Thousands of jobs are being cut each week. Two recent struggles show that even when bosses are determined to shut down operations, workers can still fight back.
In December, workers at Republic Windows and Doors, in Chicago, occupied their factory for six days. In late November, workers at the Calcast car parts factory in Northern Ireland also occupied after the bosses had said the factory was closing down.
In both cases, the workers won better pay-offs rather than reversal of the closures. But both cases show that workers have bargaining power even in the endgame.
Even if bosses want to shut down a factory or an office or a chain of shops, they will also want to sell off the stock and the equipment. Physical possession of that stock and equipment is a powerful bargaining chip.
In Argentina, some workplaces occupied by the workers when the bosses said they would shut them down in the economic crisis around 2000-1 are still running under workers' control - for example, the Zanon tile factory. They have formed a national network of "factories without bosses" for mutual assistance.
Large-scale action on jobs requires government measures. But occupations and similar action can put mighty pressure on the government, which has the means to save jobs just as it has the means to save banks.
If banks can be nationalised under bankers' control to save their credit lines, then industrial and commercial companies can be nationalised under workers' control to save jobs, converting production to alternative socially-useful lines if necessary.
If the government can decide on big increases in public spending on construction projects to limit the slump in market demand, then it could also increase public spending on public services, immediately employing thousands of workers in schools, health care, and other services, and raising their wages.
It is only because of its allegiance to capitalist interests that the government wants to make its boost to public spending through construction projects, while simultaneously, for example, putting pressure on local government for cuts. It wants extra public spending that will not bring advantages to workers that feed through into a higher "baseline" for workers' acquisitions and expectations when recovery comes. The outcome depends not on any iron economic logic, but on class struggle.
If thousands of workers are being put on short time for the crisis, trade-union action can force the employers to maintain full pay. In the great French strike wave of 1995, one thing won in some sectors, like post and rail, was cuts in the working week with a corresponding percentage increase in numbers employed (rather than, as the bosses preferred, work-week cuts on the basis of making the same workforce do the same amount of work in less time).
The government could, straight off, cut working hours in the public services and draw a corresponding number of workers who would otherwise be unemployed into socially useful jobs.
Government ministers say that they do not want to see whole communities and whole generations trashed through mass unemployment as they were in the 1980s. Such measures as the government has announced - hand-outs to companies who hire new workers, for example - will not avoid the danger.
The demoralisation and crisis-crushing of a whole generation of youth, in many areas, can be avoided - but only if the labour movement mobilises for radical measures, using radical tactics to win them.
So far the union leaders are far from that. When the Woolworths shop chain shut down, the main plea from the leaders of their union, USDAW, was for the Government "to ensure that its rapid response teams at the local Job Centres will be ready to help staff".
Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB and a supposed left-winger, advocates wage cuts as the answer to job cuts.
"It is difficult", so Kenny told the Financial Times (15/12/08), "for union officials to stand up in front of members and recommend that they should lose pay". But Kenny is not daunted. "It is much easier just to say 'No, no, no' to employers. But it must be an adult dialogue... We must consider all the available tools in the box to keep companies viable and save jobs".
The GMB has already persuaded workers to accept short-time working and corresponding pay cuts (same hourly rate) at Hawick Knitwear, JCB, and Cosalt Holiday Homes. However, the FT added in December: "The GMB, having agreed short-time working at Cosalt... was [in November] given 90 days' notice of 280 job losses at the Hull company".
Now (12 January), JCB has cut another 700 jobs on top of the 1000 redundancies it has made since July 2008. The union's efforts in October to get workers to accept a £50 per week pay cut probably only persuaded bosses that the workforce had no will to resist, and would be easy meat for job cuts. Now GMB officials can think of nothing to say but: "We will be seeking talks with JCB to minimise the job cuts".
Unions in the USA have been negotiating "give-backs" for decades, supposedly to save jobs. Result: jobs in the USA are still even more insecure than jobs in Europe, unemployment is high there, but real wages have been falling or stagnant in the USA for most of the last 30 years, as inequality has spiralled there.
We need to turn the unions towards a workers' plan for the crisis.
