For die employed 230,000 people.
jobs were lost last year alone.
lowering manning levels and Mac Gregor wishes to make the Corporation leaner'. But Ical Is not always healthy.
Warnings of summer closures at major plants, and threats liquidate the Corporation suggest that slimming may turn into anorexia nerVUSa "Slimdown' to a complete wasting away TV press have resented MacGregor as a night in shining armour, riding (for a fee, let it not be forgotten, of f2m) to rescue the industry from bankruptcy and to relieve the British taxpayer of the burden of subsidy.
Loss , BSC, despite a subsidy of f950m, expects to resent the government witt un estimated loss of £600m MacGregor claims to be able to SLOD £30-a-second haemorrhage by marketing.
increase home sales of finished steel to finished steel to 2.5m tonnes; 12m tonnes and exports of to cut capacity to 14.4m tonnes; to squeeze the workforce by productivity schemes and reduced manning, and to cut energy costs by reducing the consumption of coal.
According to the MacGregor plan, price competition will be minimised in agreement with private steel companies. Thus the present BSC in areas where production can be hived off to private concerns like GKN and Duport.
Plan But few commentators, left _or right, share the thusiasm and optimism with C11which MacGregor announced Corporate Plan.
Observers of the steel industry discern only continuing rundown of BSC. Some prophesy liquidation, for which if they Corporate Plan, responsible.
JuL DONC Plan.
Jobs Steelworkers will not proBSC and the Tories:
As the economies dive from stagnation to full-scale Western Europe the sack.
World demand for has fallen steeply.
ties in the car and machine tool industries, together with government cutbacks house, school, and hospital building, have played squeeze Hule each worker and plant.
If the steel crisis is more severe in- Britain elsewhere, the reason lies not in the idle workers of Fleet Street but peculiar historical conditions of Britain's steel industry.
First Britain is paying the price for field. Built in the last century her steel mills were sited on the coalfields of a country whose industry was scattered in a dozen valleys. mans and the Japanese industrialized later, more advanced then available dominates the world market is Today, the steel in the vast steel plants that occupy the harbours and waterways of Japan, Germany America, thich world's iron ore is carried by giant tankers.
reject the will be held Here lies the real Corporate capitalist recession, throughout are facing steel Uncertaintheir shut down In 1950, the Labour Party, eager to modernise steel, in the took the industry ownership of the year later, the Tories returned it to its former WaN tragedy. In conditions of the 1950s. the industry modernised with less injury to first in the workforce, nasters carried off the profit f the industry but did little t replace its antiquated plants.
In 1967, the The Ger. government nationalised steel once more.. Now the using the nisation programme, techniques more savage delayed, that the end of the boom and a period of falling demand. integrated ned to shut down 30 of the most out-moded steel plants and to concentrate producthe Raves rain thori Talbot and Ravenscraig, Port Llanwern. But save the into built in the 1960s.
This the boom and when might have been further Laurices steel denationalisation, of Toryism.
Unfortunately Wilson all the and profitability. for having been would coincide with Wilson, BSC plantempt viable proposition.
Redcar more viable." jobs." you this drastic Ravenscraig strip mills - built in the sixties but will it survive the eighties?
surgery has proved unable to The reces- they, told us sion of the mid-1970s forced even the closure of strip mills They figures Backed by successive Tory governments child BSC decided to cut its losses through and and that project nonsense. agreeable to the philosophy 'Corby tional steel union leaders and the fatheir local officers are playing MacGregor's game: viability steelworker, these pages a year ago: In the Charlie Keeny spelled it out in poration see this. two years before the sackings at Corby production records were surpassed in a frantic at- never wanted to become "Become more were told pense. can keep your 'At the end of two years "Too bad, didn't work hard enoueh."
presented us about the lack viability that a four-year-old could have SCOl Warwick University told uS BSC's figures could produce strip more cheaply than bringing it in, with only a small investment in new plant, much smaller than the amount they intended to buy our jobs with. We tried to make the Corit was at this point that it didn't want to know, they Jinally dawned on us they i'd know whole quest for viability had been a gigantic hoax at our ex•We had been fed a thread of hope in a cruel attempt to ready to give us the chop.
must by say the andes ad plans have beer savaged because the name of the game is profi all cost. Steel should b produced according to social need — to build the hospitals, schools, kidney machines, and other amenities which the people are demanding.
could guaranteed a job in safe and pleasant conditions through shortes working longer holidays and early retirement with no loss of earnings.
This means preparing for an all-out battle meeting blow for blow Tory resistance to these demands. There : no other option. In 1981 it's fightback or die.
.. again. QUISE
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Socialist Challenge 1 January 1981 Page 4 fightback TEN years ago, the British Steel Corporation If BSC chairperson lan MacGregor has his way. the Corporation will in March 1981 employ only 100,000; 52,000
tect their jobs and conditions if they play by the rules set by
pa Every European steel pro- ducer is desperately seeking to
Photo — Larry Herman keep us quiet until they were