Up to 40,000 Jobs May Go at Consignia

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Up to 40,000 Jobs May Go at Consignia

Editorial:
Tens of Thousands of Projected Job Losses at Consignia: The Need for Workers to Seize the Initiative!

"End of an Era" as Vauxhall Plant Closes

Post office operator Consignia is to unveil massive redundancies at its parcels division today, Monday, in what is described as an attempt to cut costs and fend off increased competition from the private sector.

Consignia has already signalled that up to 30,000 jobs could eventually be lost from its 200,000 workforce. The organisation is said to be losing £1.5 million a day and has said it intends to achieve annual savings of £1.2 billion, which it hopes will make it more competitive as the business post market is opened up to competition.

Consignia argues that the proposals will mean an end to the current universal price for first and second class stamps.

Allan Leighton, set to become the new chairman of Consignia, is expected to announce the first stage of the restructuring, which will involve up to 12,000 redundancies, according to newspaper reports.

Some reports put the total number of job losses at 40,000.

The parcels division, Parcelforce, is expected to bear the brunt of the cuts. It reportedly made losses of £200 million in its recently ended financial year and has not made a profit for a decade. World-wide it has been losing £15 million a month. Since 1991, it had amassed losses of close to £400 million. The unit employs 12,000 workers, half of whom may be axed, the reports said.

A Consignia spokeswoman declined to comment on the number of jobs at stake but said the service would make an announcement on restructuring shortly.

The BBC and Financial Times reported Consignia would shed 40,000 of its staff over three years via moves such as the closure of more than 3,000 urban post offices.

The Observer newspaper said some 7,000 Parcelforce staff would be put on individual contracts, taking them off the payroll, while others would be offered redundancies.

It said that up to 15,000 Royal Mail jobs will also go, but Consignia is said to be confident that these will all be "voluntary" redundancies.

The Sunday Times said the company will set aside as much as £400 million to cover the redundancies as the group is split into three separate businesses – Royal Mail, Parcelforce and the Post Office network.

Allan Leighton, the former boss of supermarket group ASDA, has been interim chairman of the organisation for two months but is expected to take on the role of permanent chairman.

The Observer said he has demanded complete autonomy without government interference to carry out the restructuring. He is expected to announce a three-year turnaround plan to ensure the group's survival after Britain's postal regulator recommended its 250 year mail monopoly ended by 2006.

The government is saying that keeping the Post Office within the public sector but giving it commercial freedom had been the right thing to do, but it did not mean that the company could be insulated from some of the "painful and difficult restructuring decisions" which had to be taken.

It seems certain that Consignia will announce job losses amounting to tens of thousands, according to all reports.

Recently, many thousands of other job axings have been announced at Corus, and workers over the past few years have been thrown out of their jobs at Vauxhall, Ford and throughout the manufacturing base in particular. Alongside this, all kinds of associated assaults have been made, such as on pensions, the imposition of "flexible working", introducing fixed term contracts, and so on. This has gone on despite the talk of the TUC leaders since the Labour Party came into office of "social partnership" which is supposed to indicate that if only union leaders were listened to, if only workers were to co-operate with the magnates of industry to solve their problems, then everything could be sorted out amicably.

Far from this being the case, the anti-social offensive has been stepped up. The Labour government has done everything in its power to try and convince the workers and their unions that the days when workers fought for their interests through their collective strength are gone for ever. Those workers and union leaders that have voiced concern about the direction of social programmes and the attacks on the public sector have been branded as the "wreckers".

There is no reason to suppose that the Labour government will take any stand against the action of Consignia. Its whole policy has been to keep the Post Office in the "public sector" in name only. In this, the government has been at one with the EU agenda of breaking up national postal services and compelling them to open up to competition. Any conception of a public postal service meeting the needs of society has been trampled in favour of the mantras of competition and profitability. Two years ago, the projected job losses of this course of action were put at 50,000, so even the staggering number of 40,000 redundancies may be proved too few.

The question remains about what the response of the workers should be. Clearly the Labour government and Consignia itself have done and are doing everything to sideline the workers. The announcement of job losses is due only two days before workers were about to take action in defence of their pay claim. Workers themselves have pointed out how little these negotiations over pay have actually meant for the workers, in the sense that the focus has excluded the bigger picture and workers themselves have had little involvement in the issue.

The fact is that negotiations in any meaningful sense have become a thing of the past in Tony Blair’s "New Britain". Even the involvement of the TUC and other union leaders in having any say in the way society operates, as in some of the days of the 1960s and 1970s, is no more than a nostalgic memory for these leaders. Far from accommodating the union leaders, New Labour has taken over the role of trying to eliminate any vestige of their being fighting organisations of the workers.

This raises the important point that without the working class taking up its role as the leader of society, the deterioration of society will accelerate. In fact the government refuses to recognise the existence of society in anything but words, thus taking over the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But this abnegation of responsibility is bringing with it the anarchy, chaos and violence in society. It was Margaret Thatcher who took up the task of smashing the unions as defence organisations of the class once and for all. The government of the day drew the conclusion that it could not suffer a defeat again such as the Heath government did at the beginning of the 1970s when the capitalist crisis was once more making itself felt. With the programme of privatisation carried out by the Thatcher government came the objective of smashing first the print unions and then the miners’ union. With them the illusions of the labour aristocracy that the old society could be made to serve their interests were also smashed.

Although Tony Blair came to power with the message of "fairness not favours" to the trade unions, the TUC bosses clung to the old illusions. Recently, talk of "revolution" has been in the air. What does this mean? It cannot mean that Tony Blair must be isolated and the fightback can begin. If the projected job losses at Consignia signify anything, it is that the problem is far more fundamental than this.

There is therefore an urgent need for workers to seize back the initiative and come to the conclusion that their full weight must be put into fighting the anti-social offensive and for a pro-social programme. That the world has changed since the 1970s is obvious for all to see. The crisis has deepened. The financial oligarchy is demanding that every pore of society must be geared to making the maximum capitalist profit and it is demanding control of social programmes wholesale. That New Labour is presiding over the wrecking of society in these circumstances is before everyone’s eyes.

Building the Workers’ Opposition to this situation, and uniting around the independent programme of the working class which will lead to socialism, when the economy is geared to meeting the needs of the people, is the task of the times. Uniting all the people politically against the wrecking of society and for democratic renewal and for a different society in which their claims are met is a task the workers must take up. To fight for their interests, they cannot neglect this task. The potential is there! The initiative must be seized!

The last car – a Vectra hatchback – rolled off the production line at Vauxhall's plant in Luton last Thursday as the factory closed down, 95 years and 10 million cars after the first vehicle, a Vauxhall 7/9 HP, came off the tracks there.

About 1,900 jobs have been lost with the factory's closure, announced in December after Vauxhall's parent, General Motors Europe, unveiled a "restructuring" programme. Luton's closure is related to the financial and structural problems GM faces across Europe, according to analysts’ reports. GM expects to lose $350m (£240m) on its European operations this year and has been looking to take out some 500,000 "units of capacity" in the region. "Project Olympia" is the name of this strategy.

Amicus on Thursday repeated its claim that Vauxhall's decision to close the Luton plant was seriously flawed. The union’s general secretary, Roger Lyons, said that GM was making a serious strategic mistake and had ignored quality and flexibility in favour of a cut at the point of least resistance.

Tony Woodley of the Transport and General Workers' Union said a modern, productive, efficient, profitable car plant was closing. "It is being sacrificed for no good reason other than trying to increase shareholder value. If outrages like this are to be stopped in the future, governments have got to play a more proactive role to stop it happening," he said.

The future of car production at Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port plant could also be at risk if the group does not meet stringent productivity, quality and cost requirements imposed by General Motors last month. Failure to meet the targets by the end of the year would put seriously at risk the factory's prospects of securing production of the next generation of the Astra models which it currently builds. These are due to be replaced in 2004.

If GM Europe places the Astra contract elsewhere, analysts say that Ellesmere Port would have little chance of survival as a centre of car assembly, despite the fact that GM has just finished investing £200m ($300m) in the plant to produce the latest-generation Vauxhall/Opel Vectra. Vectra production volumes on their own would not be high enough to provide viability for the works, GM executives indicated.