A manager gets his cards (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Dear Sir,  it is with deep regret! ”

 

A man has written to the newspapers to make a complaint. His complaint is that his employers have given him the sack. A popular week-end paper gave it prominence, with the comment that “its the hidden tragedy that makes it worth the reading.”

As this is something happening to people every day, the reader may wonder what all the fuss is about The answer is that the complainant was not an ordinary man. By this, we do not mean that he had double joints, or second sight He was a works manager.

"If you are earning, as I was £1,500 or so a year, the men in the workshops envy you. They call themselves the under dogs. They think you've got it easy, ordering them about . . . But if the Company gets into difficulties, the first thing that comes under scrutiny is the higher salary list. . . They (the under dogs) have chances of several hundreds to my one of getting another post because there's only one works manager and 200 or more hands.” (News of the World, 5/4/53).

Our well-educated and expensively-trained manager who, of course, is not a mere “hand,” but a highly qualified “brain,” with technical qualifications, two degrees, and thirty years" administrative experience, has made some important discoveries.

“ Nobody wants a man of 53 whose job has collapsed under him,” he says.

And yet his own letter tells us that he knew what the end would be, “I had, in fact, spent the last twelve months in pruning the factory staff to the extent that if the firm ever got busy again it would be very short of skilled operatives.”

But even a common hand, without degrees, would know that “pruning” staff (giving other people the sack) is hardly likely to prove a permanent occupation, even in a large factory.

What would you do ? he asks, and answers, first you apply to your professional institute. No good, too old. Second, you go to the Special Appointments Bureau of the Ministry of Labour. No good, “things are quiet just now."" Meanwhile, your six months' cheque is being exhausted, you will have to live on your savings. Savings! You had to live up to the job, dress Well, run a car, entertain. What savings ?

Next, worry all your business friends. “ I should think 25 per cent. of British industry is bearing my name in mind,” he says sardonically. “Gone by now are the hopes of a job at the kind of salary I used to enjoy. Half the amount—I’d jump at it—go anywhere —do anything. Anyone want a secretary-stooge ? Or a butler-valet cum gardener-handyman, or a chauffeur?”

“The story of a man who climbed the ladder of success only to have it fall under him at the age of 53,” says the Editor’s blurb. A commonplace story, you think.

“I wonder what the remedy is for cases like mine ? Is it just rotten luck or is there something else wrong somewhere ? 1 cannot decide,” says our unhappy ex-staff pruner.

These are the most valuable lines of his long statement.

The first thing is the pathetic folly of imagining that anyone is immune from the hazards and blows of the profit system. There is no escape. There are no special cases. Whether a man is manager at £1,500, or messenger at £200, anybody employed by somebody, or something else, like Public Corporation, Company or Board, or just a “ guv’nor,” can be dis-employed (sacked) by those employers at will. Leering round the shoulder of every employed person, Dustman or Duke of Windsor, War-Lord, or Warehouseman is the malevolent demon called the Threat of the Sack, making the eternal dream of the employee “ security ” (Welfare State and all), a weary nightmare.

Employment is dependence and subservience of members of the property-less class upon the owners of wealth. Whether these workers are well-paid managers or low-paid domestic helots is irrelevant “Improvements” in the conditions of wage-takers, as our manager has now discovered, frequently turn out, in the finish, to be the reverse. The fact that a job carries £1,500 a year allows the employer to pick the youthful and energetic suitably-qualified man and burn him up quickly.

Small consolation for the employee, having gone for the big lot, to find it does not last. This is the simple explanation of the fabulous (?) salaries of actresses, athletic champions and boxers, whose fortunes and life may hang on one blow.

It also explains the basis of so-called “permanent” and “regular” employment, such as that of State employees, Civil Servants, Railwaymen, Teachers and Postmen as opposed to casual labour subject to rapid fluctuation in alternating trade movements (Dockers, Building, Snow-clearers, Canvassers).

So it is that the Postal Authorities, by offering “Establishment” in “permanent” employment, can take their pick of a larger bunch, without high wages. Thus the great “progress” of the workers under Capitalism is to find themselves raised higher up, only to be smashed harder down.

Having got his motor-driver’s or gardener’s job (and he will be by no means the first degree’d man to sweep the streets), our manager must now, at 53, start a stiff course in a new tricky subject, Marxian economics. There he will find the answer to his questions, and stop wondering.

He will read in Volume I of “Capital” these pregnant lines

“Just as little as better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger allowance do away with the exploitation of the slave so little do they set aside that of the wageworker. A rise in the price of labour as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of tension of it.” (“Capital" Page 127. Dawson Edition).

Socialists work to break this chain of gold, replacing even well-paid employment by voluntary cooperative free labour.

Horatio.

Dons on the dole as well (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m one of about 35,000 university lecturers in this country. That’s too many and too expensive, says the government. Between three and five thousand of us will have to go.

So a lot of us are pretty uneasy at the moment. Will we find anything else if we’re made redundant? Teaching in the schools comes to mind. But there’s not much chance there. Even though we’re qualified to teach at university level, not many of us have the right qualifications for teaching school children. In any case the subjects' a lot of us specialise in (philosophy, psychology, engineering, and so on) aren’t school subjects at all. And anyway there are hardly any school jobs about.

Few of us thought it would come to this. True, for quite a few years both Labour and Tory governments have been telling the universities to tighten their belts. They’ve been telling them that they’re too costly to run and not good value for money. And the universities have cut down. They’ve spent less on things like stationery, grants to staff and students; equipment. They’ve tried not to replace staff who’ve left or retired. But they’ve not saved very much-you can’t by economics of this kind. The only way you can really save—the universities know it and the government knows it—is by having fewer people on your pay roll. Because that’s where most of the money goes—on wages.

Yet, somehow, the universities thought, or at least hoped, that everything could carry on as before. Maybe enough people would retire or leave of their own accord to allow “natural wastage” to make the necessary cuts. Maybe the next government would be more sympathetic to the universities than the last one (didn’t the Tories say they would be when they were in opposition?). Maybe the country’s economic situation would look up and cuts in university spending be seen as less necessary. After all University lecturers did think they were a cut above most other workers. They did think their work was particularly important and that their status guaranteed them immunity from the vulgar business of redundancy.

How’s the government going to decide which of us are to go and which to stay? It’s a difficult one. In the past university jobs have been considered as held for life and usually that’s the way it’s been. You only got sacked if you went out of your way to get on the wrong side of your Head of Department in your first three years (your “probationary” period) or if you committed serious (very serious) moral indiscretions with a student (“moral turpitude”, it’s called). Now, suddenly, ways have got to be found of quickly getting rid of people in large numbers. The government knows the universities aren’t going to be able to solve it for themselves, so it’s going to tell them (“advise”, I believe,is the official terminology) who’s got to go.

 

Not that the University Grants Council — the government body that deals with the financing of universities — will be naming names. It will be “advising" universities to cut out certain departments or faculties and telling them that, whether they do so or not, they’ll no longer receive funds for their running. The surplus staff will then be declared redundant and their students distributed among other Universities giving lecturers who have kept their jobs there an increased work load.

What about the situation in the university I myself work in? It’s one of those, so rumour has it, which are most likely to be heavily affected. The University Grants Council has said it will be sending out letters in June with details of where to make the cuts.

This leaves plenty of time for rumours. And at the moment, with the summer term barely a fortnight old, it’s all rumours. We’ve all already heard half-a-dozen quite different “leaked” versions of what’s going to happen. On the cards, according to a sober senior academic, is that the whole university will close. Another rumour is that it’s only one faculty, Social Sciences, that’s going to shut down. From other quarters there’s talk of medium-sized departments such as languages, philosophy and classics bearing the brunt. Others predict less drastic cuts with the extinction of just small lightly staffed departments—such as Art, Statistics, Music and my own.

How are we reacting to this unprecedented state of affairs? In various different ways. Some linguists, for example, have thought about using their redundancy money (will there be any?) to set up a translation agency in the town. But is there a market for one here? Doubtful. English lecturers talk about writing their long dreamed of best seller. Other colleagues are offended that they haven’t been “consulted”. Some are confident that the University Grants Council, who after all are only academics themselves, haven’t got the power to force sackings on the universities.

What about our union? Won’t the AUT (Association of University Teachers) give us any protection? The AUT moved from being a professional association to a fully-fledged trade union several years ago after a ballot of its members. The idea was that under the collective TUC umbrella, we’d have more protection more bargaining power. Since then the AUT has managed to negotiate wage rises at about the same rate as inflation which, some would say, is no mean feat. It uses tough language too and until recently has refused to even contemplate the possibility of redundancies. Now, though it still says it will fight hard against redundancy proposals, it’s yielded to circumstances by admitting that redundancies are possible and even likely. And when the government axe falls it’s difficult to see how the AUT will be able to help us. It’s likely to take a test case to the courts to determine whether universities are legally empowered to dismiss employees who, according to contract, have life tenure. But most of us agree that this is unlikely to resolve things in our favour.

So perhaps by the time you read this, the affair should have been settled. And you’ll be able to read in a future issue of Socialist Standard how the famous University Grants Council letter has affected the jobs and lives of this writer and his colleagues.

Just a final word. Why is it happening at all? Many people in the universities would say that it’s because we’ve got a reactionary philistine government in power which is determined to spend as little money as possible on education and public services. There may be some truth in this. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. It was the last Labour government which started to make serious cuts in the education budget, which caused many redundancies by shutting down Colleges of Education, and which began to talk about and pave the way for redundancies in the universities. So, in government, both parties have moved in the same direction. The continuing recession in world trade has forced them (as it’s forcing governments elsewhere) to limit investment in the training of skilled manpower which is what universities are about. The end result of this had to be unemployment.

This brings me back to those of my colleagues who wanted to be “consulted”. When it was pointed out to one of them that workers in many other occupations were being sacked without being “consulted”, the reply was: “Yes, but we’re not down the mines”. This nicely summed up the view long held by most university lecturers that they’re a kind of privileged élite with special status and nothing to fear, that they’re somehow in a different category from workers in other jobs and that their employer, recognising this, will somehow treat them in a special way.

In fact university lecturers, whatever their image of themselves, are just as much members of the working class as anyone who, in order to live has to sell his energies to an employer for a wage or salary. He will also tell them that, in times of economic crisis, “status” doesn't make their job one bit more secure than that of their fellow wage-slaves “down the mine”. Universities are an important part of the profit system, giving to a section of the working class (the students) the intellectual skills that their future employers will need and will buy from them. And their employers will be in business for one reason alone—profit (or, if the government’s the employer, to provide the employing class with the services necessary to realise that profit).

Here’s hoping that the present shake-up will at least shake some of my colleagues out of their comfortable self-satisfied view of the world. Here’s hoping that their first direct taste of working-class insecurity will make them use their intellectual skills to look closely not just at their academic specialities but at how present-day society works. Here’s hoping that they'll sec its absurdity and come to the conclusion that social sanity means the end of the wages system and the end of production for profit. There is no other way of ending that terrible ever-present wastage of human skills and energies known as unemployment. 

Howard Moss

The Right to Disinvest (1997)

From the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

This was the right invoked by a leader of the European employers’ association to justify Renault’s decision in March to close its factory at Vilvoorde on the outskirts of Brussels, throwing 3,100 workers out of a job. The French President. Jacques Chirac, was equally explicit. Factories closing, he said, was ‘‘part of life". All this is very true. Under capitalism firms owning factories and other means of production exist to make a profit.They don’t exist to provide jobs for workers. Firms will only go on investing their capital in production if they calculate this will bring them a profit at the going rate.

If they don’t make profits, or calculate that they wouldn’t, they will hold part of their capital in liquid form, either as cash or as money lent for short periods or used for currency and other form of speculation. They will lay off workers and, if things are really bad, they will close down factories, “disinvest". All this is part of normal life under capitalism.

Things have been bad for Renault. There is overcapacity in the European car industry. In other words, all the car firms taken together have overinvested in facilities for producing cars in relation to the market demand. This has led to intensified competition between them. But who says competition says losers as well as winners. And Renault has been one of the losers.

Its sales have fallen and its share of the market, even in France, has fallen. In 1996 it made an operating loss of £200 million. Under these circumstances it had no choice but to disinvest, to cut back on its productive capacity. This was the only chance it had of staying in the running and of restoring its profitability. The French Stock Exchange understood this. The day after the announcement that the Vilvoorde factory was to close, the price of Renault shares went up.

The workers concerned saw things rather differently: that they had been used and then thrown away, just like a Kleenex as they put it. Naturally they protested. So did other workers, who knew what they meant. On 16 March some 70,000 trade unionists, including 5,000 or so from France, marched through the streets of Brussels.

This march was basically a plea by workers to be treated as human beings and not as commodities. But this is not going to happen under the profit system where workers, or rather their working skills, are commodities, bought by employers whose aim is to make a profit out of them.

The view that the present economic system puts profits before people is in fact more widespread than even socialists sometimes think. An opinion poll carried out in France for the magazine L’Evenement de Jeudi (13/19 March) found that to the question "When you think of the economic system as it operates at present what does that incite in you?”, 41 percent replied fear and 31 percent replied revulsion. Seventy percent thought the economic system "considered the human person as a commodity” and 80 percent disagreed that it "prepared well the future of our children".

No doubt this explains the popularity of a recent book by the novelist Viviane Forrester entitled L’Horreur economique—a title that needs no translating—which mercilessly criticises the present economic system for the way it throws people out of work and leaves them to rot.

The hope must be that this disaffection with the profit system will not be channelled into futile attempts to humanise it—that reformist project has been tried many times this century and failed.

Adam Buick

Something to think about (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing about 2½ million workers are officially registered as jobless. Accompanying the monthly tilt of a full Wembley Stadium of workers on to the scrap heap, has been a sharp rise in alcoholism, violent crime, family breakdowns and admission to mental hospitals. While millions of people over the world slowly die for want of food, resources lie untouched and men hankering for work walk past empty padlocked factories having been told their services are no longer required. Fierce blame for this madness is levelled at a variety of people, politicians and policies. The problem of unemployment is not peculiar to Britain, for there are presently about 30 million registered unemployed in America and Europe.

Mr. Slick is a company manager whose career is developing nicely, along with his ulcer. He blames unemployment on the British disease, laziness. “Most of them are too idle to get a job, there are plenty advertised in the papers and Job Centres. They should move to where the work is, any employment is better than scrounging..

Were workers falling to laziness at the rate of 3,000 a day during November 1980, for that was the rate of unemployment? Every week there is news of thousands more who are to be told that they will shortly not be used anymore. Although last December there were two and a quarter million out of work, government figures put the number of job vacancies at 83,517. When 2,900 men were made redundant from the steel works at Consett last year there were already over 2,000 jobless in that region and only 31 jobs available to any of the ousted steel workers.

Is a worker obliged to leave home and family and trek around the country, from one high unemployment area to the next in search of work? To move with your family you may need to sell your house and nowadays there isn’t exactly a queue to settle in an area like Consett. Incidentally, Mr. Slick, if you believe that any employment is better than being a parasite why not tell that to the Royals, the Aristocracy and the Company owners, for whom you “manage”?

One other thing Mr. Slick. In times of recession very often the first place a company will start to prune its costs is with its management. Cutting a few £10,000 a year labour-units is usually a good way for a large company to improve its cost-effectiveness. An article called “Confronting the Unthinkable” (Financial Times 22/10/80) deals with a “predicament that is increasingly being felt in industry as, on both sides of the Atlantic, executives fall victim to economic recession and face enforced redundancy or early retirement”. An American company has been set up to groom redundant executives to present themselves to maximum advantage to potential new employers. “You are the chief executive of a New York company which is suddenly taken over. Next thing your are an out-of-work chief executive. You have turned fifty and are not of an easily employable age. So what do you do?” 

Perhaps you have a serious think about the society in which you live. Redundancy can come as a painful illusion-shatterer to anyone who believes him or herself in the mythical middle-class. The grooming company, THinc Consulting Group, even panders to the snob terminology of the executive (where jobs are “appointments” and wages are “salaries”) by describing the job-finding service as “executive outplacement”, although trying to sell yourself to someone is humiliating whatever you’re calling the exercise. Executives made redundant from private and nationalised industries can buy similar services from British grooming companies, although the fees are high and many shame-faced salary-seekers have to make do with sidling to the Job Centre to sign on with the Professional and Executive Register. It’s goodbye to dreams of power, cocky business talk and the company car. Then there’s the small matter of the hefty mortgage commitment and the children’s school fees. If you are one of the 90 per cent who do not own industrial concerns, land or have control of financial capital then consider the degree of harsh reckoning over our lifestyle which is exercised by those who do own those sceptres and who operate them remorselessly to profit from our work, when they give it to us.

Terry Dolt is in the National Front — or has he joined the British Movement? He wants to protect his England which he claims is something more than his rooms in that high-rise council block, although what more he’s not sure. Perhaps it’s his English culture, you know, tea (from India or China), the monarchy (from Germany) and so on. Unemployment? That is caused by immigration. No, not immigration from Canada or South Africa, but black immigration and jewish conspiracies.

When unemployment reached the level of three million in Britain in 1932, so little black immigration had there been that a single asian or negro was regarded as a curiosity walking through a British city, and as for the jews being responsible, far from masterminding the mass redundancies of that racial conglomeration described as “British”, they were living in dreadful poverty-remember the condition of Cable Street? The locations of today’s highest unemployment levels — Scotland and Northern Ireland — are areas where there has been virtually no black immigration. It is a sad irony that in the recessions of capitalism it is immigrant labour which generally finds it most difficult to get employment. Racial discrimination has arisen, and been fomented by politicians, as a scapegoat for the problems produced by the real culprit — capitalism.

In the 18-month period up to May 1975 unemployment rose by 65 percent for the general population and 182 per cent for young West Indians (Department of Employment Statistics). There has been no NF or British Movement regime in Britain, but we can point to the racist Labour government of 1964-70 to show the failure of immigration control to solve unemployment. The Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962 was a piece of racist Tory legislation described by the contemporary Labour leader Gaitskell as a law which “. . . will be regarded very largely throughout the world as the imposition of a colour bar over here . . The retention of this law was part of the 1964 Labour manifesto but the non-colour-blind immigration controls operated throughout 1964-1970 did not stop the number of jobless from almost doubling.

Mr. Grimace is a Tory. The discipline of his public school and the army has made him the questioning, independent thinker he now is. His main concern with unemployment is not entirely to do with the enormity of working class suffering it leaves in its wake, but more to do with its damaging effect on the economy. By this he means withdrawal of investment, loss of profits, falling share prices — damage, in short, to the interests of the parasites. Mr. Grimace supports Thatcher.

If capitalism is left to run freely with minimum government intervention, says Grimace, the unemployment level will be greatly reduced if not solved altogether. We are told that if the government stops inflation and greatly reduces public expenditure it will be able to make big cuts in taxation which will allow employers to retain more of their profits. With this extra margin of profit, we’re told, further investment will be made in industry, creating more jobs. This is fallacious. Between 1820 and 1913 there was no inflation and yet government expenditure gauged against the total national income — of less than one quarter of what this government is spending. Yet these conditions for which Thatcher is striving did nothing to prevent continuous unemployment and the agonies of the Great Depression. The mistake is to believe that employers are motivated by a need to create jobs. Even given a larger margin of profit, by reduced taxation, capitalists will not re-invest it in industry to create more jobs if the goods, were they to be produced, would not be sold at a profit.

Keith Joseph’s latest gem is that unemployment could be alleviated if workers threatened with redundancy were to accept lower wages than the going rate in their particular line of work. This is called “pricing yourself into a job’’ and means that a company paying £70 to eight men could employ ten men for the same outlay if each was only paid £56. This cut in wages, reduced even more in real terms by inflation, would mean a severe retrenchment in the already base living conditions for most workers. Why? Simply to maintain the profit level of those who we allow to own industry. As a substantial shareholder in Premier Investment Trust, Drayton and the building company Bovis, Joseph must find his job of devising such profit-protecting policies quite engaging. His scheme however will not lower unemployment. The ten men in the example above might produce more than the eight men. If the company managed to capture more of the market it would be at the expense of a rival firm which would in turn be forced to lay off some of its workers. Do you remember all that moronic melodrama from Saatchi & Saatchi in Thatcher’s election campaign? The ever-lengthening dole queues were with us, we were told, not courtesy of capitalism, but because Labour wasn’t working. Since the Tories have been in office with all the power they asked for to solve the problems, the number out of work has soared by over a million.

Ms Policy is an ardent member of the Labour Party. She’s not proud of Labour’s six-government record of not met promises on Housing, Inflation, Unemployment and so on. In fact, she’s not proud of Labour’s record full stop. But at least, she’ll tell you, it’s better than the Tories. One more chance for a Labour regime with Foot as overlord is bound to reduce unemployment to a “tolerable level”, if not solve the problem. Not so. Another Labour government as a proposed answer to unemployment is a non-starter.

Today the production of wealth in all industrialised countries, including state-capitalist Russia, is chaotic. Regardless of human need things are only produced if sales are predicted. Rival national and international companies churn out goods to compete in the bedlam of bidding for markets. Periodically markets become flooded with goods. With disappearing prospects of profits, enterprises slacken or stop production and workers are thrown out of work. In the West the tiny minority who make these gravely consequential decisions are Boards of Directors, shareholders and the Boards of the nationalised industries. In the misnamed Communist Russia there are industrial managers. “They are promoted and given bonuses like their capitalist counterparts when they increase production and profits. They are dismissed and humiliated if they fail in this task. They differ from their counterparts in that they are fellow workers of the State with the lowliest worker in the plant they manage, but they are remote from him physically and spiritually. They live in more attractive, spacious and isolated quarters than the bench workmen and they do not share fully his concerns, in spite of numerous efforts to bring the two together.” (The Soviet Legal System 3rd Ed. Hazard, Butler and Maggs). These are the Mr. Slicks of the Eastern block.

Important industrial decisions, however, like whether production of a certain good is to be stopped are made by the top officials of the Communist Party (apparatchiks) — a ruling elite — who actually hire and fire the industrial managers. In times of slackened production, the Russians who would be in the dole queue in western style capitalism are “allocated” jobs in the police and armed forces. Hence we are told there is no unemployment in Russia.

Constant unemployment, periodically escalating when markets become glutted, is a characteristic of capitalism which no Labour government can remove. In November 1980 at an unemployment rally in Liverpool Michael Foot inveighed against Tory policies and bewailed the catastrophe of jobs being lost at the rate of one every 15 seconds. What was he offering as an alternative? During the 1974-79 Labour government, for part of which Michael Foot was actually Minister of Employment, jobs were lost at the rate of one every 3 minutes 35 seconds — something Foot forgot to brag about at the Liverpool rally.

The 1945 Labour government’s promise of “jobs for all” seemed to be almost kept as unemployment remained very low throughout its office but this was not because the Labour cabinet was controlling capitalism. There was a great deal of work to be done after 1945 reconstructing industry after the war and British industry’s potential rivals — the industries of Germany and Japan for instance — were not to be in full swing again, winning markets from British companies, until the seventies. And again, during Labour’s 1964-70 management of the economy, the dole queue nearly doubled its length.

The Keynesian formula is basically that governments can solve unemployment with an “expansionist” policy: as the Labour Party put it in 1945, “if bad trade and general unemployment threaten . . . we should give people more money and not less to spend”. But each note of the “more money” that the workers were receiving became worth less and less. In 1938 there were £500 million worth of notes in circulation but by 1976 the notes in circulation amounted to £6,000 million. The consequence was a vast increase in prices. Having used inflationary policy to reduce unemployment, the Labour Party found itself in the rather awkward position, in 1976, of attacking inflation as the cause of unemployment and trying to crack the problem with wage-restraints. In that year the government set itself the target of reducing unemployment to 700,000 by 1979, and yet by April 1979 the number of unemployed had risen to 1,340,595. It is not only Miss Policy and her friends who end up supporting the prolongation of the profit-system. The revolutionary proclamations of the SWP dwindle at election time when they urge us to “Vote Labour with no illusions” in the absence of a SWP candidate.

The places where we work — factories, farms, offices, trains, docks, mines — are the property of a small minority. We go to these places to be employed. When we are of no use to the owners we are shut out. If these places belonged to society at large they would be operated to provide goods and services for people to enjoy, not to be sold to those who could afford them. We would not subserviently have to seek employment. We would have free and equal access both to work, chosen in line with talent and interest, and to the results of our labour. The possibility of such a society is no more a fanciful daydream than the agonies of today’s society are an illusory nightmare. But the transformation of society from the profit-system to socialism is clearly not one of these on-a-plate remedies promised by politicians and left-wing leaders. The depriving money-system can only be wound up once a majority have thought seriously about the choice we have, and have decided to act co-operatively for fundamental change. The option is open and you know what decision the capitalists would like you to make. Consider the rest of your life under the yoke of wage-slavery. What do you think? 

Gary Jay

The profit motive : a case study (2005)

From the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

In January Sony, the multinational electronics corporation, announced it is to declare 300 redundancies at its two factories in south Wales – 80 from the Bridgend factory, producing cathode ray tubes, and 220 from the TV factory adjacent to the M4 at Pencoed –  a move that almost certainly signals the imminent closure of an operation that once employed 3,300 working people. This latest news will be of no surprise to those working in the two factories where Sony has been quietly shedding jobs since the late 1990s.

Production from these factories relies on ‘old’ tube technology and, as a spokesman explained, “The move away from CRT-based TVs accelerated last year with flat panel products now accounting for around half the UK market” (Guardian,  21 January). It is now evident that the managers employed in Japan to make profits for shareholders had decided by the late 1990s that investment to support flat screen televisions would go elsewhere and after 30 years have decided to call it a day in Wales. So where did it all go wrong?

Sony’s Bridgend factory, officially opened by Prince Charles in 1974, was the first major manufacturing venture in the UK by a Japanese multinational corporation. The main imperative of capitalism is to expand – a fact well understood in Japan where by 1972 the country had the largest television industry in the world producing in excess of 8 million sets a year and a domestic market on the verge of saturation. Japanese exports had already devastated the American television industry and while UK imports of Japanese colour TVs were rising, UK manufacturers found some comfort under a 1962 treaty that limited imports of Japanese televisions.

Sony needed unrestricted access to European television market and the UK government was on the verge of joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Assembling televisions inside Europe would circumvent the agreement limiting imports and end the stream of accusations from European manufacturers that Japanese televisions were being ‘dumped’ on the market at ‘uneconomic’ prices.

 

Welcomed

The British government was friendly to Japanese investment and politicians quickly warmed to the prospect of new jobs. This, combined with financial grants made available to ease job losses in traditional coal and steel industries, an established market and a region crying out for employment made Wales an attractive proposition. Bridgend was to be Sony’s assembly base to compete in the EEC, a venture viewed by Britain’s partners in Europe, particularly in Holland – the home of Philips – as a ‘Trojan Horse,’ an apt description for a company importing 90 percent of its components from Japan. In 1976 the British government, under pressure from the EEC and the European television industry, moved to protect  ‘home’ producers. It agreed that unless 50 percent by value of components had European origin, sets could not claim to be ‘British-made’ and would therefore count towards Japanese import quotas agreed between the two industries. By this time, however, Sony was operational and employing over 500 people and compliance with this ‘origin rule’ was quietly forgotten.

Other Japanese television manufacturers followed and by 1977 Britain had ‘overcapacity’ in both set and component manufacture. The Radio Industry Council made representations to government for protection and again policy was altered. In future inward investment was to be encouraged provided it either took over existing capacity or resulted in joint ventures with established manufacturers – hence Rank-Toshiba and GEC-Hitachi. But by 1979 it was apparent that British television manufacturers were unable to compete with Japanese design and manufacturing technology and in October 1980, Pye at Lowestoft was shut with the loss of 1,100 jobs. Despite the higher wages paid to Japanese workers, “the direct labour cost of a set made in the UK was almost double that of one made in Japan because the Japanese set took 1.9 hours to make and the British one 6.1 hours.” (Keith Geddes, The Setmakers, 1991) Japanese television sets incorporated 30 percent fewer components by making greater use of integrated circuits, and automatic insertion accounted for 65 percent of components against 15 percent in the UK. These advantages forced a spate of factory closures and ‘consolidations’ as European producers tried desperately to compete.

Sony’s output at Bridgend had now increased to a level that justified investment in a tube-manufacturing factory, built alongside the television factory and opened in 1982. This expansion was essential because Sony holds patent rights to a cathode ray tube – “Trinitron” – fundamentally different from its competitors and available only from Sony in Japan. Local production was needed to reduce enormous importation costs. Further expansion to tube manufacturing came in 1989 when the television factory was relocated to a site 3 miles away allowing the tube factory to double in size. The new television factory – hailed as Sony’s ‘European Flagship’ – was constructed on former farmland in Pencoed and opened in 1992 at a cost of £30 million. By the early 1990s Sony had a major share of the European television market and was locked in bitter competition with Philips. Output peaked at about 1.75 million televisions and computer monitors were added to the production line-up. The combined turnover of both plants was approximately £800 million.

But then things started to go sour. Intense competition from manufacturers producing high quality, low cost televisions and the collapse of a major market in Russia started to eat away at profits. The market demanded cost reductions, and Sony  –  which had traded for so long on a brand name that marketing gurus had made synonymous with quality and price premiums – could not deliver, at least in Wales. A further threat emerged as Sony’s recently opened television-factory in Barcelona, employing the latest technology, gathered momentum.

The ‘centre of gravity’ of the European TV market was moving eastwards and factories in Wales were no longer suitably placed. The company then negotiated generous grants and tax concessions and, eager to exploit cheap labour, opened new factories in Hungary and Slovakia to improve competitiveness in the growing east European market that had once been supplied by the Pencoed factory. The factories in Wales had served their purpose and utilising ‘old’ technology were now to be run-down while ‘new’ technology and investment went elsewhere. The workforce now lived under threat that production would be transferred unless profits improved, serving to keep wages and benefits fixed, while the trade union, effectively anaesthetised since the 1970s, collaborated with management on projects to increase profits. Desperate to cut costs, investment in manufacturing was slashed; internal component production contracted out, permanent workers were replaced by temporary employees and leavers not replaced. Discipline became oppressive and workers grew demoralised and indifferent to the continuous demands to improve performance. The company’s reputation as an employer plummeted and official redundancies were first declared in April 2000.

The bottom line

So who is to blame? Why did the bubble burst? It would be easy to blame local management employed to squeeze profits from working people or the working people who became dispirited or perhaps even market conditions. But all this evades the fundamental issue that we live in an economic system that demands that corporations must roam the world in pursuit of lower costs to remain competitive to increase profits for shareholders. Sony, like any other corporation with global aspirations, cannot stop to consider how its working people, many employed since the beginning in 1974, are to survive when the factories in Wales close, as they must surely do in the near future. The fact that Wales already suffers dire poverty and comparable jobs will virtually impossible to find is of no consequence on the balance sheet, where the only consideration can be the bottom line. It should not be forgotten that the social cost of Sony’s years of successful profit-making in Wales was achieved at the expense of forcing thousands from employment in factories across Europe with all the misery and trauma this entails. The wheel has turned full circle and it is now the turn of people employed by Sony in Wales to by abandoned, cast aside in the pursuit of greater profits. This is capitalism.

In capitalist society there can be no allegiance or loyalty to a workforce or community. Production is motivated solely by profit, regardless of the social consequences. As a recent article in the Economist states, ‘corporate social responsibility’ – “a kinder, gentler capitalism,” is a non-starter. Instead, we learn:

  “The goal of a well-run company may be to make profits for its shareholders, but merely by doing that the company is doing good works. Its employees willingly work for the company in exchange for wages; the transaction makes them better off” (22 January).

Now we are asked to shallow the outrageous proposition that capitalism has a benevolent social purpose – but try telling that to the people until recently employed by Sony or those formerly employed by the thousands of other companies that have shed working people when higher profits are demanded. The choice is stark; the working class either sells its labour power in return for wages or salaries or goes without the essentials of life. This is not willingness but compulsion. It is wage slavery. 

Capitalism has outlived its usefulness and must be immediately replaced by socialism. Capitalism divides the world’s population into two classes, the majority who sell their labour power in return for wages and salaries and those who own the means of producing wealth and live on profits. It is class struggle where workers will always be the losers, with the impending closure of Sony in south Wales a testimony to opposing class interests of workers and owners. As ex-Sony workers go about rebuilding their lives, they, and working people everywhere would do well to reflect on the fact that capitalism cannot operate in any other way and is incapable of being reformed to do so. Like millions before them, capitalism has condemned these workers to an uncertain future, breeding the stress and anxiety that is linked to a Jobcentre interview likely to lead nowhere.

Steve Trott

Sting in the Tail: Ignorance is Bliss (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ignorance is Bliss

A recent news item provided a long list of history exam howlers written by college students in the USA and Canada.

Examples included - 

• Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
• Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg.
• The Magna Carta provided that no free man could be hanged twice for the same offence.

Comical stuff, but what about the political howlers reported in the media any day of the week? For instance -

We were the first truly democratic party there has ever been in this country

(David Owen on the SDP)

Karl Marx invented Marxism in the British Museum

(historian A.J.P. Taylor)

We would see an end to all world wars if men wore fishnet stockings more often.

(Richard O'Brien, creator of The Rocky Horror Show)

Many workers vote Tory because the Labour Party isn’t left-wing enough.

(any Trotskyist paper)

Still Dreaming

British Telecom's plan to cut another 10,000 jobs despite having declared profits of over £3 billion outraged opposition MPs, trade union leaders and others.

These dreamers think the sackings are not justified when profits are so high, but BT is in business not to provide jobs but maximum profits so that it can keep its shareholders happy and re-invest in order to stay far ahead of its competitors.

BT knows it can only continue to do this by constantly cutting costs and reducing its workforce is an obvious way of doing this.

Karl Marx described how the war which capitalist enterprises wage among themselves must be fought-

this war has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour. The generals, the capitalists, compete with one another as to who can discharge most soldiers of industry.

That is the logic of capitalism no matter what the dreamers may think.

Charitable Thoughts

In the recent furore about registered charities adopting a political stance and the government's threats to tighten the laws governing charities, an interesting fact about the number of charities emerged.

  The number of charities is growing, totalling 171,434 at the end of the year — against 168,170 the previous year.

The Independent on Sunday (2 June)

The picture of 171,434 organisations beavering away trying to alleviate some of the problems arising from capitalism in 1991 shows how correct, a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde was in attacking charities in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, when he stated:

  They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

A very clever person saw the futility of charity in 1891. It must be a very foolish one in 1991 who does not see that these 171,434 organisations are powerless to solve the problems of poverty.

Another Fake

Lesley Mahmood is the "Broad Left" candidate in the Walton by-election in Liverpool.

Ms Mahmood, who was recently expelled from the Labour Party, describes herself as a "socialist". The Guardian (11 June) has provided a selection of her recent statements and given us the opportunity to examine her socialist credentials.

No genuine socialist would say as she did "Of course I want a Labour government elected". After all, the Labour Party has supported the production for profit system throughout its inglorious history.

And although she wants to see ". . . socialist ideas being put into practice . . . her comrades in Militant need not panic because she doesn't mean anything really revolutionary like the abolition of the wages system, only ”. . . the council building new homes for people . . . that kind of thing."

Whatever the Labour Party expelled Lesley Mahmood for, it obviously had nothing to do with socialism.

Pin Stripe Penury

The Socialist Party have always clearly stated that there are only two classes in society. We have denied the existence of a "middle class".

This has made us unpopular with trendy left wingers and marketing people who claim that higher paid members of the working class, like managers, lawyers and doctors, are not members of the working class.

The recent increase in unemployment has made it very clear to many of these "middle class" people that there is no security for the working class — whether relatively lowly or highly paid.

Only 3 weeks ago the Department of Employment told the British Institute of Management that 80,000 people claiming unemployment benefit described themselves as managers.

Independent on Sunday (2 June)

Describe yourself how you may — you cannot escape the often unpalatable truth — if you have to work for a wage or a salary, then you are a member of the working class.

What's in a Name

The recent decision to change the name of Leningrad to St. Petersburg excited a great deal of media coverage.

Changing the name from that of a ruthless dictator to that of a megalomaniacal religious freak is just the sort of trivia that does excite the media.

At least it could be said in favour of the change that the working class residents of that city were consulted. That was certainly not the case in another change earlier that month.

  Republics still wanting to be part of the Soviet Union have agreed on a name, dropping "socialist" from the USSR to become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, Tass reported last night. Leaders of nine of the original 15 Soviet republics, meeting at a government villa in Novo-Ogaievo, outside Moscow, decided on the name in discussions concerning a new Union Treaty.

Daily Telegraph (4 June)

After 84 years of deception the ruling class in the USSR are at least dropping the pretence of calling the country socialist.

The excitement felt by any class conscious worker in the USSR could be likened to that of an inmate of Strangeways on hearing the governor had decided on a new name for the prison.

Hand Outs & Charity

Socialists are always hammering on about people starving while farmers are being paid NOT to produce food. We make no apology for citing the most recent example of this obscenity reported in the Glasgow Herald on 19 June:

 On top of that, Mr Evans said that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr Robin Leigh Pemberton, as well as being given a £22,000 pay rise, had received £80,000 compensation for NOT growing grain on his 2,000 acre farm.

Now that's what we call a hand out!

These Foolish Things: Taking off (1995)

The Scavenger column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The basic contradictions in capitalism cause widespread death, destruction, pollution, poverty and waste. But this is to take the world view. Most of us experience day-to-day capitalism as a series of small stupidities, irritations and frustrations. Here are a few. If you encounter any worth a wry smile, please send them to The Scavenger who will publish the best.

Taking off

"Selling the nation’s family silver” goes on with all haste to keep the present government’s budgets within tolerable balance. To add to nearly £800 million raised through the sale of Ministry of Defence properties in the last ten years, a further £300 million is expected from the twenty airbases due to be put on the market before the end of the century. However, flying of a sort may still continue at Bentwaters in Suffolk. The Maharishi Foundation is said to have bought the 1,000-acre site for a university of Natural Law.

Nearer the bone

There must have been a few smirks of satisfaction among British capitalists at the tail end of March. Dewhursts the butchers went bust. Surely a cause for sadness? Vesteys, the family which became super-rich through providing meat from the ranch to the customer, clocked up debts of over £400 million. Their family fortune shrank from about £1.5 billion to a mere £600 million. But Sam and Edmund Vestey were not only keen businessmen—they were also keen tax-dodgers. They did not pay their share for being (fairly new) members of the ruling class of Britain. Back in the 80s they managed to pay just £10 tax on a year’s income of £2.5 million. Now Union International, the family firm, will have to let the Receivers sell the 300 shops trading under the names of Dewhurst, Matthews, Baxter and Cobb in order to pay the debts.

Grinding the poor

At this time next year Unemployment benefit will be replaced by the Jobseeker’s Allowance. This will require a person applying for state benefit to state the lowest wage they would accept in taking a job.

Blanket solution

Meanwhile, staff in Job centres are facing the threat of increasing violence from clients—a 400 percent rise in the last five years. This has followed the instructions to staff to conduct far more rigorous checks. After a particular attack on staff by a man with a knife in Handsworth, Birmingham, the staff have been issued with blankets They are not sure what they are meant to do with them.

A suggestion

At Lucas, John Pocock was an enthusiastic contributor to the firm’s suggestion box. One of his ideas saved Lucas £36,000 a year. Another will probably save over a quarter of a million in five years. He has been paid £3,750 for this—and given the sack because he is fifty. It is all part of the new Lucas boss’s regime. Who says, "For the company to achieve its goals in 1995 and beyond, it will require an enhanced contribution from you all.”

On the other hand

At Christmas, six men got together for a meal at a hotel. There is no record of the amount they spent on food—perhaps because the amount they spent on drink dwarfed it. They bought 12 bottles of Chateau Petrus claret at the Dorchester at £960 a bottle. Apparently they were unable to finish the last half-bottle and graciously left it for the waiter. What is the connection between this and the previous items?

The Scavenger

These Foolish Things: The Age of Leisure (1996)

The Scavenger column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Age of Leisure

"The holiday home was buzzing with the sounds of the modem cottage industry— faxing, computing, phoning . . .

Technology, once hailed as the liberator of the work force, has become an insidious thief that steals scarce holiday time. Laptops, phones and faxes are readily transportable, available at hotels, airports and on some planes. Holidays can all too easily turn into the virtual reality' of a day at work.

Rob Donnelly of the Confederation of British Industry, says: “More people in management roles are seriously eroding their free time. There’s a cult of irreplaceability that says, ‘As long as I keep my place. I’ll have a job”’ 

Mail on Sunday, 4 February.

Competition will cost £320 million

“Government plans to introduce full competition into the electricity market from April 1998 suffered a setback last night after warnings that an expensive new system for trading power was unlikely to be ready in time.

The committee governing the electricity pool—the wholesale electricity market—warned that a new £250 million computerised trading arrangement would need to be phased in and said it remained unclear how this initial price tag plus the annual running costs of £70 million would be met.”

Guardian, 21 December 1995.

On the scrap heap

The research will confirm “the significantly raised mortality of the unemployed in comparison to all men of working age,” according to tire 1996 edition of Social Trends—the bible of official social statistics . . . In 1990, analysis of an Office of Population Censuses and Surveys study which is tracking a sample of more than 500,000 people drawn from the 1971 census, showed death rates were 37 percent higher than average among men seeking work during the period 1971-81. 

Guardian, 25 January.

If you can pay

“Doctor John Stanford is about to realise a dream. It began in a swamp in Africa and it could result in a medical breakthrough that would rank alongside Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin . . . Skin tests carried out in Nepal, India and Burma revealed that somehow the harmless mycobacterium vaccae worked to stop the terrible tissue destruction effects of TB . . . The company in which John and Cynthia Stanford, Professor Rook, UCL and Eric Boyle retain a major share holding now has a capital value of £70 million ... if [the team at UCL] is right, a lot of people will make a lot of money. But, far more importantly, the world could be freed of the terrible threat of TB. . . “ 

Lorraine Fraser, Mail on Sunday, 25 February’.

“City delights at good round of job cuts”

"It is one of those paradoxes. While most ordinary people get upset at job losses, the highly paid young men and women in the City'—assuming they aren’t the ones being downsized—love them. Job cuts, they argue, enable companies to become more competitive, streamlined, “leaner”, helping improve profitability and dividends. On the wider front, they are also good for the economy as they also help keep down wage inflation. It was for this reason that yesterday’s move by United Utilities, to trim its workforce by a further 1,700, was so welcome in the Square Mile. The shares shot up 14p to 611p, after Wednesday’s 19p jump, as analysts smacked their lips in expectation of chunky dividend increases. One, who wisely asked not to be identified, summed it up this way: ‘The cost reductions are greater than expected, and that’s very good news, really exciting’” 

Guardian, 29 March.

The Scavenger

Death by Consultation (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Monday 2 October, 8.00am: 2,100 Monarch Airlines staff woke up to learn on BBC News that they had no job. Monarch had maintained complete secrecy until midnight on Sunday when the final rescue deadline expired with the Civil Aviation Authority and the company went into administration. Monarch destroyed thousands of holidays, and two thousand working lives, with zero notice and zero decency. But mass redundancies aren't always so brutal. Sometimes they are done on the sly.

Things seemed to be looking up recently in my area when a long-derelict piece of ground overgrown with scrubby weeds was invaded by a small army of diggers and 'dozers and men in hard hats and neat stacking portacabins. The recession was over, this hive of sudden activity seemed to say. Banks must be investing again. Capitalism is moving out of slump towards its boom phase.

As if to confirm the excitement, there was around the same time a flurry of mail through the door offering credit cards sweetened with zero-interest loan periods. What did it all mean? Where was all this new cash coming from?

But this isn't new cash, it's old cash that's been in hiding. Recessions aren't times of no money, they are times when the people who have money don't want to lend it. Idle money may not earn them anything, but with firms going bust every day the risk of not getting their money back is just too great. Nor is there any incentive to lend, because the central bank will have floored the interest rate in order to keep people spending and borrowing and thus keep the economy moving. But it's a Catch 22, because the same trick also means that nobody wants to lend.

In a recession businesses can't get loans so they go to the wall, sometimes taking whole supplier networks with them, while new businesses can't start up. To people on the street with nothing but fluff in their pockets and negative figures in their bank accounts, it will look as if there is no money anywhere, as if it's all mysteriously vanished into some cosmic black hole. Which in a way is true. The banks have sucked all the money out of the system and are sitting on huge piles of it, stashed away in their credit ledgers.

Eventually things change, if only because things can't stay that way forever. People with money need to lend almost as much as the rest of us need to breathe. They dare to become confident again, or at least their venality finally overcomes their caution. The economic lights turn from red to amber. The green light is coming, and engines start to rev.

Looking back on the start of the recession is like looking at an elephants' graveyard, a mass culling of under-financed and over-exposed businesses including the shock collapse of seemingly-invulnerable giants. In this late period one might still see the odd outlier like Monarch, but mostly it's a long tail of rasping last gasps drawn by small and medium businesses which had somehow hung on grimly under the radar and, cruelly, started to believe they were going to make it.

Death of a company

You don't hear about these small deaths because they don't reach the news. Their passing is marked by barely noticeable details. Boards go up, tombstone-like, across windows which yesterday were alive with deals and special offers. Workers in a car park manoeuvre large numbers of used office desks and other furniture into a removal van. A skip is piled high with rain-soaked office jumble: filing shelves, brochure containers, birthday cards and old Christmas decorations.

As in nature, businesses don't necessarily enjoy a serene passing. Smelling blood, the sharks close in, and there is a feeding frenzy of takeovers, asset-stripping and closures. It is a wonderful chance for those with money to pick up plant, equipment, patents, licences and customer databases, all at rock-bottom prices.

Cannibalising a company is not straightforward though, and buyers must be careful to step gingerly through the regulations, known as TUPE, which relate to takeovers. Specifically, you are not allowed to buy a company and immediately sack its workforce, because you will be successfully sued at a tribunal for unfair dismissal. Neither can you get around this by offering, or appearing to offer, similar employment in some distant city, as this will fall foul of the rules around constructive dismissal.

Instead, the clever thing to do is to buy the company and tell the nervous staff that you have no idea what you plan to do. You issue a 'Letter of Measures' which includes an innocuous clause suggesting that 'some redundancies' may not be ruled out. You then embark on a period of 'Consultation' with the staff in order, supposedly, to determine the best way forward for their company. You encourage them to open up honestly about systemic problems in the company and when they do, you are all ears and sympathy. You want to find solutions. You are here to help. If staff want to know what the future holds, you answer helplessly that nobody can predict how the Consultation will turn out. If staff are tempted to desert the company before you are ready to let them, you encourage them to stay and assure them that there is no reason to fear the worst. You beg them for the sake of everyone's future to maintain business confidentiality and not divulge any information to business associates, or even to their friends. You maintain an impenetrable air of fairness and open-handedness.

When the consultation period is over you can announce 100 percent redundancies, citing systemic problems and confident that you have followed TUPE procedures to the letter if not the spirit. The devastated staff know that they do not have a legal leg to stand on. However you are still not in the clear, because you now have to abide by Part IV, Chapter II of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which stipulates that you must represent your intention to close the business as a 'proposal' and allow a further minimum 30 days for more 'Consultation' with the staff. You duly do this, inviting the staff as per regulation to come forward with any alternative suggestions (e.g. not getting sacked) which they may be able to come up with. Of course you have no intention of seriously considering these suggestions and when they materialise, you destroy them comprehensively by any means necessary including using financial data which is confidential to the business and to which the staff have no access. The proposed closure is at this point a 'proposal' in name only, a fact evident to everybody but which you must continue to deny at every point. With no other recourse, the staff sit at their desks pretending to work and await the inevitable. When the staff fail to produce any further suggestions to avoid their fate, you can regretfully proceed with the closure. The staff have had every opportunity. Procedures have been followed. No chance of ACAS becoming involved.

Working lives trashed

When the bottom line demands it working lives get trashed, either brutally and all at once, or slyly and through a prolonged pantomime of consultations. Workers ought to understand this and some do but somehow many don't. Instead they insist on believing in decency and fair play, not realising that these are only found among the working class and in fairy tales but not in business or among the rich. First comes the hope, then the shock, then the bitterness. Too late comes the cynicism.

But the knife twist is worse than this, if one considers how the business came to fail in the first place. Like the captain of a ship who runs it aground or into an iceberg, the boss of a company may refuse to take good advice from their officers and crew. Such bosses, emotionally attached to their own authority and deeply distrustful of those around them, may refuse to delegate and attempt to micro-manage every part of the business until, exhausted and unable to tell good decision from bad, they make a final and fatal error. The 'wisdom of crowds' is not a concept understood by bosses. Democracy is anathema in business and reviled as 'mob rule'. So even when the enterprise is sinking the workers are kept in the dark for reasons of confidentiality, to maintain authority and to avoid early desertions. They are victims of capitalism's obsession with hierarchies, in which pecking orders matter more than rational decision-making and corporate status alone decides whether a worker has a voice.

So the ship goes down and the workers then discover, if they didn't know it already, that debt is an ocean it's easy to drown in. They flounder in this ocean, holding their families up and trying to hail passing boats, but the boats are all full or not looking in their direction. If a boat approaches with a spare seat, there's no question of being automatically hauled on board. Instead, the worker must go through the interview process. Why this boat, and not some other boat? What can you bring to this boat? Are your skills a match for what this boat needs? Why should we rescue you and not someone else? Describe a situation where you helped a boat row faster. Describe a problem involving boats which you solved. The worker concentrates hard on playing the game and giving the clever answers while trying to tread water and look cheerful. Nobody wants you when you're desperate.

And that is not even the final twist, which is that the boss has meanwhile got a handsome pay-out by the takeover company and an executive job on their board. When the captain of the Costa Concordia ran his ship aground in 2012 and fled before bothering to see his passengers safe, he got 16 years in jail. When similar things happen in business nobody thinks anything about it. It's nothing personal. It's just business.

Gradually the global recession lifts. New companies start up and new job opportunities will appear. Eventually a new generation of wage workers will also appear to fill these posts, brought up to aspire to better things than their parents had, but inevitably facing all the same groans and gripes and office politics that wage slavery engenders. And they will persist in the cruel delusion of their forebears, that if you work hard for a company, the company will work hard for you, and that if you defend capitalist society, that society will defend you. One would like to think that workers can learn from their mistakes, but some never recover from the experience of being scrapped like a rusty hulk, and sink into the murky depths of self-worthlessness and nihilism.

Some workers do get over it though. Maybe they talk to other people, maybe they just figure it out for themselves, but they understand where the real blame lies. Underneath the corporate courtesies and the glossy paintwork is a submarine class war that's as deep as it is dirty, a war that could not exist if all the oceans of power and money were drained right out of the world. Those workers know that the class war is being won today by the bosses because workers don't even realise they're in a fight. And they also know that doing nothing about the class war is the same as giving in.

That's why there are socialists in the world.

Paddy Shannon

Getting the sack (1980)

From the April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the factory where I work we weren’t exactly surprised to hear that one third of us would be sacked in a few weeks’ time. The firm make foundry and quarry equipment and we knew there was a shortage of orders. First, the night shift had been taken off, then all overtime stopped, and for the last two weeks skilled platers and welders had been put to painting the factory and doing minor maintenance work. Obviously, this couldn’t last. Every company, whether order books are empty or full, must always strive to keep down costs in order to maximise the profits each of them is in business to make, and paying men the skilled rate to slap on paint is not usually the best way of doing it.

The shop stewards’ immediate reaction was to involve three unions but management’s case was that if the redundancies don’t go through then the place will close. There’s little the unions can do in the face of this so all that remains is for the stewards to negotiate the best possible financial settlement for those who have to go.

The bad news was received calmly as most of the men have been through it all often enough. Two or three of the long service men nearing retirement hope that they will be on the list so as to collect their redundancy money before they reach 65 and lose it, but most of the men can’t help being worried. Unemployment in the area around Clydebank is well above the national average and every month brings news of more closures. Some of the local newer “starts” have lost two jobs in the last year and they know that the practice of “last in, first out” will probably see them on the move again.

Of course, not one of the men sees a redundancy as a consequence of capitalist production. They see it as something that could probably have been avoided and blame it on inefficient management and all the “non- producers” (office staff) on the payroll. But booms and slumps are part and parcel of the production for profit system. The owners of any company—in this case a multi-national—invest capital to provide a factory, plant and material. Workers are hired to use these in order to produce wealth greater than was there at the start—surplus value. If, owing to a slump in worldwide trading conditions, demand for the product is slack then what is the company to do? Can it squander the investors’ money by paying workers to wear out expensive machinery by working up equally expensive materials into products that cannot be sold? There is only one course the company can take. It must cut back production to the level required to maintain profitability, and this is what is happening all over the world.

Tea and lunch breaks sometimes provide an opportunity to question some accepted ideas. For example, when workmates gripe about the wages they get, I reply that they should reject the wages system itself; when they complain about how “the country” is being run, I ask them why they allow' politicians to do their thinking for them. These contributions are generally received with disapproval or puzzled silence. After all, where else do they ever hear such ideas? When social problems are discussed by the media, both Left and Right talk in terms of patching up or otherwise reorganising the production for sale on the market system. Wages, prices, profits, pensions, and all the other hallmarks of today’s private property set-up are taken as eternal. All that is needed, apparently, is “new policies” or maybe a change of government, so the workers are never given the opportunity to think about a solution outside of the framework of the status quo.

A few days later we are told that management will “pick the team” on the following Monday. On the Monday morning one of the young platers who has seen me speaking at an outdoor meeting asks me why he is being sacked (only a guess at this stage but it turns out to be a good one). I tell him that none of us are given a job for our benefit and that the company just doesn’t need some of us any more. I start to explain the profit motive but he loses interest and tells me he will be sacked because his foreman doesn’t like him.

From the moment we start to take in ideas we are discouraged from thinking in terms of class at all. Class, like sex, is nasty and we are taught that “the nation” is what counts and how the fate of each of us depends on our own efforts as individuals. So the working class never acts as a class because it doesn’t recognise itself as such.

An older man, a rabid Labour Party supporter, does have an answer to the redundancy. He wants to see the place nationalised. I point to the vast redundancies taking place at British Leyland, British Steel, and other state owned industries and which are only a continuation of those begun by the last Labour government. I remind him that the last job he lost was in a nationalised shipyard and during a Labour government, too. I know I’m wasting my time with him but some of the others who are listening may be taking it in.

Monday drags on and everyone is on edge waiting for the axe to fall. Late in the afternoon the foremen are summoned to the manager’s office and when they emerge each has a list in his hand. They head for their own departments and the slaughter is on. Of course, the sacked men put a brave face on it but most of them cannot hope for a job locally. Any job they do get will require considerable travel involving extra expense and those with mortgages will be hardest hit. Among those sacked are two or three in their early sixties and they know they will probably never get another job.

The blow is softened by the fact that all those who are leaving receive redundancy money or (thanks to the efforts of the stewards) six weeks’ pay in lieu of notice. Some say they will have a holiday before they start job-hunting, but sooner rather than later they will have to begin hawking themselves around, filling in forms, waiting for interviews, and all that is connected with the degrading business of seeking an employer.

Being hired and fired is a part of working class culture and always will be so long as we allow capital to use us when and where it wants. Our class must one day make the capitalist system the victim of the biggest redundancy of all.

Vic Vanni

Sting in the Tail: Food for thought (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food for thought

Fancy a nice juicy steak? The Meat and Livestock Commission want to make sure that you do and have issued a booklet to assure us that eating meat is both physically safe and morally sound.

The booklet (available in supermarkets) dismisses most vegetarians as either bogus or having "a misconception about a healthy diet”. This doesn’t help veg sales but supermarkets know that people spend a lot more on meat than they do on veg.

We are then told that meat is good for just about every part of us, and be warned -

Britain has the highest rate of heart disease among EC countries, but the second lowest meat consumption per head.

No mention is made of the 74,000 cattle which have died in Britain of mad cow disease since 1985.

All this we can expect from any organisation trying to boost sales but just look at what follows under the heading "Does eating meat deprive the third world of grain?" - 

There is already a world surplus of grain and so if it was simply a matter of availability of grain supplies then there would not be a problem. THE PROBLEM OF HUNGER LIES IN POVERTY AND NOT AVAILABILITY (their emphasis).

THAT we don't expect, but we welcome having the socialist case against capitalism backed-up and especially from such an unlikely source.

False prophets

After the Tory election victory the British holiday industry's market forecasters were convinced that the foreign holiday market would grow again because of the expected boom, so more hotel rooms and aircraft were booked.

Sadly, the boom went bust and Thomson, the biggest package holiday operator, estimated in June that there were 500,000 too many holidays on sale.

Yet only five months later the industry reported a 5% increase in demand in 1992 (Ceefax 15 November). Having- been let down by the boom that- wasn't they had been saved by . . . the recession!

Apparently, many redundant workers are spending their redundancy money on a foreign holiday in the belief that it may be their last for a long time.

Can readers think of a more futile job in capitalism than market forecasting? Answers on a postcard please to Scorpion, address at the bottom of this page.

Raving Mad

The news that 5 young people have died in Greater Manchester since 1989 from dance floor dehydration and heatstroke accentuated by drugs such as Ecstasy, has alarmed the local city council.

Their concern is understandable when it is realised that one of the contributory factors has been the dance hall owners trick of charging £2 for a drink of water.

The money conscious entrepreneurs turn up the heating, cut off the water supply in the toilets and wait for the dehydrated drugged dancers to stump up the two quid for a glass of water.

If the dehydrated youngsters can't afford the two quid and drop dead - well, that's just market forces at work, isn't it?

Useless Money

Currency speculators have been on the rampage recently with "runs" on the pound, the French franc and several other European currencies.

Nowadays the world's money markets have immense sums of money at their disposal. Ex-Labour chancellor Dennis Healy estimated that only one fiftieth of this money is required for world trade settlement ("Greed" Channel 4, 8 November) so the rest is available for speculation.

So any "weak" currency is singled out for attention and the speculators know they will win. Sweden lost almost all of its foreign reserves trying to defend the Krona while the Bank of England lost £11 billion of "our” foreign reserves in a bid to defend sterling. The attack on sterling was led by the City of London and there wasn't a patriotic scruple in sight.

And after all the frenzied activity in which millions had been won and lost, society had not one whit more food, clothing, shelter or health care to show for it.

A Star Is Born

And now for our showbiz update! The word is that professor J.K.Galbraith, Keynesian economist and new comic genius, was a smash in his London one-man show.

The Guardian (25 November) reports him joking that in future "the social left" must give up "socialist principles” and is "no longer in search of an alternative economic system" to capitalism! His deadpan irony would have any audience in stitches.

The prof, surely had them rolling in the aisles when he hit them with such show-stopping vote catchers as "reasonably full employment", "more equitable distribution of income" and "needs of the underclass". Only proves once again that the old jokes are the best jokes!

Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson, Paul Merton and co., have one hell of an act to follow!

A Royal Mess

The Queen has had a pretty shitty 1992. Well, we’re sorry to hear it, but then it was hardly a wonderful year for the rest of us either.

Commenting on the Joseph Rowntree Trustee report on what a family needed to live on, The Independent (15 November) noted that a single parent bringing up two children under 11 on income support received £25.12 less than the Low Cost Budget of £110.72. This Low Cost Budget was reckoned to be the basic minimum necessary to live in 1992.

The newspaper reported the position of Kathleen Elliot who receives £85.60 to bring up Kirsty eight and Stacy three in a working class estate in Gateshead.

"Some nights I just cry myself to sleep. We live in a three bedroomed house, but at this time of year we all sleep in the same double bed and throw Kirsty's duvet on top as well. It's warmer that way. I can't afford the heating. . . .  I just buy essentials like bread, tatties, beans. Can’t afford meat, though sometimes I get sausages."

Not only are Kathleen, Kirsty and Stacy living in abject poverty and misery, but even the Queen is pissed off. Let's get rid of capitalism for all their sakes!