After recent threats to thousands of jobs in the aluminium, car and banking industries, Green Left Weekly spoke to Geelong Trades Hall secretary Tim Gooden about strategies to fight the job cuts.
“Alcoa says 600 jobs are in danger, but there are 3500 more hanging off that,” Gooden told GLW.
“If they close Point Henry [aluminium] smelter, it will hit the rolled products, and then the companies that use the rolled products.
“This would devastate the community. Not just jobs, but loss of apprenticeships, flow-ons to other businesses. These jobs are highly qualified, highly skilled, highly paid, and all the pay is spent in the Geelong community. When [Geelong firm] Harvester shut, we had former workers suiciding.
“But the Alcoa board members who will make this decision from the US head office won’t suffer whether it stays open or closed.”
Alcoa is hardly struggling. Its 2011 profit was US $611 million, an increase on 2010. Its first quarter 2012 report said: “The company forecasts a doubling in global aluminum demand between 2010 and 2020.”
It is paying out $1 billion to its shareholders. A year ago Alcoa said its Australian operations “ended 2010 in excellent shape, maintaining its place as one of the most profitable Alcoa regions”.
Gooden said the new jobs cuts are “not because Alcoa Australia isn’t profitable, it’s just not profitable enough”.
Not a free market
“Alcoa have been in Geelong for 39 years with huge public funds, raking it in,” Gooden said. The company receives about $200 million a year in Victorian government subsidies, “but it’s hard to tell exactly because we can’t get to their books”.
“Now when they say ‘we’re not travelling too good, we may have to cut jobs or leave’, we should be able to look at the company books, especially when massive public funds have been used.
“Have you been shifting profits into a slush fund? Have you not been reinvesting properly? And how much public money is going in?
“We need to count everything to get the real picture of how much these ‘private’ companies are publicly propped up. Not just the straight grants, but everything that supports the company — the infrastructure, electricity, training the workforce, roads, reduced payroll tax, subsidised insurance premiums for workers comp.
“If the government withdrew all that, most companies wouldn’t be able to exist.
“People say it’s a private world, a free market — that’s crap. All the risk has been socialised, all the profits are privatised.
Don’t subsidise, nationalise
“In reality, society is pretty much paying for these companies anyway. If the corporate system can’t maintain them, then the public system should take them over.
“If Alcoa decides to leave Point Henry, we can say, ok, we’ve been giving you up to $200 million for the last 39 years, you’ve been living high on the hog. Take that as our payment, you’re leaving, and so we will run it.”
It’s likely that government subsidies have already risen above the cost of the Port Henry smelter. Greens MP Adam Bandt told AAP on February 13 that Alcoa’s electricity subsidy had cost taxpayers $6 billion over several decades.
Gooden dismissed the argument that nationalisation is “old-fashioned”. “The Victorian government just did it,” he said. “The privatised grain transport line had trains coming off the tracks, there was disrepair and the company pulled up. But we still needed grain transported, and the government re-nationalised it out of necessity, put in public money to fix it up.
“Overseas we saw governments nationalise banks during the financial crisis. In Britain, Portugal, Ireland, the Netherlands and Iceland they nationalised a bunch of banks and more.
“Even the US government took over running the federal mortgage groups, and took majority ownership in General Motors.
“So nationalisation has happened recently, both locally and internationally.
“Then there are examples of nationalisation by socialist governments like Venezuela and Bolivia. Unlike capitalist nationalisations (which take place only when forced and [then they] try to re-privatise as quickly as possible) the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments want big industry out of the private market and into public ownership so the wealth is shared by the people.”
The Venezuelan government has nationalised its oil industry and is putting parts of the cement, steel, glass and aluminium industries into public hands. It also nationalised six supermarkets to fight food hoarding and speculation that was harming Venezuelans’ ability to afford basic foods.
Gooden says nationalisation should be looked at for other industries. “You could say the same about the car industry, glass and steel. Anything that society is currently relying on, where huge amounts of people are affected, then the community should have a say in how it is run.
“So that includes the banks, which are making record profits but laying off thousands of workers, workers who need to live. Society needs banks. We need to put our savings somewhere and we need to be able to get a loan to buy a home. Let’s not leave it to the boardroom sharks. Let’s make sure it’s run responsibly, it looks after customers, looks after workers and looks after society.”
Benefits
Gooden told GLW that the nationalisation of key industries was needed because it “means workers are treated like people, not numbers. If an industry became redundant, workers should be retrained on full pay into the new industry, not thrown on the scrapheap like we see today.
“Nationalisation would also be cheaper — if we aren’t paying business board members millions to suck on cigars, the costs would be lower. And any funds raised are for public, not private, use.
“Importantly, we would be able to plan any scale down of an industry that society decides is redundant or harmful. We could put the resources and skills into industries we want.
“We would avert society degenerating to the point where we have 49% of young people unemployed. If we get to that situation, we are talking about huge social problems, as we’ve seen in Europe and beyond. With a right-wing media, that anger can easily move in a racist direction. Even the International Monetary Fund is predicting 10 million more unemployed in coming years.”
Gooden said he acknowledges the serious environment concerns with Alcoa, which uses 28% of Victoria’s electricity. Aluminium is now the dirtiest industry for every dollar spent.
He said: “Smelting uses a lot of electricity. The whole floor is electrified — 500 metres by 500 metres — which is needed to generate the heat. The main problem is that Victorian companies have been using dirty brown coal to generate that electricity. http://www.environmentvictoria.org.au/media/alcoa-ties-its-future-polluting-coal-generation
“Right now we could move to gas, and then as quickly as possible switch to 24-hour base load solar stations like those in Spain.
“We could also use the new aluminium whisper wind generators which have been developed in Geelong, make no noise, and produce 20 megawatts of power.
“We could build those all along the national grid, under the current huge power towers and feed into the grid. We’d be developing jobs and renewable energy.
“It’s wrong that the old industries like refineries, mining and coal power get millions from the public with no strings attached, yet there is bugger all for new technologies like renewable energy.”
Gooden says nationalisation would allow society to plan for the future with the environment in mind.
“If we decide we should make different stuff then, for example, we can replace aluminium with carbon fibre. If it was in public hands we can make that decision and retrain workers into the new industry.
“We could convert a nationalised car industry into manufacturing public transport instead. But now, if private companies want to produce destructive products, six cylinder gas guzzlers or whatever, in destructive ways, then we have no say in it.”
Gooden said the hardest thing will be to put nationalisation back on the political agenda.
“Technically it’s possible. It’s happened here, it’s happened overseas, it’s happened recently. The money is there, but at the moment it is given as corporate welfare, condition-free. And the public already hates privatisation. Everyone knows it leads to job cuts and worse services.
“The first steps need to be taken within the progressive movements, progressive political parties, even churches. The unions are crucial — we can’t sit around anymore waiting for boardrooms to make a decision in their interests — we need to jack up as a union movement and start to say ‘piss off, we’ll run it ourselves’.
“Basic demands should be agreed upon, and then a united campaign taken up to governments. If that requires rallies, walkouts, the creation of new political groupings, then that is what we need to do. Until that battle is fought and won, there is no compulsion on governments.
“But when it has happened once, when one company has been nationalised, then it will have an immediate effect — companies will have to think twice before crying poor and calling the governments’ bluff.”
