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Coal and steam powered the industrial revolution. Steel and skill built the industrial manufacturing base of Britain – especially in South Yorkshire, Scunthorpe, south Wales, Scotland and the north east.
The destruction unleashed against the steel industry in the last 50 years is now coming to a conclusion. The threatened closure of Liberty Special Steels UK in Rotherham, Stocksbridge and Brinsworth is a further death knell to the industry.
The sites will be asset stripped; skilled jobs and essential industrial production will be gone forever. We have to resist.
Steel workers have seen private steel companies and capital nationalised, denationalised, privatised, re-sold, asset stripped, passed between multinationals – British, Indian, Dutch, Italian, US etc – by sleight of hand and quasi if not outright fraudulent practices.
We have seen cleverly crafted government bailouts, weasel words about preserving the industry and the splashing of vast sums of cash to disguise the wheels of closure and pay redundancies.
Much of this has been hidden behind weasel words about an alleged switch to green steel production. But every time, what we really see is bailouts to save failed capitalists, not to save or transform our industry, and not to protect our jobs or our country’s skill base.
It is not enough for the unions in the steel industry to clamour for the best redundancy deal possible. Once the mills are closed, the jobs are gone, and the skills have become museum pieces then our future generations will have been betrayed and buried.
It is not enough for workers to sit at home and take their pittance in furloughed pay, fatalistically waiting for the closure to be finalised and the redundancy notice to arrive. Or hoping against hope that the government on a white horse will ride up to save them.
Unity is strength
The strategy of government and employers is to break morale, undermine collective identity and strength, and corrode the class consciousness which as unified workers makes us strong. We have to reassert our history and what makes us strong: Unity is strength, we must stand and fight.
Before the steel mills collapse into rust wastelands; before the asset strippers move in to create another monstrous housing estate or shopping mall, we must seize the sites.
Through our unions, through our communities, through all the bonds which unite us as the real heart of British Steel, we need to physically take control of our workplaces.
Possession is nine tenths of the law, so make every threatened steel mill our fortress of resistance.
Capitalism is not going to save steel and industry, it is up to us to salvage what is left before the ruling class can obliterate the last vestiges of our country’s productive economy. It is up to us to turn the tide.
OCCUPY to save the industry, our jobs and our futures!
