Sack the bosses not the workers

The announcement by BlueScope that 1100 workers will be sacked from the local steel industry has sent shockwaves through the community and much of the country.

Another 200 people could be sacked from the Port Kembla wharves and at least 100 more local workplaces will be seriously affected.

Many of the sacked workers have been at the steelworks for decades. They are now being told to get out of town, to move to Queensland or Western Australia, to forget about their ties to Wollongong, because other corporations may need them somewhere else.

The sacked workers have been promised assistance finding other jobs, but it is unlikely many of them will find work in the region.

As well, they will be forced to spend any redundancy payments before they can receive unemployment benefits and will have increased harassment from Centrelink under the government’s new harsh restrictions and penalties.

Workers facing the sack are already complaining about the special government hotline set up to assist them, reporting that they are shuffled from department to department and eventually to an employment agency that knows little about their situation.

In a region already ravaged by three decades of mass layoffs, these sackings will be devastating to communities already suffering from high levels of unemployment, underemployment and precarious work.

Although BlueScope claims to have lost $1 billion in the past year, $922 million of this loss involves the “writedown of value”.

This “writedown” is typical of the creative bookkeeping used by corporate bosses to justify sackings. BlueScope says the sackings are necessary to return the company to profitability and they will now be $255 million better off.

Responding to the sackings, the federal government immediately rushed to reward BlueScope for its restructuring drive, announcing it would give the company $100 million dollars under the government’s Steel Transformation Plan, with more money to come.



This is a similar pattern to that adopted by the Labor government in the 1980s when it provided half a billion dollars to the steel industry bosses so they could introduce job destroying technology and sack tens of thousands of workers.

At the same time asthey were throwing many hundreds of workers onto the scrapheap, BlueScope executives were awarding themselves millions of dollars in bonuses.

These were rewards for cutting costs and for convincing the federal government to give more assistance to the company.

During the same week, BHP, which divested itself of the steelworks in 2002, announced the biggest profit in Australian corporate history — $23 billion.

Not satisfied with a record amount of wealth bled from its workforce and stolen from the communities it plunders, BHP’s CEO immediately launched a campaign to boost productivity and restrain wages — calling on workers to do more work for less pay.

In response to the BlueScope sackings, nationalist and corporatist agendas are now being promoted by big business mouthpieces. Local politicians and business leaders are arguing that we need to be “realistic”, while economists and bankers have described the social impact as “structural adjustment”.

What they mean by this is that we should get used to mass sackings. The region’s unemployment rate is already officially 7.4% of the workforce with the youth unemployment rate at 16%. However, the real figures are significantly higher.

There are likely to be hundreds of other allied jobs lost in the next three months and a wave of job losses within 12 months.

It is also clear that the NSW government is preparing for massive public sector job cuts and some economists are tipping the loss of as many as 100,000 jobs by the end of the year.

Apparently, BlueScope does not expect to face industrial action from unions trying to fight the sackings.

However, Australian Workers Union acting branch secretary Wayne Phillips has told local media that steelworkers are furious. The company has already rejected a union-proposed redundancy package for those losing their jobs and steel unions are planning a mass meeting.

Facing the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s, workers in many countries are now being told they will have to pay for the failures of the capitalist system and the crimes of the rich. It is becoming increasingly clear that it’s time to sack the bosses rather than the workers.