Vestas workers – Up for a fight!

Submitted by bobsutton on 7 July, 2009 - 5:41 Author: Patrick Rolfe
Vestas

On Friday 3 July, Workers’ Climate Action and the Cowes Trades Council held a public meeting attended by around 100 people, to oppose the closure of the Vestas plant, Britain’s only wind turbine factory, on the Isle of Wight.

Two months ago, Vestas announced over 500 job cuts. It is seeking to move production to the USA.

The room was packed with workers from the factory, as well as people from the wider community. By the end of the meeting, there were people seriously discussing the tactic of a factory occupation to save jobs and force much-needed investment in wind energy.

How did this come about?

The Isle of Wight is, for the most part, staunchly Conservative, with very little history of class struggle or environmentalism. It has one Labour councillor, no branch of any left group, and an apparently inactive Green Party branch. The previous campaign to save jobs at Vestas was very small, based mainly on a Facebook group and a petition had ground to a halt, lacking direction and the confidence to take radical action.

A small number of activists from Workers’ Liberty heard the news of the closure and began getting in touch with people on the Island three weeks ago. We managed in touch with a few local trade unionists from the Trades Council. Most of these turned out to be past retirement age, but many with militant histories.

As impressed as these old heads of the labour movement were and as glad as they were to see a bunch of energetic young people having come down to set up a campaign, no one expected it to go anywhere. The wisdom was that this was a workplace that had never been unionised, the closure had been announced, the ball was in motion; we should try by all means but we shouldn’t get too disappointed if we got nowhere.

Despite this, we went out and simply stood outside the factory waiting for people to come out of work. Our only leaflets was the basic Workers' Climate Action ‘Climate Change is a Class Issue’ one. As the workers went past we got chatting, heard stories of people having to move house as a result of the redundancies and various attempts over the years to get trade union recognition met with victimisations and sackings.

People felt betrayed. Many are young, many had thought that this was an industry with a future, many genuinely felt they were doing their bit to save the planet. All this was down the drain.

People were pissed off, all that was lacking was the sense that anything could be done to do anything, to fight back, we decided at that point to try and pull together a meeting. We got the Trade’s Council to sort the venue, came back to London and knocked up a leaflet.

We mobilised a small but diverse group of Workers’ Climate Action activists (environmentalists, socialists, and anarchists) from across the country to come down.

We spent a week intensively building for a public meeting. We leafleted the gates of the two factory sites at least twice a day, did stalls in the main towns, and constantly spoke to people about their concerns – the impact of the closure on jobs and the local community, environmental concerns, the poor state of health and safety at the Vestas plants.

We raised the appropriate political questions – who should determine how jobs are provided and how energy is produced? How should the transition to a low carbon economy be achieved? What is to be done about harsh management practices, job losses, and factory closures?

Working in a political environment not usually best suited to revolutionary politics, we found that our concern for jobs and the environment was immediately taken on by the many of the hundreds of people we spoke to.

Over the years, Vestas have generated a high turnover of employees, to prevent unionisation and stop the workers from building up significant redundancy packages. The air conditioning in the factories is inadequate. Many workers contracted contact dermatitis, an allergic reaction to the resin used in moulds, and the company operates an unofficial ‘three strikes and you’re out’ disciplinary procedure, as well as regularly denying workers days off and sick days for no good reason.

The exploitation of the workers for profit provides us with an analogy for environmental exploitation and degradation.

We succeeded in talking to the local media, including BBC radio Solent, the Isle of Wight County press, and Meridian News, and we were able to voice ideas like the just transition to a low carbon economy and democratic workers’ control of industry in forums where they had not been heard in a long time.

Using contacts made during the Visteon occupation, we persuaded the former convenor of the Enfield Visteon plant, Ron Clarke, to speak at the public meeting. Ron spoke about the experience and the tactics of occupation, telling the gathered crowds that physical control of the factory was the only way to bargain with the bosses. The experience gained by the Visteon workers, and their resounding success provided a galvanising example of what can be achieved if workers take action and stick together.

We encountered problems and obstructions from all the usual sources. Just before the public meeting, a police inspector phoned the secretary of Cowes trades council, informing him that the Workers’ Climate Action had published a piece exhorting Vestas workers to chain themselves to machinery. This was, of course, a lie. The police were, nevertheless, very visible outside the public meeting.

In addition to this, many of the speakers brought to the public meeting by the local Trades Council revealed themselves to be bureaucrats. They told workers to simply join UNITE and get official recognition, but were disdainful about the idea of occupation. These business unionists and social partnership bureaucrats brought little to the campaign, but they certainly alienated a lot of workers with their elitist talk of letters written to ‘Lord Mandelson’.

Despite the politically questionable character of the meeting, we managed to get workers and people on-board to expand the campaign further into the factory and the local community. The Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party are already organising public meetings in Southampton and Portsmouth with speakers from Workers’ Climate Action and workers themselves. A protest in the centre of Newport is planned, with the possibility of a happening outside Downing Street in London to put pressure on the government.

National groups are expressing an interest in getting involved, and we are following up contacts in Denmark, where Vestas have their headquarters, with a view to encouraging solidarity actions. Watch this space, and the Workers’ Climate Action Website (www.workersclimateaction.co.uk) for more information.

Our actions to oppose the Vestas closure will demonstrate that, though energy and enthusiasm are essential to achieve results, we must also, as Lenin says "be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link; the order of the links, their form, the manner in which they are linked together, the way they differ from each other in the historical chain of events, are not as simple and not as meaningless as those in an ordinary chain made by a smith."

Already messages of solidarity are pouring in via email (savevestas@googlemail.com), and a motion will be circulating around trade unions who wish to offer their support to the Vestas workers. The campaign is already snowballing, but it must be held in mind that this situation could be brought into existence anywhere - at Corus, or in the car industry, or at Nortel where 2,000 redundancies were announced today. Go to where jobs are being lost, talk to a few workers, collaborate and draft a leaflet, call a big meeting. Raise the experience of Visteon. Raise the possibility of direct action: it can be done.

Workers Climate Action are holding an organising meeting in Cambridge on Friday 17 July. Come and get involved. The WCA website should have more details soon.

Appeal for support

Thank you for your support. The campaign to save jobs at the Vestas factory is asking all supporters to help out in several ways:

1. We need donations of money to our fighting fund! Please send a donation from your organisation, union branch, or trades council, or make a personal donation: cheques payable to Ryde and East Wight Trades Union Council, 22 Church Lane, Ryde, Isle of Wight, PO33 2NB

2. Spread the word about the campaign to save the factory, and encourage more people to send messages of solidarity and offers of practical support to savevestas@googlemail.com.

3. Organise a visible demonstration of solidarity – hold a gathering in your town centre, distribute the attached leaflet, collect signatures on the attached petition, make people aware of the dispute. Take a photograph of members of your organisation holding a placard that reads “Save Vestas” and email the photo to savevestas@googlemail.com.

Actions like these are crucial to building confidence amongst the workforce and bolstering the campaign. Every message, every penny, every leaflet and every photo really does count!

“As a wind turbine manufacturer I was confident as the recession took hold that green or renewable energy would be the area where many jobs could be created not lost.

“So I was, along with many others, horrified to find out that our jobs were moving to America. Over 600 jobs from the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth were going to be added to the already poor state of island unemployment.

“This has and will continue to send shockwaves of uncertainty through countless families — many of which are being forced to relocate away from the island.

“I find this hard to stomach as the government are getting away with claiming they are investing heavily in these types of industry.

“I think it’s about time they stopped bailing out greedy bankers and started doing what they claim to be doing.

“The people of Vestas matter and the people of the island matter but equally importantly the people of this planet matter.

“I for one will not be brushed under the carpet by a government who is claiming to help us.

“Please show your support for Vestas workers as we try to take our concerns all the way to Number 10.”

The Island, as we know, hangs in a fragile balance, and with the closure of the Vestas wind turbine plant in Newport we will take another step closer to the edge.

For as yet another company succumbs to the recession, 600 workers are soon to find themselves unemployed.

What they need is the support they deserve:

  • SUPPORT THE WORKERS: Help stop the Island’s rising unemployment rate and let these workers and others keep their jobs.
  • SUPPORT THEIR FAMILIES: Help the workers provide for those who still depend on Vestas.
  • SUPPORT THE ECONOMY: Help keep one of the Island’s largest employers and prevent the effect it would have on smaller businesses through its closure.
  • SUPPORT THE ENVIRONMENT: Vestas provides a clean ‘green’ energy source. Don’t deny the world Vestas’ climate saving product.

It may seem small, but your support is greatly needed. This would not just aid us locally, but on a global scale.

SAVE VESTAS, SAVE THE ISLAND, SAVE THE WORLD

Comments

Submitted by Newcastle on Thu, 16/07/2009 - 21:44

Haizee,

Not sure if you went to the meeting, or want to fight to save the factory. I hope that you did.

I didnt read the article as slandering the efforts of workers lives, But criticism of the bosses for moving jobs to US, and preventing workers from organising by opposing unions and victimising workers.

Yes my employer has disciplinary policies but having a strong recognised union means that its fair. And although lots of bosses are victimising workers who call in sick, we should condemn this shouldnt we?

A spoke to one of your fellow workers at the weekend and am glad that a mood for action is growing. I think that's what we can do from outside of the Isle of Wight offer support, send messages of support and those of us who can get down there work with you.

At a meeting of Tyneside Socialist Forum last night 50 people got together to discuss uniting the left and fighting this economic crisis. The meeting agreed to send a message of support to the workers at Vestas and offer to build solidarity in whatever way we can.

The BBC news last night showed a feature of wind energy and how the government sees this as a big growth area for the uk (we lag behind all other european countries according to the feature) and this is the time the government are allowing Vestas to close down. We must fight this, they found the money to bailout the banks, they have just nationalised the North East to London rail route since National Express can;t cover the costs. Yes banks and trains should be nationalised, but without renewable energy such as wind power, all our lives are in jeopardy. We must point to the hypocrisy of the governments claims over energy, if they mean it they should support Vestas workers keep building turbines, and nationalise the factory, and keep your jobs.

Comradely

Ed, Newcastle

Submitted by martin on Sat, 18/07/2009 - 10:47

Hi Haizee,

I've been on the Isle of Wight for a few days now, leafleting and petitioning in support of the workers and talking to workers at shift changes and other opportunities.

Even those workers who don't want to fight the closure echo the complaints about the management and the conditions in the factory that are quoted above. Some of them have shown me the skin troubles they've contracted from working in the factory. One worker in R & D said to me that his conditions in that department are all right, but he didn't think he could stick it working in production under the management they have there.

A sizeable number of workers now are resolved to fight to stop the closure and also to change the regime in the factory.

Martin, London

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