Socialist Party Wales Socialism In Wales
By Alec Thraves
2020 has been a health, social and economic disaster for workers across Wales and is graphically outlined in a Senedd Research document earlier this summer. But more importantly is the living experience and the devastating impact Covid has had on almost every community, workplace and family in Wales, particularly on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society.
Capitalism internationally was yet again facing a serious economic downturn prior to the pandemic but the onslaught of Covid rapidly increased that process, locking down the UK for months since March before a profit hungry, rushed easing of the lockdown began in June.
With a second wave now spreading this Autumn any kind of return to normality has been blown out of the water and working-class people are facing a second wave of health and economic concerns, worries about contracting this deadly virus as well as the prospect of wage cuts, job losses and evictions.
And they have every right to be concerned!
By the end of May, 20% of Welsh businesses had closed or paused their trading, the highest percentage of any of the UK nations with the deprived rural areas and the Valleys most impacted.
The slow and temporary recovery over the past 3 months has now been pushed into reverse which will spell the death knell of many of the 46% of Welsh businesses that have just 6 months or less of cash reserves to fall back on.
The box of state funded, economic sticking plasters, that the Tory and Welsh governments have used to try and prevent a total collapse of the Welsh economy over the past few months are fast running out.
It is young people between 16 and 24, already in precarious employment on slave labour wages and zero-hour contracts, who will bare the brunt of this coming unemployment tsunami.
The Welsh economy is dominated by the public sector and the so-called ‘shutdown sectors’ of hospitality, tourism, service and retail. All of which face further attacks in the coming months.
The dwindling manufacturing and industrial sector in Wales were already butchering highly skilled and well-paid jobs before the pandemic with Covid exacerbating this decline, impacting on local communities across Wales.
The Ford Bridgend Engine plant has finally seized up and closed its doors throwing almost 2000 workers onto the scrapheap and dumping alongside them around 70 component suppliers along the M4 corridor and Valleys.
In Caerphilly, Socialist Party Wales members helped organise and participated in the mass protest and rally at the end of July to prevent the hundreds of proposed job cuts at GE in Nantgarw.
British Airways in South Wales are looking at 400 more redundancies whilst the mighty Airbus plant in North Wales could see 1,400 jobs flown off into oblivion!
The mistaken idea, prominent amongst the industrial trade unions in Wales, is to prioritise the retraining of these already skilled workers.
In most circumstances this would be an incoherent strategy but in the context of the Welsh economy it is criminally laughable.
Retrain for what? The Institute for Fiscal Studies in Mid-May reported that job vacancies were nearly 60% lower than the same time in 2019 with 15 unemployed job seekers for every vacancy.
University graduates, entering the jobs market with £30,000 to £40,000 of student loan debts, can’t even guarantee getting a job at a Tesco checkout let alone being able to utilise the knowledge gained through their hard-worked for degrees.
The private sector jobs slaughter across Wales must be answered by a determined and militant Welsh trade union movement and a fighting political response from the Welsh government.
A socialist programme of action is the only guarantee of immediate job security and for any prospect of future employment for young people. A red thread running through these past closures and threatened redundancies has been Socialist Party Wales demand for the socialist nationalisation of these industries run under democratic workers control and management. This was our key demand after the announcement of the closure at the Ford Bridgend engine plant and earlier when Tata Steel threatened to close its massive Port Talbot steelworks.
This demand for state intervention and public ownership to preserve jobs and protect the community received a positive response from many of the workers but was rejected out of hand by a trade union leadership conditioned to working in ‘partnership’ with the profit hungry employers who ultimately end up closing the plants or cutting jobs, pay and pensions!
The Tata Steel Executives who slashed jobs, cut terms and conditions and wound up the pension scheme now want ‘substantial funding from the tax payers’ to keep the plant open after 2021. Tata are now negotiating with the Tory Government and Investment bankers for a £1billion state subsidy allowing the government a 50% stake in Tata Steel UK – semi nationalisation – or they will walk away!
Socialist Party Wales continue to advocate 100% socialist nationalisation with any financial compensation to the owners based on proven need – meaning Tata’s Executives would get £0.
With capitalism facing an international organic crisis then these are increasingly the demands necessary to defend the working class and our communities.
Francis O’Grady, General Secretary of the TUC was taking ‘partnership’ to an historically new level when she appeared in Downing Street alongside Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Dame Carolyn Fairburn, leader of the Employers organisation the CBI, to support the so-called ‘Jobs Support Scheme’ which actually introduces even steeper wage cuts for workers during Covid!
The TUC, alongside its ‘mini me’ totally invisible Wales TUC, should be mobilising for Socialist Party Wales demand of fulltime work or 100% wages during this crisis.
Private sector workers face an unemployment nightmare which has continued in the public sector for the past 10 years of Tory/Lib Dem ‘austerity’.
Tens of thousands of public service jobs have disappeared in Wales since 2010, council workers, civil servants, teachers etc and Covid has cruelly highlighted the absolute decimation of public services.
Local government have suffered continuous cuts every year for the past 10 years, with jobs and services being reduced to the absolute minimum and with little flesh left on the bones of council services. Tory cuts have been obediently implemented by the Welsh-led Labour government and Welsh Labour councils who almost fanatically refuse to even consider Socialist Party Wales demand to pass a ‘No Cuts’ budget and organise with the unions and community organisations to confront this weak Tory government.
The Welsh Local Government Association predicts even before the next round of Tory cuts there could be a shortfall of up to £475 million for local authority budgets.
The fighting approach of Carmarthenshire UNISON local government branch, led by Socialist Party Wales members, has saved jobs and services over the past decade and won overwhelming support for it’s ‘No Cuts’ strategy. If the predicted local government cuts are to be avoided then Welsh local government unions urgently need to adopt the strategy of this intransigent, member-led branch committee.
In this period of economic and health crisis new workers leaders in Wales will be forged out of the struggle and assist in transforming our business friendly, timid and placid trade union movement into fighting, working class organisations.
Alongside re-building the unions in Wales, the development of a ‘new worker’s party’, necessary to replace Sir Keir Starmers and Mark Drakefords capitalist Labour second eleven, is a key task for Welsh activists in looking towards the Senedd elections of 2021 and the propagation of a clear socialist programme to confront this brutal capitalist system.
