will cost the State at least £3,000 million and will cost the working class at least 50,000 jobs by 1976-7, although the Govern The 20,000 redundancies which have taken place since 1971 have produced great uncertainty among steelworkers and the local announcements now being made at such places as Shotton and Ebbw Vale, where all sorts of assurances had been given by BSC only recently, have produced considerable shock. This despite the fact that the overall plan and its concrete implications for the various plants has been known and publicised by the revolutionary groups for over a year. The reaction of the union leadership, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (formerly BISAK TA), was to deny the authenticity of the document. But the detailed announcements now being made correspond more or less exactly to the document itself, first acquired in late 1971. Any serious union leadership would have been able to gauge the situation. The overall strategy could have been deduced from those closures which have occurred so far by anybody with any knowledge of the steel industry at all. What is more, this plan was discussed publicly as early as 1966 with the publication of the Benson Report, and during the course of the Labour Government's nationalisation of steel. The activities of the Labour Party and the union bureaucracy in steel are a severe condemnation of their politics, as we shall see.
SIMPLE The idea behind the plan is simple. Production of steel is to be concentrated in four major plant complexes: Llanwern (Newport), Port Talbot (Swansea), Lackenby-Redcar (Teeside), and Scunthorpe. A fifth, and small complex, Ravenscraig (Glasgow) would cater for the "closed" Scottish market. All remaining steel-making activity* will be eliminated if the working class lets BSC and the Government get its way. The object of the exercise is to reduce the number of men needed to produce a ton of steel. This saving in labour time is to be achieved by re-sit ing steelmaking on coastal sites, thus saving the cost of transporting iron ore overland. Most of this is imported from the Southern Hemisphere in huge container ships which require The job reduction does not stem from a crisis large port facilities.
Secondly, the building of these new complexes involves the installation of new steel converters which use oxygen rather than coal or oil. These units are able to produce many more tons per man shift than the steel converters used at present. Together, these two changes make it possible for BSC to close steel making in such areas as North Wales, North Teesside, the Manchester Ship Canal, Corby, Glasgow and parts of South Wales, thus saving the BSC the cost of thousands of workers. For British capital, the rationalisation of steel is an urgent task.
This was not so much the case in the Fifties when the steel industries of Germany and Japan had been destroved by the War and the other competitor, US steel, was preoccupied with domestic economic growth and the Korean War boom. The lisadvantages of previous world supremacy have now overtaken British imperialism in general and British steel in particular.
ILLUSIONS There are many illusions being fostered in steel.
Earlier in the year, for example, Melchett, Chairman of BSC, was saying that the target figure for capacity in 1980 should be 40 million tons, the Government that it should be 35 million tons. Tribune and the Labour lett created the impression at the time that this was the difference between redundancy and no red undancy in steel. If only Labour were in power, these scrimping Tories would not be slaughtering whole towns. But in fact, the difference between the two estimates represents only a difference over the rate at which additional oxygen units are installed in Llanwern and Redcar. The injand plants, and the non-oxygen coastal plants, would face closure just the same;
even their timing would be little affected.
The Labour opposition also linked this up to their chauvinist campaign against the EEC * Production of common steel is to be concentrated in the five complexes. accounting for some 27-28 million tons out of a planned capacity of 33 million tons planned for 1980. The difference is made up by what are known as "special steels', that is high quality stees oroduced D ecerne are conrertors, manu sited in the Sheffield-Rotherham district. LICCLEC SEC production does not have to be sited near the coast since it uses scrap metal rather than pig iron as its raw material. and therefore needs to be sited in Ine industrial heartland. Ebhw Vale - massive redundancies announced a month ago Those bureaucrats in Brussells were trying to restrict the growth of British steel, and the Tories, who are being very unpatriotic these days, are letting them get away with it because they never did agree with the nationalisation of steel anyway. This wailing of the Labour left is false political economy. Physical output -growth simultaneously falls. For example, in 1969, I0 Open Hearth converters at Port Talbot were replaced by two 300 ton oxygen units with a combined capabity of 3½ million tons. The labour force in the converter shops was reduced from 2,200 to 400 men. An additional unit would double capacity, creating only a few score of new jobs: this additional unit. in turn, would more than make superfluous the 1 million ton output of Ebbw Vale, putting several thousand jobs up the valley on the line.
of demand, but from a crisis of productivity. Output per man and per unit of capital in British steel are much lower than in the steel industries of Britain's competitors, and this will govern policy in British steel regardless of Britain's formal entry into the EEC. As to the whole business over nationalisation, the Tory opposition to this in 1967 was geared to forcing up the price of compensation. But Labour had exactly the same plans for steel as the Tories. Those on the Labour left who claim surprise at the present plans, know full well that the Benson Report, produced by the British Iron & Steel Federation in 1965, predicted that "whereas the industry produced 27 million ingot tons in 1965 with 317,000 workers, it should be possible for the industry as envisaged to produce some 35.3 million ingot tons in 1975 with about 215,000. The industry "as envisaged" by Benson would concentrate production in half a dozen big units, closing most of the 30 or so steelmaking plants in England and Scotland. The return of Labour to power would make no difference to the needs of British capital, which the Labour Party was defending when it carried out nationalisation -the industry by 1966 was so bankrupt it could not raise the capital for new investment and the dozen major companies could not possibly destroy their plants, measures absolutely necessary to raising the productivity and therefore profitability of the industry.
DIFFICULT TO FIGHT Plant closures are notoriously difficult things to fight. This is very true in steel. It is not a declining industry like shipbuilding. Steel workers can see oxygen plants being built in places like Scunthorpe whose output they know is already replacing their own. There is little or no history of struggle in steel, a situation which is only just beginning to change. The ISTC, the main steel union, has no annual conference, and its shop stewards are not the centre of power in the plants, since major disputes in the plant are quickly taken into conciliation machinery by full time officials. Its branches are built on the basis of shops in which workers are organised into production teams, the various positions in the team carrying 'seniority and graded pay; the leadership does not hesitate to take disciplinary measures against militants who even so much as make enquiries about the wages and conditions groups of workers who have put forward the of steel workers in other areas as in the recent Teesside parity claim.
The ISTC interprets rationalisation within plants not as a threat to jobs but as a source of threat from non-IST workers (craftsmen') who are thought to take advantage of the discan rise a great deal while employment turbance to the seniority ladders caused by technical change. In 1969 ISTC negotiated the Green Book, which itself is a serious source of redundancy; ISTC has also accepted unusually high redundancy payments, which undermines opposition to redundancy in advance (this is one reason why BSC can give several years of advance notice with such confidence). The lack of any inter-regional organisation at rank and file level is one of the greatest factors reinforcing the isolation of militants under these circumstances, and one of the greatest obstacles to working out a strategy.
COUNTER-STRATEGY What sort of counter-strategy is needed? Very often, following an announcement of closure, the entire labour force of a steel town will mobilise, forming the sort of ad hoc Action Committees which we have seen in Irlam and Stanton. In the absence of any national strategy, the spontaneous reaction of the labour movement is to demand 'no closure. But this is not a basis for a strategy because it leads to false arguments fired up especially by local MPs and local ISTC officials who are often implicated at many levels in local state administration -that the plant is "really viable" because BSC has failed to understand the demand for this or that type of product or facility. BSC has got its sums wrong.
Of course, BSC knows its own interests perfectly well, and the destruction of productive resources in the interests of raising the productivity of industry is part of the logic of capitalism.
BSC soon demonstrates that economics is on its side and the workers are left without a perspective for struggle. This also allows BSC to divide workers from one another. For example, in Rotherham, the works known as Steel Peech & Tozer (SPT) is being dismantled and its electric arc convertors being transferred to Park Gate where the existing convertors are being partly eliminated. Here, it is easy for BSC to say to the anxious men at Park Gate that their plant is "really viable" once the ares arrive from SPT. This leaves the men at SPT without allies.
Another example, this time on a more dramatic scale, is the case of the Hunterston plant on the Clyde which workers in Scotland have been expecting since 1968. It is thought that this might compensate for the massive closures of plant planned in the region. This has been a myth all along. In 1968, the Scottish Division of BSC assumed that the development of an ore port at Hunterston meant a big complex was planned.
This was news to BSC Headquarters, but it has since been politically unwilling to shatter the bubble. The belief that confidence can be placed in the capitalist market will be cruelly shattered on the Clyde.
SOUNDER RESPONSE A sounder response has been developed by idea of a 35 or 32 hour working week without loss of pay for all steelworkers, recognising that this is a national problem. This expresses the correct idea that, regardless of the capitalist profit-drive, if the work load contracts, then th working week must also contract if redundancy is to be avoided. However, this cannot form a coherent strategy, for certain material reasons. Without an annual conference it is difficult to get the union to take this up. Such a struggle could take many years. Also, a 35 or 32 hour week is an arbitrary figure - a negotiated reduction of hours on an industry wide basis would probably need a lower figure. But most important, because the spread of redundancy i uneven, a 35 hour week is useless for men in plants facing total closure, and a negotiated reduction carries no guarantee against redunda cies. This is in fact an improvisation. A shorte working week is a long standing aim of the trade union movement and many workers have tried to use this traditional form of struggle to meet a new problem - widespread rationalisati throughout the British economy - to which it is not really suited.
What is happening in steel is an example of the violent, irrational and contradictory nature of capitalism as a social system. The modernisation of steel is a step forward in the organis ation of society's productive processes; yet under capitalism, it means the destruction of resources and labour time which could be put to other social uses if society was run on the basis of a plan and common ownership of its resources. In fact the capitalists will only go ahead and introduce these new techniques if they can bring about precisely such a wastage of resources and labour time. The aim of reducing the labour time needed to produce stee is the whole object of the exercise. It is not possible to deal with this completely irrational situation by appealing to the market to reason, or demanding a negotiated reductio of the working week in the belief that capitalis is after all "progressive'. Since the working cla is not yet in a position where it can solve this problem rationally, that is seize the means of production from the capitalists and operate th on the basis of a plan, then it must defend its own interests regardless of those of capital. The only way to meet this situation is the demand for the sliding scale of working hours with no loss of pay, which is discussed at leng in the IMG pamphlet on steel. How does this work?
SLIDING SCALE The key question is not whether the plants sta open or shut. As far as this is concerned the employers have time and all the forces of the state on their side. The key question is wheth the working class can force BSC to employ the existing labour force in steel, since they cannot find employment elsewhere. This is after all, what BSC is interested in with its nanonal pian reorganising in such a way that a unit of steel is produced with less men than at present. The workers must place then in a position where, if they want to go ahead with new techniques, then they must give the workers a shorter working week. They can be