Monday 4 May 2009

Proud of Your Red Lines Now Brown?

Dr Marchionne says that closing down car plants isn't a realistic option in Europe, where many workers are shielded by contracts that make it costly for companies to lay off workers. During a recent conference call with analysts, notes the Wall Street Journal, Dr Marchionne said he preferred cutting back production at some plants rather than shutting them down entirely.

Now, where are there workers who are not 'shielded by contracts that make it costly for companies to lay off workers.'? Where might it be easiest to cut back production rather than shut down plants entirely?

As Blair negotiated accession to the Lisbon Treaty under Brown's exigent direction, the 'red lines' were drawn to protect the untrammelled market in labour that ostensibly had helped to create Brown's never-ending boom, the banishing of bust in the British economy.

How can any worker support Brown's continued Leadership of the Labour Party?

1 comment:

Electro-Kevin said...

We were told to accept globalisation.

We were told that the price for cheap shoes and gizmos was our own jobs. Competition had to be opened up to the whole world and this meant that the exodus of our work was innevitible.

We told them this was madness but they told us it was we who were mad. And so it has come to pass - it was madness for us to give up what we once had.

The only things that weren't globalised were health, safety, human rights and the right to a living wage... and politicians' jobs for that matter. So how could we compete when manufacturers' responsibilities to their workers were abbrogated so ruthlessly by means of relocation to unregulated countries ? We couldn't compete, so our governments colluded and bought us off with welfare and paper shuffling jobs - even prostitution was reclassified as an 'industry'. (The sex 'industry')

And now for the great reckonning - for this is what the Credit Crunch is truly about. The two great Anglophone economies have hit a brick wall - this is because the promise of ever rising living standards in tandem with the dumming down and de-skilling of their people was entirely false and unsustainable.

And they knew it.