Vestas

Vestas factory occupation, 2009. Read our pamphlet here.

A Vestas worker speaks out

What follows is the text of a speech written by a Vestas worker for delivery at trade union and environmental movement meetings, edited only slightly. It gives an excellent insight into the background of the struggle, and its wider political significance. Taken from the Save Vestas blog . Hello there – my name is Matt and I’ve come today to speak about a little factory called St. Cross on the Isle of Wight – otherwise known as Vestas; you may have heard about it before… It is currently in occupation as it’s due to close at the end of the week [31 July]. Over 625 jobs will be lost at the three...

Vestas: how it happened

28 April: Vestas bosses announce that they are ditching previous plans to re-fit the Isle of Wight plants for more advanced production methods, and will close them instead. They blame “a lack of political initiatives to support the wind industry” and say that “orders have ground to a halt” in Northern Europe. At this stage, however, they also say that it is “too early to say whether orders wwill pick up enough to rescue the plant”. 15 June: Workers’ Liberty activists arrive in the Isle of Wight to start leafleting and talking to workers about the Vestas factory closure and ways to resist it...

How Vestas workers became a power

It all started on 15 June, when a small group of young members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty set off for the Isle of Wight. They had read in the press about the planned closure of Britain’s only wind turbine blade factories, operated by the Danish-based multinational Vestas at Venture Quays, East Cowes, and St Cross, Newport, on the Isle of Wight. They had discussed it among themselves and with other AWL members. They had cast around for contacts to give them a first foothold on the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t easy. The Isle of Wight — both a local-government county and a parliamentary...

We will build the sustainable society!

The action taken at the Vestas wind turbine plant demonstrates the emergence not of a “red and green coalition” (as the Guardian would have it) but a realisation on the part of two social movements that they are inextricably linked. The environmental movement has realised that the only system capable of making the economic changes required to achieve sustainability is one of democratically controlled, social production. In parallel, the socialist movement has realised the imminence of environmental destruction — we cannot wait until the democratisation of production before we build a...

The rules of revolutionary socialism

The AWL’s motto and guideline is what Leon Trotsky called “the rules” for revolutionary socialists: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives”. We see other would-be revolutionary-socialist groups, like the SWP and the Socialist Party, as abandoning those rules in favour of what we call “Apparatus...

Vestas: the RMT and Unite

Activists from the RMT union, which mainly covers rail, bus, and sea workers, joined the Vestas workers outside the factory from very early on. These were not full-time officials, but branch representatives from the RMT Portsmouth branch which organises the Portsmouth-Ryde ferry workers, especially Richard Howard, branch secretary, and Mick Tosh, branch chair. One way or another, they managed to work their union facility time and leave from work so as to be at the site almost 24/7, providing help and advice. It was a model of what good trade unionists should do: going to the aid of other...

An activist's diary: how the Vestas campaign started

I remember first hearing about a wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight being shut down at the Workers’ Liberty conference back in May. We decided that someone should go down there. Why did I volunteer? We’d been talking about “voluntarism” — the necessary element in socialist politics of making things happen by will-power and initiative. I travelled to the island on 15 June with two other AWL members, Ed Maltby and Pat Rolfe, and stayed for a couple of days to make contact with local labour movement activists. Members of the local Trades Councils had been campaigning around Vestas, but...

Vestas: can the Government be budged?

Many Vestas workers are becoming confident that Vestas bosses can be budged, to some degree at least. Many are less confident about budging the Government. But the Government was already shaky a month ago. It had already been forced to abandon its taboos against nationalisation and against higher taxes on the rich. Since then it has been forced to retreat on Royal Mail privatisation and on ID cards, to concede the long-demanded “Fourth Option” on council housing, and to renationalise East Coast mainline railways. The growing public storm about the Vestas closure puts pressure on a Government...

Vestas: what kind of management?

In conversations about what management they would like to see in the wind-turbine factories if they win nationalisation to keep them open, some Vestas workers say “workers’ control”, some say “any management, as long as it is fair”. No-one has a good word for the existing top management at Vestas. Many of the workers who didn’t want to fight the closure explained their attitude as one of being glad to get out from under an oppressive management, however poor their prospects of a new job might be. In other words, in apparently peaceful, conflict-free factories there was a huge underground well...

Youth campaign for jobs

On Sunday 26 July Workers’Liberty organised a showing in a church hall near the Vestas occupation of the film “With Babies and Banners”. It tells the story of the 1936 workers’ occupation at the General Motors factories in Flint, USA, which was decisive in winning union recognition in the US car industry. As the discussion developed after the film among the 20-odd people present, it turned to the idea of organising a campaign for jobs for young people on the Isle of Wight. Local young people who had come to the meeting told us of their anger at the lack of opportunities for them, unless they...

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