For jobs, fight the bosses, not other workers!

Submitted by Anon on 13 March, 2009 - 8:43

An Appeal by Socialists and Trade Unionists

As the recession brings attacks on jobs, wages and conditions, we are determined to fight back, and to support our fellow workers who do so, for example in the recent engineering construction walkouts.

We demand:

• Jobs for all workers

• Work or full pay

• Pay to be levelled up to the best rates

• Direct recruitment of labour by the companies or by principal contractors, rather than the use of subcontractors, wherever possible

• Union agreements to be enforced without exemptions for contractors

• A register of unemployed union members which companies must recruit from.

• International cooperation between unions, so that trade unionists from one country can automatically be integrated into unions if they move to another country. Union resources to help migrant workers organise and integrate as equals into the trade-union movement.

• The repeal of the anti-union laws designed to prevent workers fighting back

• That employers “open the books” and give workers and our unions access to all information about finances and contracts

• The repeal of EU legal rulings that allow contractors to avoid giving workers rights in their host countries; workers’ unity across the EU to win EU-wide guarantees of workers' rights; action by the British government to guarantee such rights despite the EU rulings.

Workers should not pay for the bosses' crisis in Britain or in Europe. If the British Government can advance £1,100 billion to save the banks, it can also take the energy and other industries into public ownership, under workers' control, and with working hours cut with no loss of pay in order to create new jobs. It can step up, not cut, investment in “green” energy projects, thus creating thousands of socially useful jobs.

Capitalism is international. Workers’ only reliable weapon to defend ourselves is unity, across borders and across differences of origin. Otherwise the bosses will be able to play off one country's workers against another’s, and workers of one origin against workers of another. We therefore oppose the use of the slogan “British Jobs for British Workers”.

The slogan was picked up by the BNP and the far right to fuel hatred of foreign workers and immigrants. If it spreads, this slogan will become a weapon to divide workers, setting longer-settled workers against the maybe two million migrant workers who are a major part of today’s “British” working class. Only the bosses can gain from that.

The media and politicians have highlighted slogans such as “British Jobs for British Workers” for their own ends. We must not play into their hands.

Workers should direct our anger — and our demands — against the employers and government that attack us, not against fellow workers.

• To add your signature to this appeal, email unity.2009@yahoo.co.uk. or go to www.workersliberty.org/j4aw

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