This leaflet will be distributed at the Unite and GMB construction workers national shop stewards meeting in Manchester on Monday 9th February.

Jobs for All
● Foreign workers are not to blame
● Workers of all countries, unite

The bosses and the bankers caused the world economic crisis. But all over the world, they're trying to make workers pay the price.

The bankers are getting hundreds of billions in bailouts. But what do workers get? 
Job losses. Pay cuts. Price rises. All ways of making the workers pay for a crisis we never made.

No wonder all over the world workers' anger is turning into action. In France a one day general strike on 29 January saw 2.5 million down tools and flood out of the factories and offices in the fight against unemployment. In Ireland, around 200 workers have occupied Waterford Crystals in a protest at the plant's closure. In Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Ukraine and even Iceland workers are on the march saying 'we won't pay for their crisis.'

In Britain a mass of job losses have been announced, running at 1,500 a week and rising. As the crisis gathers steam there's no doubt there's worse to come. In America more than 600,000 jobs went last month alone! And the International Labour Organisation predicts 51 million job losses worldwide as a result of this recession.

Thousands of jobs on the line at Corus. Thousands more on the London Underground are facing the axe. Retailers, bank workers and industry after industry are seeing job cuts week in week out. Santander, Barclays, Denby, Land Rover, JCB, Burberry, Zavvi, Grattan and Empire Direct and Woolworths have all dumped workers on the dole. And now Royal Mail is planning 10 percent cost cuts, with masses of jobs in the firing line.

But the TUC and the national trade union leaders are doing nothing about it. No marches, not a word about strike action in defence of jobs. They should get off their backsides and call for a national strike, with a mass demonstration in London. The demand should be simple enough: if Brown can nationalise failing banks, then they can do the same for companies declaring redundancies. Not one job should go!

Last week's strike at Lindsey oil refinery and the solidarity strikes that swept the country add to the picture. They show that the anti-union laws on balloting and picketing which slow down and weaken trade unions' right to respond quickly and effectively, can be ignored and broken by workers taking unofficial action. But they have another, negative, side: the call for 'British Jobs for British Workers'.

The unofficial walkout at LOR began when bosses announced that all the jobs on a new desulphurisation unit were going to the foreign staff of the contractor IREM. The Italian and Portuguese workers were not casual labour taken on at lower rates by discriminating against UK workers – they were permanent staff of IREM. But the walkout began around the demand that the workers hired should be British not foreign. That was why the posters and flags at Lindsey and on solidarity pickets across the country last week repeated the nationalistic 'British Jobs for British Workers' slogan.

The deal that the company struck with Unite last week centred on this too. While it is good that no Italian is being made redundant, the 100 'new' jobs announced seem to have come from the original pot of 300 that were going to be taken up by Italians.

The danger with this is clear enough. More of this and we'll be fighting among ourselves for every new set of jobs, and fighting on nationalist lines. Instead of fighting together against casualisation and for the levelling up of wages, we could get sucked into a series of strikes over the nationality of workers rather than over jobs, pay, conditions and union rights.

After the Lindsey strike began, their strike committee added other important union demands like no victimisations, unionisation of all immigrant labour, all construction workers in UK to be covered by the NAECI agreement, government investment in apprenticeships and training. These were all good, but they never renounced the call for the jobs to go to British rather than foreign workers.

Unite's campaign targeting foreign contractors divides the working class along national lines rather than uniting workers of all countries against the bosses. It doesn't make it easier to unionise foreign workers if the union doesn't defend their right to work as well as British workers' rights.

The next dispute in this campaign is at Staythorpe power station, where Alsthom has been contracted by RWE Npower to build a gas-fired station with hundreds of new jobs, some of which are said to be going to Polish workers. Construction engineering workers walked out on unofficial action. It is right to demand that all workers on the site should be in the union; but it is wrong to demand that they have to be British. Our unions should demand inspection of hiring and make sure that where new jobs are on offer there is no discrimination of any type on national lines: but the demand for British Jobs for British Workers will divide workers along lines of citizenship and make it harder to win working class unity.

And millions of British workers work abroad – construction workers do not need to be reminded of that! With three times as many British citizens working in the EU than EU nationals in the UK, imagine what would happen if foreign unions tried to replace British workers with their own nationals. If workers resistance to the crisis goes down the route of fighting each other over who gets the lion's share of jobs on projects in one another's countries we will be dividing our movement.

It's not a recipe for a united fightback against multi-national bosses; it’s a recipe for in-fighting and disaster.

No wonder the slogan British Jobs for British Workers originates with the fascist BNP and was taken up by Gordon Brown. They want to weaken and divide us.

What about the EU? The EU Posted Workers Directive allows foreign contractors to hire labour at less than the going rate: it only says minimum wage laws have to respected. This is not good enough and the trade unions should all be fighting to level up pay and conditions to stop the race to the bottom. But we should have no truck with Little Englanders like the Tories and UKIP who make out all our problems are to do with the EU and ignore British bosses and British laws. After all, British bosses opted out of the EU law limiting workers to a 48 hour maximum working week. And the European working class movement is strong – we should be building unity with them to fight against multinational companies and bosses.

The call for 'local jobs for local people' is another dead end. Of course there should be no discrimination against people based on where they live. But if we start saying no-one from outside the area should be hired until all local workers have jobs we'll have wrangling between workers from different towns and cities instead of a united fightback.

We can focus on equal pay and union representation for all without bringing a divisive nationalist tone to our disputes. That way we can link up with foreign unions and show a united front to greedy bosses who try to play us off against each other and undercut established pay and conditions.

The alternative is to use our strength nationally and internationally to force the employers and their governments to stop the mass sackings and make them pay for the crisis

● For a national strike against job losses
● For a massive programme of public works to put the two million unemployed back to work
● Cut the hours, not the jobs: job sharing on full pay not layoffs
● Nationalise all firms declaring redundancies
● Open the books: trade union inspection of company accounts and board minutes
● Trade union inspection and control of hiring – no to any form of discrimination in hiring
● All contractors – UK or foreign – to observe national agreements and meet national pay rates: level up wages and conditions
● Reinstate the closed shop: all labour, British or foreign, to be unionised
● No to campaigns against foreign labour: no to campaigns to drive out or enforce quotas against foreign labour
● Link up with unions in Europe and across the world
● Occupy workplaces facing closures and cuts
● No to deals that sell wages for jobs
● Break the anti union laws: a national wave of action would make them unworkable; demand Brown scrap Thatcher's laws
● For a rank and file movement in the unions that can take action with the officials where possible, and without them where necessary
● Not British Jobs for British Workers, but jobs for all!
● Workers of All Countries Unite.


--

Workers Power is a revolutionary socialist organisation, and is the British Section of the League for the Fifth International, an international organisation with sections in five European and two Asian countries.

We are fighting for a new mass working class party in Britain and new world party of the working class.

We participate in the National Shop Stewards Network, and the Campaign for a New Workers Party. Our action programme 'The Workers' Answer to the Crisis' can be found at our website: www.workerspower.com