Protestors demonstrate nothing but their limitations

“Why has your factory been so neglected? They’ve turned it into a rubbish dump. Why was everyone running around like cockroaches before my arrival? Why was no one capable of taking decisions?” demanded Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Prime Minister, of Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska is a multibillionaire oligarch, and the owner of an alumina factory in the town of Pikalevo where labour unrest threatened to destabilise Putin’s carefully orchestrated political monopoly.  Putin went on to fine Deripaska $1.3 million and threatened to expropriate his businesses if he didn’t reopen the plant and re-employ the 800 workers he had laid off.

Around the world, employers – both honourable and dishonourable – are under tremendous pressure to create jobs and keep factories going, even when there is no money to pay salaries.

In April, French workers at Caterpillar kidnapped and held four executives hostage at the company’s factory in Grenoble.  Police did not intervene and Caterpillar gave in to worker demands for strike pay and for reduced retrenchments.  25 workers at Vesta, a wind-turbine manufacturer on the Isle of Wight, have shut themselves inside the factory in order to prevent it being closed.  Workers at a Cellatex chemicals factory in the Ardennes poured 5,000 litres of sulphuric acid into a stream in 2000 during a labour dispute. 

And we’re all familiar with the violence and civil disorder that has accompanied strike protests around South Africa during the most recent round of labour unrest.

All of this, sometimes quite literally, is an attempt to hold a gun to employers’ heads and demand, “Keep paying our salaries, and more of them, or we’ll hurt you.”

This attitude to businesses – as miraculous job creators divorced from underlying economic conditions – is what has created the problem in the first place.  There is way too much motor-manufacturing capacity relative to the number of cars being bought and sold.  The same is true for aluminium smelters, textiles plants, chemicals factories and so on.

Governments offered tremendous incentives, inducements and threats to get companies to open in the first place.  Some executives accepted these conditions – unwisely and dishonestly – in the similar expectation that healthy tax collections would continue indefinitely and subsidies would finance the shortfall.

Now the market has fallen and it has fallen on both the wise and corrupt together.

There certainly are people who know how to make money, even in the worst of times, but too much of the global economy is now in the hands of a politically-pliable elite.  Black Economic Empowerment oligarchs in South Africa are gleefully hoping that the government will nationalise their failing mines and companies so that they can hand their debts over to taxpayers.  French factory owners have agreed to maintain production, but only off the back of further government bailouts.  US automakers have similarly extracted billions of dollars in cash to support their failing plants.

Sensing an opportunity, workers and unions have followed suit.  Cities around the world are being filled by marchers demanding jobs and threatening not to work if they don’t get them.  Critical functions are being held hostage, like the construction of world cup stadiums around South Africa.

As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, workers of the world are attempting to hold the means of production hostage in order to secure for themselves both jobs and benefits.

That isn’t to say that all strikes are wrong.  Public sector doctor wage disputes are raising very real grievances.  But most strikes appear opportunistic and unwise.

Nothing shows the limitations of such protest action more than the events taking place on the Isle of Wight.  Workers have been in complete control of the turbine factory for two weeks yet have produced not a single turbine.

It takes the actions of thousands of workers to bring a workplace to a standstill.  But it takes the knowledge and ingenuity of but a single investor to get it started again.