The Socialist Worker reports on the worker occupations of the Visteon car parts factories:
Around 80 workers occupied the building on Wednesday morning and remained there throughout the day. They are staying overnight. More workers, locked out by the company, stayed outside the site to show their support.
Workers were told that they would not be paid for last week’s work at the meeting on Tuesday. Many have no savings and no idea of how they are going to make ends meet over the next few weeks.
“They’ve treated us like dogs,” Richard Bruce, who had worked at the site for 17 years, told Socialist Worker. “We’re not even going to get paid for our last week’s work or for our work on Monday and Tuesday. But the workers in Ireland occupied – so we thought, now it’s our turn to do something.”
Many of the workers felt that the attack was preplanned – even though they had no notice of it themselves. Several said that vans from factories supplied by Visteon had taken away their tools from the site last Friday.
One worker, Terry, said, “Even the vending machines were emptied yesterday morning. Everyone knew we were going to be sacked.
“There are parts piled up inside our factory. They’ve made sure that the car plants can still be supplied – everything’s been prepared for this.”
In a crisis like this factory occupations are essential for worker self defence. It’s the only weapon left to workers whose labour is no longer valuable to their bosses anymore, to take physical control of plant space, and as important, the valuable tools, reserves and machinery they contain. It’s a desperate, short term measure, but one that can work and on which more permanent solutions can be build, as we saw in Argentine in the early noughties.