What future for steel workers?

In a few weeks’ time, hundreds of men and women could be added to the unemployment figures just in time for Christmas.

The workers at Tata’s steel plants and Caparo Industries will join the 2,200 who lost their jobs at Redcar when government inaction saw SSI collapse and, with it, a viable coke plant went to the wall.

Where before these workers could make plans, pay the bills, stay ahead, they now face dreadful uncertainty with the added despair of trawling job fairs where these highly skilled men and women will find buttering bread in a sandwich franchise is the future Tory ministers envisage for them.

The Italian government didn’t clutch at ‘market rules’ dogma when the giant Ilva steel plant was faced with closure. It did not hide behind supposedly insurmountable European Union barriers.

The Italians leapt these ‘hurdles’ to keep their plant going. Today, that plant is still making steel, providing work for 16,000 and a community with a future.

Gold standard Germany

Of course, the gold standard for these things is Germany where steel production is plugged into everything from car making to construction. The global headwinds don’t skirt Germany, but at least when they hit German industry knows its government will provide shelter taking the necessary actions, such as on energy prices, when needed.

In the United Kingdom, the joke goes that George Osborne’s ‘March of the Makers’ is now a ‘stroll of the shoppers’ as governmental industrial activism has not so much been down-graded as destroyed by Sajid Javid.

Under the business secretary’s doctrine of non-intervention (would that our government swap their international war and domestic industry strategies), the proportion of gross domestic product manufacturing contributes has continued to slide.

Conservative neglect of our industrial heartlands leaves more and more of the economy balancing on the slender shoulders of the retail and service sectors. New jobs are hoarded in the over-heating south-east while the rest of the country shivers from neglect.

We know where that leads. Seven years after Lehman, despite promises to the contrary, we still have an over-reliance on finance, banking and consumer spending and the Tories’ enduring austerity fetish has left British households deeper in debt than ever.

Therefore, when business leaders, experts and unions plead for action to save a foundation industry, on which many other vital sectors base their futures and on which so many jobs depend, government must act.

Industry in crisis

Steel is an industry in crisis – for sure, much caused by global circumstances, but only active domestic action can help mitigate.

Allowing our naval fleet to be built from Swedish steel is an act of gross irresponsibility that must not be repeated, and with hundreds of billions in public money to be spent on projects from HS2 to road improvements, the work of procuring UK-made steel for UK projects must start now.

The public is on our side, even Tory voters. Six out of 10 of those recently polled by Survation want the government to consider temporary renationalisation. That may not surprise you but surely 54 per cent of Tory voters saying this does.

Back to Tata and Caparo. We have only a few weeks – thanks to this government’s reduction of the redundancy consultation for large workplaces from 90 to 45 days –- to save the jobs of 1,200 men and women.

Competitiveness is not the problem – our plants have been industry bench-marked as among the most competitive in the business, and UK steel is rightly acknowledged as world class.

With some restructuring, jobs hanging in the balance could be saved and a brighter future hoped for. While that hope is alive, Unite will fight tooth and claw to save every last steel job in the land of the industrial revolution.

An obscenity

Ministers’ job is not only to sweep up the mess but to avert disaster in the first place. I saw the destruction Thatcherism brought to people’s lives the first time round so I will tell ministers this for free – your schemes for start-ups while you allow shut downs are an obscenity.

Working-class communities have been painfully reminded that the Tories are more wedded to a warped dogma than they are to their jobs and futures. Make no mistake though, in failing to join us to save our steel, the “party of the working people” will never, ever be forgiven.

This article first appeared in Tribune, November 9, 2015