In memoriam

In memoriam? - The Automotive Industry

By Ian Griffiths, March 2009

"I'm in business to make money, not cars,"

Lord Donald Stokes, chairman, British Leyland, 1968-1975

At the start of March 2009 the 850 workers at LDV, the commercial vehicle manufacturer based in Birmingham, voted for a ten percent reduction in their take home pay, the loss of productivity bonuses and a change in working hours in order to assist and facilitate a directors' buyout of their factory. This was the advice proffered to them by their own trade union officials who had been involved in a 'negotiated settlement' advising that otherwise the plant and the jobs would go.

The company was acquired in 2006 as a subsidiary of the Russian giant Gaz through its investment company, Basic Element, all owned and controlled by the billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska and sometime friend of New Labour's Peter Mandleson and acquaintance of the Conservative's George Osbourne. He had appealed for a £30 million bale-out from his friends in government to keep his company in control of the plant. When this request was turned down the continued viability of the plant was brought into question.

Production had been suspended in late December 2008 as a result of an evaporation of demand. This long-term lay-off and the new scenario of closure and unemployment had obviously burnt deeply into the confidence and morale of the workers.

But what resulted from their meeting with their management and trade union organisers on 3rd March epitomised the bankruptcy of thought in the labour movement and the absolute treachery displayed by national trade union leaders in the automotive industry.

The leaders of Unite, the biggest trade union in Britain and the main representative of the car and commercial vehicle workers, have clearly demonstrated at every opportunity, both at LDV and recently at BMW Mini, that they are nothing more than facilitators for the bosses.

On the one hand they berate government policy that has resulted in the tax payer, ordinary salaried and waged workers, subsidising the bankers and the financial elite but on the other they allow their own members to subsidise their bosses through 'negotiated' loss of earnings.

The officials, at all levels, are what was once described as labour lieutenants i.e. those who order and police workers on behalf of capitalists. Together, these full-time officials have purposely created a company union.

It’s a Vision Thing

There was another way but it is one that would ignite a grass fire of struggle. The scope of this revolt would travel beyond the control of union officials and their buckets of cold water and, in no uncertain terms, would result in redundancy notices being served on Simpson and Woodley and their officer class.

All that was needed at LDV and at BMW Oxford - where agency staff on the mini production line were laid off at a moments notice with union connivance and co-operation - was one worker to propose a sit-in, a factory occupation, a declaration of workforce control over production and a vote of no confidence in the union leadership.

In the case of LDV this could have been followed with an immediate appeal to middle and lower management to throw their weight behind the venture as equal partners. They could then have together demanded financial backing from a so-called labour government.

Such a stand would then put the government on the spot, exposing their class loyalty. Would Mandleson and Brown et al have granted the workers the same support that they will perhaps offer the directors' in their attempted buyout?

They would have to be reminded of things they choose to forget. The success, for instance, of the Tower Colliery in south Wales and the abilities of its miners, ordinary workers who took control of their own labour, its product and its marketing and who survived in business until the pits' coal seams were spent.

The proposed new directors of LDV have set themselves a 'modest' production target of twenty two vehicles a week by April's end compared to previous figures of over two hundred before the recession bit. An achievement that would hardly be described as inspiring.

But imagine, if you will, the beacon that would be provided by a workers' co-operative successfully rolling just a few vehicles off the production line, and the effect it would have on other workers across the threatened and beleaguered British car industry.

The opportunity would present itself for such a company to compete anywhere in the world market on price and quality.

Is there a need for commercial delivery and haulage vehicles? A short trip to any underdeveloped country would surely uncover an obvious need for such transport, if only to distribute the demand for humanitarian aid and food supplies that will become glaringly obvious before many more weeks of 2009 pass by.

Furthermore, the workers would, at long last, be free to express their ingenuity, creativity and enterprise. Without the burden of shareholder dividends and Mr. Deripaska and Co.'s personal profit taking sitting on their shoulders, the new 'owners' would be able to determine a reasonable take home income. The surplus of their labour would, no doubt, be re-invested in research and development and new market orientated projects.

Such a producer as this could link up with its intended world market, enter into discussion with potential customers with regard to their requirements and, by so doing, plan, design and manufacture the type of product that is needed rather than things that are simply 'wanted'.

The country is crying out for an integrated, accessible and comfortable public transport system, the introduction of green, eco-friendly transport technology and other innovative commercial systems. It is only the current paid workforce of the automotive industry, those employees who earn a living by hand or by brain - certainly not the board of directors - who are able, through their experience and vision, to revolutionise and modernise methods of production and finished products for the benefit of society.

The wheels came off

The automotive industry and its supply chain are suffering a death by a thousand cuts as a result of the credit crunch. This was a line of production more dependent than any other on consumers selling their souls to the loan sharks and moneylenders. In real terms it was an unsustainable agreement.

The viability of volume car production has been dependent on a credit dependent, ever growing market, year on year, in an attempt to combat a constantly diminishing rate of profit. It was an impossible quest of over-production and over-capacity. At some point the bubble had to burst, the credit crunch was the inevitable trigger. This is the crisis faced by the big car manufacturers on a world scale and best exemplified in America, but thereby also Europe and Japan.

In the wake of the LDV proposal, workers at the British Toyota plants also accepted the agreement of a ten percent reduction in earnings, initially for twelve months but anybody with a modicum of understanding must contemplate perpetuity. This is the fate facing all automotive workers across the globe, diminishing incomes combined with capacity closure, as the SAAB experience exemplifies. This is only the start of a protracted collapse.

In 'What is Happening?' we posed the likely perspective that one of the three major American car manufactures would go under as a result of this depression. This is still our belief. Although having been provided with a massive government bailout, GM and Chrysler are back with the begging bowl. Because they need extensive and long term restructuring, because they do not produce the right kind of vehicle for this period and because house values and consumer spending in the US is still falling it is not feasible to see a constant flow of government funds in order for them to languish in the hope of better times to come.

We also stated in 'The World Economy: An Introduction to a Dogfight' that when multi-nationals such as these start to hurt it is their foreign subsidiaries and factories that are the first limbs to suffer the surgeon's scalpel.

It must be extremely worrying for British car workers, particularly at Ellesmere Port and Luton at the present time, but it could be that their fate is already being sealed by both company and government.

There is an old adage that says 'you cannot control what you don't own'. If car plants face closure in America, Britain or any other part of the globe the only and last course of action for the workforce is to assume ownership of their work for themselves.

The shop floors upon which these current workers stand have absorbed the sweat and blood of generations of workers who struggled against a succession of employers to earn a decent standard of living, maintain a safe environment of production and provide a continuance of employment for future generations.

Once these factories are allowed to close they will not return and nor will any other meaningful employment for decades to come. The hour is approaching for all concerned to make a decision, fight or trudge away to isolation and impoverished obscurity.

This will not be a battle about the rescuing of a 'dying' industry but one about maintaining a 'right' of employment and the means to a continuance of purpose in workers' lives. A multi-national's workforce, organised together, could make an international army of opposition to the employers and to a system that intends to consign them to the scrap yard.

To Create A Different World Market - A Brave, New World of Plenty

When a depression strikes an economy it does not mean that a real demand or need for goods evaporates. What does vanish, under the anarchic forces of capitalism and credit financing, is the ability for those goods to be purchased and manufactured.

However, in the case of the car industry we must also be honest and acknowledge that the manufacturers have induced an overabundance of vehicles on our roads. This mass ownership often reduces miles of our highways to mindless jams of metal at certain times of the day.

In the period of false prosperity from which we are now emerging, the car company 'marketing men' successfully redefined and repackaged the notion of car ownership. For some, the ownership of a car had become an expression of status and personality, an object of their desire. Vehicles have been reduced to 'must have' fashion items, something that is 'worn' to better display a person's vanity.

But let us also not forget either, that cars and commercial vehicles were originally manufactured to provide an immediately accessible means of transport in order to carry people and goods from point A to point B and that remains their fundamental purpose.

Under the current conditions of capitalism, car ownership is an absolute necessity for many families and individuals in order for them to undertake the most basic of needs, a daily commute to work, to do their shopping, for health appointments, etc.

Thus, it is the absence of a safe, affordable and regular public transport system that has also partly generated the current level of personal vehicle usage.

It also incumbent upon any rational thinking human to identify that the internal combustion engine, even in its most modern fuel efficient form, is, nevertheless, contributing to the disastrous state of the world's climate and thereby the limited future we are creating for our younger generations and beyond.

Whilst there is the availability of relatively cheap oil and a source of easy profit, the motor manufacturers and oil companies will perpetuate current transport provisions and technologies.

The production technology and skills that exist in a modern car plant, however, can be utilised and modified to manufacture an array of necessary goods for society other than vehicles. It just needs the vision and application of a workforce that is not driven by an owners desire to manufacture incessant and excessive profit.

One example is ever present whilst its need exists. It is the case of people suffering kidney disease who have to queue or face a post-code lottery for the provision of their dialysis requirements.

Many have to travel miles because their local hospital does not possess the necessary equipment. We must agree that, in twenty first century Britain, this is an aberration!

There are insufficient dialysis machines because of, on the one hand, the lack of government funding for the NHS and its prioritisation of resources whilst, on the other, the absence of the incentive of mass profit for manufacturers. This shortage can be multiplied a thousand times across the developing and underdeveloped world and it represents just one example of need and insufficient supply of medical equipment and materials that exists in this system of capitalist disorder.

There are a million and one commodities, some in existence others yet to be invented, that have and will have an absolute benefit to humankind, the value of which can be accounted for in much more than pure monetary terms.

The skills and the technology of the car workers could easily be modified to the production, marketing and distribution of these necessary products. But it is only they and their fellow workers in other industries who, organised on a national and international basis, could recognise such need and bring about a bounty of provision.

A world of manufacturing, shorn of the profits system, could afford a level of overproduction in order that there would always be an abundance of supply to meet demand, desire and contingency.

In times past - and we will hear and read such representations again as this crisis deepens - capitalists have attempted to portray a world of workers' control as a grey, drab place, inhabited by automatons. They depict a society of endless regimentation and soulless drudgery where shortages prevail and choice is eliminated.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Let us take the car industry as an example. Earlier in this decade Ford announced its intention to manufacture future 'made to measure' vehicles. Often quoted is Henry Ford's 1909 wisecrack about the Model T, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

It took The Ford Motor Company over ninety years to contemplate the possibility that they could offer the customer the choice of any model in any colour, not only that but also the choice of other individual refinements from a range on offer to personalise a unique vehicle. Well, that was the plan. Unfortunately for Ford it hasn't materialised and the bet is it won't this side of the socialisation of the economy.

It will be only when workers and managers take charge of the productive forces themselves that there will be a flourishing of design in all things and an opportunity for fundamental choice in every consumer commodity.

Though a genuine workers' state is primarily concerned with the eradication of want and deprivation it is also about the unleashing of the constraints placed upon people in order to provide the opportunity for individuals to express themselves to the full of their ability.

It is about a society free from prejudice with the enshrined right that anybody can pursue any appearance and desire that they might harbour with one important caveat - no individual would be allowed to express their own self in a way which would endanger, threaten, injure, damage or offend any other human, creature or any other living matter nor the environment in which we all have to co-exist.

Importantly, it would be a world society where not only poverty would be eradicated but where its antithesis, individual and collective greed and the pointless accumulation and ownership of things, would be eliminated. When there is an overabundance of all things there is no purpose for one person to covet any. When more value is placed on the spirit of human endeavour, however it may be expressed, than on a lump of shiny metal, a designer label or a particular car marque, then the envy and avarice associated with the owhership of things will be abolished.

In this new world of talents, how many Leonardos, Epsteins, Beethovens, Pavarottis, Diagalevs, Beatles, Shakespeares, Galileos or Einsteins would be able to emerge?

What is true is that every human being would have a worth, a destiny and a legacy.

This is the brave new world that can have its conception today. It could take place in any workplace where this depression now threatens closure and where just a hundred or so workers are about to lose their livelihood as much as it is possible in a factory of thousands.

It is when they decide that enough is enough, when they become convinced that capitalism can no longer provide the most basic of their needs or protect the interests of their families. It will be the time when they collectively decide, "Let's do it", and they will stand by their posts, their equipment, their drawing boards and their desks and they will declare workers' control of their place of employment.

This will be an action whose time has arrived. From then on it is an action that will be supported by family and community, it will be sustained and replicated over and over again from district to region, region to country and country to continent. Its progress will be unstoppable.

This is the period in which we now live. It will be a time of courage and an end of fear, it will presage an age of achievement and a world of plenty and finally, it will usher in a century of international harmony and cooperation which will overcome the global threats to human existence that threaten. Let us make it happen.