In face of growing numbers of plant closings and redundancies in the United Kingdom that are putting thousands of workers on the streets and threatening entire communities, the Communist League urges the unions to initiate a campaign to demand the Labour government of Anthony Blair take immediate and wide-ranging action to defend the interests of working people.

The recent determined actions by auto workers stands as an example of the potential to mobilize the broad ranks of labour in a struggle to demand the government reduce the workweek with no cut in pay in order to spread the available work around. We can demand Blair enact a massive, long-term public works program to put tens of thousands to work building needed social projects, such as schools, hospitals, affordable housing, and a refurbished mass transport system.

In response to claims of hard times by General Motors and other companies that are cutting jobs and closing plants, the labor movement can demand of the corporations: Open the books! Show us your records! These capitalist concerns seek to make working people pay for the crisis of overproduction in the auto and steel industries. But there is no reason why the unions have to bow before the hallowed sanctity of corporate secrecy or sacrifice the livelihoods and well-being of tens of thousands of workers and their families at the alter of big business profits.

The effects of the crisis of capitalism and the slowdown in the economy are worldwide; the fight by workers and farmers to defend ourselves from its devastating consequences must be an international one as well. In imperialist countries such as France, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the consequences of a potential downturn in the capitalist business cycle will be devastating for working people. In the semicolonial world, already wracked by social and economic dislocation, it will be a catastrophe. The labor movement can take the moral high ground and take concrete steps to unite with workers and peasants in the Third World by also demanding the imperialist governments cancel the foreign debt of these countries whose payment in yearly tribute is exacted from the toil of working people.

The strikes, walkouts, and demonstrations by workers at General Motors across Europe struck an important note of this kind of international working-class solidarity. The union actions helped cut across what will become a heightened drive by the corporations to pit workers in one country against another and to put the unions in the dead-end framework of defending "British jobs," "German jobs," or "French jobs."

Workers in France are also fighting a government and corporate drive to raise the retirement age and to implement other measures to cut back the social wage of working people. The massive turnout across the country the same day as the mobilizations against General Motors point to the power the labor movement has to stand and fight in the broad interests of all working people.

Embarking on a course of struggle along these lines points to the need to fight for a government that consistently and uncompromisingly stands and fights in the interest of working people, something that will take a revolutionary struggle by tens of millions to accomplish. The mobilizations across Europe this past week are the initial indications of the pressing need for such a struggle and of the capacity of workers and farmers to see it through to victory.
 
 
Related articles:
40,000 stop work at GM plants in Europe
Chrysler will cut 26,000 jobs by 2002
 
 
 
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