Money, not jobs

Peter Paterson

Some years ago, soon after the Redundancy Payments Act became law, a left-wing Magazine carried a cartoon showing what it high would he the impact on a typical nigh street: a forlorn and empty factory in the background, and every other shop a sweet and tobacconist. I recall it not in order to emphasise that Trotskyists have a sense of humour — it stands to reason that they Must have — but to show how, from the very Lbeginning, the idea of redundancy pay has een regarded not as a useful piece of bridging finance to help a worker find himself another job, but as a lump sum payment distantly akin to a win on the football pools. Inflation has eroded the value of the Payments established by the Act, which Were originally, if not a golden handshake, a. t least gold-plated. Now the £2,400 max'Mum is regarded simply as a starting point for assessing the sum a worker is entitled to for surrendering his job. Even so, when you take the character of the transaction into account, most British workers, and their unions, set their value extremely low. Yet even at a time of high unemP1°Yment, the remarkable thing is how eagerly workers will take the money and run, rather than listen to their shop stewards somewhat less stridently, their union leaders appeals to stand and fight against redundancies and closures by strikes, occuPations and the mobilisation of their fellow Workers to prevent work and machinery °eIng transferred from one site to another. To resist is invariably the natural first instinct. We saw it at Liverpool last Weekend, when workers from the doomed Leyland sports car factory at Speke ejowded into the local boxing stadium to ear fighting speeches of resistance from `neir shop stewards. In the heady atmos

Phere of solidarity they unanimously agreed

that the proposed closure must be fought rtooth and nail, and the stewards referred „(1,arklY, if unspecifically, to contingency Plans which could bring Leyland to its knees or lower if you take the view that the comPanY is in that posture already — if they dare go ahead with the transfer of TR7 assemIY from Spoke to Coventry. Et. ut if precedent is any guide, that is not going to be the pattern of events. There are abrly number of examples of brave standards keing planted ready for the coming battle nt, with the dawn light, the troops have lied the field, their kitbags loaded down

vilth the employers' shillings. Among the iew exceptions have been those groups of workers who managed to attract the sym

1;1thy of Mr Tony Benn when he ran the ePartment of Industry as though it really oelleved in workers' control. Aside from

such brave ventures, which form no part of the philosophy of Mr Eric Varley, the prospect of laying their hands on a few hundred, or even a few thousand pounds, is sufficient to undermine workers' resistance, though fighting talk remains a useful opening gam bit for the hard bargaining that usually fol lows, to bring the minima of the Act up to a more reasonable level.

Clearly, the larger the company, the more the publicity, and the more eager the unions to show they are on the ball, the higher the compensation payments will be. Spillers, getting out of the bread industry (though not the highly profitable flour-milling sector) and declaring many thousands of men, often with long service, redundant, will find it a very costly exercise. Even though they are proverbially poor payers, when it comes to redundancy pay, they will have to produce real dough.

And British Steel, with the help of grants from the Common Market, together with the added spur that big closures are hitting prime Labour constituencies, have managed to push up the level of compensation to levels hitherto associated only with the

boardroom — up to £17,000 in South Wales, though it has to be emphasisedthat such

sums are not universal, that they will not be paid out in one go, and are dependent on the subsequent fortunes of the individuals concerned: if they fall on their feet, they will not qualify for the maximum; if they have to endure years of unemployment, or get work that pays them much less than steel, then they can get subsidies over a long period.

In spite of the small print, British Steel's payoffs have excited the admiration and envy of other groups of workers, including those at Spoke. Unfortunately for Merseyside, however, the factory has only been there for a few years, and compensation for redundancy is always based on length of service. So while the South Wales steelworkers, whose resistance to closures (mainly on the political level) has lasted for years, and thus boosted their entitlements, will be leaving the industry for an average sum of £7,000 per head, Leyland's offer at Spoke averages only £1,500, with some due to get as little as £400.

There is some specific evidence of the preference workers have for compensation rather than continuity of employment. A so-far-unpublished report produced for the Anglo-German Foundation showed that a hundred workers in part of British Steel in Scotland opted for redundancy, although there were more than a hundred vacancies lopen to them at a nearby plant. And when Bowater, the paper manufacturers, transferred production from one works in the Medway to another only twenty-five miles away, only eighty-eight men out of 570 offered work at the new location made the move: the rest preferred to pick up the

redundancy pay and take pot luck on find ing a new job.

One lesson from all this, perhaps, is that British workers have so few opportunities to amass a modest capital sum during their working lives that they will leap at any opportunity that offers them the prospect of paying off a mortgage, buying a new car, or refurnishing their home. The tragedy is that apart from the rather longer odds of winning the pools or the premium bonds, it is only by selling their jobs that they can hope to acquire such a sum. In view of this, it seems surprising that there is not more political and trade union push behind profit-sharing schemes, annual bonuses and equity-sharing schemes that would offer a similar benefit in a more secure fashion. The timid gesture on shares for employees in the Budget was little more than a crumb for the Liberals, indicating no real change of heart, even if share-owning was the best way forward.

The trouble, perhaps, is that both sides of industry have an interest in maintaining the financial servitude of the worker. Mass redundancies, suddenly announced, are a cheap substitute for decent personnel planning policies, or the development of workable internal labour markets in big corporations that can guarantee job security. And there are fears on the union side that for the worker to become a capitalist, in however small a way, is to blunt the edge of militancy. Last weekend's meeting in ,the Liverpool Stadium was just the first round in a campaign, not to force Leyland to keep the plant open, but to extract higher redundancy pay. The workers of Spoke have not finally spoken yet.