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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 09 2017, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the found-more-exploitable-workers-elsewhere dept.

The World Socialist Web Site reports

[October 3], Toyota wound up production at its plant in Altona, a working-class suburb in southwest Melbourne. The closure marks the end of the company's 54-year Australian manufacturing operation. The shutdown left 2,700 workers unemployed, and threatens tens of thousands more jobs in the car components industry.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), which covers car workers, previously oversaw the shutdown of Ford's production in Melbourne and Geelong in October last year, eliminating the 600 remaining jobs. Once Holden closes its operation in South Australia, in less than three weeks, a further 944 workers will be left unemployed, and car production will cease in Australia.

A University of Adelaide study in 2014 predicted this would result in the destruction of some 200,000 jobs across the country.

The string of shutdowns is an indictment of successive Labor governments, at the state and federal level, and the trade unions. Having imposed round after round of sackings, speed-ups and cuts to conditions, the unions, functioning as an industrial police force of the car corporations, have done everything they can to ensure "orderly closures".

[...] after extracting vast profits from their employees, Ford, Toyota, and Holden, have decided their Australian operations are not providing a sufficient return for their ultra-wealthy shareholders. They have thus ended manufacturing, wreaking social havoc on devastated working-class communities.

This is part of a global restructuring by the major car producers, aimed at taking advantage of poverty-level wages and economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs. Workers in every part of the world, from Asia and the US and Europe, are paying the price.

[...] The unions, taking their nationalist and pro-capitalist program to its logical conclusion, support this global race to the bottom, helping companies pit workers against each other along national lines. The AMWU, working with Toyota and the major companies, drove down wages and conditions over the past 20 years, seeking to ensure Australian car manufacturing was "internationally competitive".

[...] This is part of a broader corporate offensive against jobs, wages, and conditions, following the collapse of the mining boom, amid a deepening crisis of Australian capitalism. Massive job cuts have been imposed in the energy sector, telecommunications, and virtually every other industry.

A Roy Morgan survey in August found that more than 10 percent of the national workforce, more than 1.2 million people, were out of work.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:40AM (#579626)

    You're implying that a government is necessary to promote voluntary interaction, but that's not at all obvious; it's particularly non-obvious given the fact that government is by definition based on involuntary interaction.