Hidden cost of "saving" Nissan jobs
Socialist Outlook2000sScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
After a £40m sweetener from the government Nissan has confounded speculation and decided to build the new Micra in its sunderland plant On the face of it this deal protects several thousand jobs which were on the line if the Micra had gone to France, and it gives the plant a better chance of survival in the medlilm term Certainly if the Micra had gone elsewhere it could well have been the beginning of the end for the plant. But a closer look at the deal chows that ions are under threat just the same. Firstly, management have made it clear that the allocation of the Micra to the plant involves a commitment to further productivity increases in a plant where the pace of work is already high.
The workforce will go onto 7 day working on a 24 hour shift pattern. This will be combined with the introduction of a working time system in which overtime will be replaced with a banking of hours system.
Nissan has been one of the few plants where this system was not already in existence, and it will mean a huge pay cut for the workforce as a high proportion of what they previously took home was made up of overtime payments.
There is also the question of how Nissan intend to deal with the strength of the pound, when they are manufacturing cars inside the EU but outside of the Euro zone - the principal reason for considering moving production to France.
Nissan UK will only pay for components (which is by far the biggest part of the labour value which goes into a car) in euros. This gives them the best possible situation: they will have the benefit both of cheap and flexible employment conditions in Britain, and the current low value of the euro.
There are far reaching implications for the component industry, however. Either component manufacturers located in the UK can cut costs to the extent that they can accept payment in euros (which would mean very substantial cuts): or orders will be switched to manufacturers inside the Euro zone - which would involve large jobs losses in UK component plants.
This would probably lead to further closures as the shrinking industry loses the. economies of scale. But of course these would not have the same high political profile for New Labour as the closure of Nissan itself - and therefore they are happy to see these workers' jobs sacrificed.
Contrary to the sickening platitudes that AEEU leader Sir Ken Jackson has trotted out -that the Sunderland plant was "saved" because the workforce had embraced new management techniques, the reality is that these measures represent yet another attack on conditions in the plant as well as a major loss of jobs in the component sector.
The greed for profit is endless, and the sooner workers in the car industry and elsewhere recognise that the only way to protect jobs and conditions in through struggle not partnership, the better for us all.