Nationalise City Link!

Submitted by Matthew on 7 January, 2015 - 10:23 Author: Darren Bedford

Union campaigners have called for bankrupt delivery firm City Link to be nationalised, after more than 2,400 workers were sacked on New Year’s Eve 2014.

Around 60 activists demonstrated at the company’s headquarters in Coventry on 31 December, with smaller demonstrations taking place at delivery centres elsewhere in the country.

The firm owned by investment company “Better Capital”, headed by former Tory and current UKIP donor Jon Moulton. Moulton purchased City Link for £1 last year; having failed to make it profitable, he will walk away from the mess relatively unscathed, while City Link workers, many of them self-employed contractors reliant on the firm for jobs, face an uncertain 2015.

The ease with which capitalists like Moulton can toy with working-class people’s lives speaks to the inhumanity at the heart of capitalist market chaos. A mild inconvenience for Moulton and “Better Capital” could mean poverty for workers and their families. But when the market rules, such chaos is inevitable.

Mick Cash, General Secretary of the RMT union, which organises some City Link drivers, said: “The confirmation from the administrators that they have just sacked 2,400 staff and are pulling the plug on any efforts to save City Link is a disgraceful and cynical betrayal that will wreck the lives of our members, many of whom are owed thousands of pounds.”

The union has called for City Link to be taken in public ownership. More prominence needs to be given to such calls in union press statements, demonstrations, and other actions. City Link should be integrated into a renationalised public postal and delivery service, rather than run as a private enterprise.

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