by 41% in Europe.
It reported an operating loss for Vauxhall/Opel of $360 million compared to an operating profit of $102 million last year.
In February GM announced that either the Opel plant in Bochum or the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port would be closed.
This set off a frenzy amongst the leadership of the Unite union to prove that they could win any ‘beauty’ contest against German workers, that they were prepared to sacrifice every right enjoyed by Vauxhall workers to win the new build for the Astra at Ellesmere Port.
The deal that Unite signed up to offered ‘round-the-clock’ flexibility at the plant, flexibility on pay, working hours, overtime payments and holiday entitlements.
The union agreed to 51 week a year working (doing away with the traditional summer holiday break) along with a 4 year pay deal.
They accepted a two year pay freeze to be followed by two years of pay increases fixed at just 1% above inflation.
Weekend working was no longer subject to overtime payments.
To meet the increased productivity demanded and keep the company’s costs as low as possible workers were signed up to a deal that meant they had to work the hours dictated by the bosses in return for pay cuts on top of the pay freeze the union had already accepted in 2009.
When it was announced in March that Ellesmere Port had ‘won’ the contract to build the new Astra and that the Bochum plant would be the one to close the Unite leadership greeted it as the ‘saving’ of the plant.
That they were falling for ‘fools gold’ is obvious now, as the crisis of overproduction in the industry dominates, despite all their grovelling concessions made to the employer.
Workers at Luton and Ellesmere Port will be paid for the down week but GM will demand that they make it up with unpaid hours when the company demands. In other words workers are forced to pay for stoppages not of their making in order to keep GM in profit.
All the concessions made by the union leadership, agreeing pay cuts for their members and turning them into a completely flexible workforce obedient to every whim of the employer has not secured a single job as this closedown demonstrates.
There is only one way to prevent the wholesale destruction of the car industry and that must be a campaign of strike action and the occupation of any plant in the UK threatened with closure to bring down the coalition and secure the nationalisation of GM in the UK.
What goes for the UK also goes for Germany and the other EU states where there are GM plants.
As GM is incapable of running a car industry in Europe its plants must be nationalised and placed under workers control.
Above all a new revolutionary leadership must be built in the unions that is prepared to wage and win this fight.
