Reports & Reflections on the 2009 UK Ford-Visteon Dispute: a Post-Fordist Struggle. Past Tense, June 2009.
“On 31st of March 2009 Ford/Visteon announced the closure of three factories in the UK and the sacking of 610 workers... No guarantees were given concerning redundancy or pensions payments. The management had made the workers work up to the last minute, knowing that they would not even receive any wages for their final shifts.” In response, workers from the Belfast plant spontaneously occupied the sites and in a few hours were joined by several hundred local supporters. On hearing the news, workers from the Basildon and Enfield plants went into occupation the following day. This pamphlet concentrates mainly on the Enfield occupation, which lasted for 9 days, and is written by a supporter of the workers.
Of particular interest is the author’s analysis of the role of the union during the occupation, particularly their role “as mediators and defenders of capitalist exploitation”. It is true that the unions’ role is one of mediation and as such does nothing to challenge the material basis of the relation between workers and employers. However as the existence of the wages system is only questioned by a tiny minority this can be of no great surprise; the unions do not work to establish socialism because their members are not socialists. To write off unions as defenders of capitalist exploitation is a step too far, as the author of the pamphlet accepts, “to be without a union would usually be even worse under present conditions.”
The real question is one of internal democracy and the extent in which the union is run by and for its membership. Whilst all unions do have a certain amount of democratic framework the amount of member participation is often lacking, perhaps not surprising when “unions are generally run today primarily as financial service brokers – "negotiating deals on insurance, mortgages and pensions, medical cover, holidays and car breakdown services" etc – and investment funds with a sideline in industrial arbitration.” Unions, sometimes under the well entrenched leadership of full time officials, have at times acted against the interests of the working class but such occurrences should not be understood as a fault of the union form per se but as an expression of the contradictions of the position of workers under capitalism.
The assumption – which is not explicitly stated in the pamphlet but hinted at in certain passages – that capitalism can be overcome through industrial action alone and that this occupation was part of such a process, is not one that should go unquestioned. Workers who struggle to maintain and better their conditions should be commended, but until the working class consciously and politically organise to end the wages system the same battles will have to be fought over and over again. It is true that the bitter experience of the Visteon workers may lead some of them to question the basis of capitalist society, but from start to finish all this struggle was attempting was to get the best from a bad situation, not to bring about world socialism.
A myriad of experiences from everyday life can provide enough motivation for the disenchanted to ask themselves ‘why do I have to do this every day?’ To steal a pithy phrase from the Socialist Party of Australia “it is Capitalism itself, unable to solve crisis, unemployment and poverty, engaging in horrifying wars, which digs its own grave. Workers are learning by bitter experience and bloody sacrifice for interests not their own. They are learning very slowly. Our job is to shorten the time, to speed up the process”
The workers at Visteon secured a deal ten times greater than the original offer, their (and our) position as materially dependent sellers of labour-power continues.
Darren Poynton
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