International Socialism 122 Spring 2009 In the Balance: the Class Struggle in Britain

Summary

Everybody interested in the potential for workers’ resistance to the crisis should view two videos shot by BMW workers at a recent mass meeting at the Mini plant at Cowley, Oxford.2 Management announced that 850 people were sacked with immediate effect. Some had been there for four or five years, but there was no redundancy pay because they were agency workers. In one video a management representative reads from a prepared statement which is full of the double-speak management love. At first workers listen in silence as the manager tells them that their shift is to be abolished and their jobs with it. The language is so convoluted that it does not sink in for a while that they are on the dole, without a penny. Anger rises only as they are reminded to hand in their uniforms or face a £25 fine. In the second video the union rep faces the wrath of the workforce, who want to know why they have been treated like this and why the union is so powerless. The union man does not criticise the decision to kill the jobs, only the failure to give three weeks notice. The workers’ anger boils over. One takes the microphone and demands all the subscriptions back from the patently useless union. Others hurl fruit at the union rep. As you watch, you may well end up shouting at the screen, “Why didn’t somebody call for an occupation of the plant?” The fact that nobody instantly came up with a plan for resistance shows the need for greater workplace rank and file strength, a bigger left and stronger socialist organisation. Who knows what would have happened if the left had been big enough in the run-up to that Cowley meeting to circulate workers with the news that the Waterford Glass factory in Ireland had been occupied and that management were already making concessions. What if one or two well known and well respected Cowley workers were part of left networks that had prepared for just such a moment? What if their Unite union was leading resistance across Britain to every job cut? All this underlines the importance of subjective factors and the question of leadership. There are times in history when the weight of the material situation is so great that it almost crushes the message for resistance. At other times the mood from below is so strong that even if there is almost no leadership a fight will burst out. We are in neither of those situations. We are at a moment when what individuals do can makes the difference between resistance and surrender. It is a time of alternatives, of volatility, when history is up for grabs.