Phoenix Falls into the Ashes

Scan page 13

Another nail in the coffin for Sheffield steel jobs. John Cunningham reports.

THE merger between River Don BSC and Firth Brown will be yet another nail in the coffin of Sheffield's ailing steel industry. The merger to form the Sheffield Forgemasters Holin Company, and is rationalisation exercise. Seven hundred jobs will go in Sheffield and a further 400 elsewhere, mainly at the Breadmore Forge, Glasgow, part of Johnson Firth Brown which owns Firth Brown, Sheffield, the largest private steel works in the country.

Steel, once the pride of Sheffield, has taken one hell of a beating since the recession started to really bite in Sheffield. Some 20,000 jobs in steel have gone since 1978 and the fall in manufacturing output in the area is now twice that of the worst year in the thirties.

In Sheffield 1 in 8 is now unemployed, and in nearby Mexborough the THIS WEEK'S column is figure is 1 in 5 - the blackest spot in the whole of South Yorkshire. On top of all this many are on short time working. In 1981, some 16,000 were only working 4 days or less.

The merger, called 'Phoenix 3' between Firth Brown and River Don, has to be seen in the context of this gloomy backcloth. It is not a particularly novel development - BSC and the private sector already overlap in many areas.

Phoenix plans number 1and 2 are already past and gone - and slowly but steadily the Tories are achieving their aim of hiving off profitable parts of BSC to the private sector. BSC holds 50% equity stake in at least 4 private firms - Alloy Steel Rods, Round Oak Steel, Templeborough Rolling Mills and Firth Brown Fox.

BSC also has varying stakes in a number of other private firms, including Bridon Wire , (10%), Kiveton Park Steel (36%) and Lee Bright Bars (45%). So increasingly it looks like the Tories' plan is to blur the divisions between private and public sector LAAAAAA in order to facilitate their aims to do away with nationalised industries altogether. Phoenix 3 therefore is a part of the Tories' strategy, not an isolated incident.

As Thatcher said in the House of Commons earlier in the year, when defendget BSC into sound operating shape and when it is, I think perhaps we can denationalise it.' Getting BSC into 'sound operating shape' means running plants like BSC River Don down to such an extent that it has little hope of survival on its own and is easy meat for the type of merger being proposed.

BSC River Don was before nationalisation Firth Vickers - where J.T. Murphy, famous Sheffield revolutionary, once worked turning gun barrels while reading the works of James Connolly and Marx. A major supplier to the armaments industry, it has suffered badly from the turn to high technology armaments which need less steel plate, etc. It also lost many orders at the time of the overthrow of the Shah in Over the last decade it has made steady losses of about £1,000,000 a year. Jobs have been eroded steadily. 78 jobs went in 1971, 29 in 1972, 80 in 1977 and approximately 400 in 1979. The plant is now only a shell of its former self.

In 1972 the workers staged a sit-in aginst the closure of sections of the plant. They were inspired by the example of UCS on the Clyde and were prepared to fight, but over the last few years the response to redundancy has not shown the same fighting spirit.

STLELWORHERS

COL F00.1 CoLd In November of 1979 a mass meeting voted to accept redundancies on a voluntary basis.

Firth Brown, by contrast, was fairly stable until quite recently, but in February 1981, a massive 1,250 redundancies were announced. A fight looked like developing, but a slight retreat by management on 100 jobs and offers of voluntary redundancies was enough to defuse the situation and the bulk of the redundancies went through.

What Phoenix 3 involves isn't known exactly. Management and Governhowels. This woul bowels. This would cause a faster and easier throughput.

In a Third World diet, food passes through the ment have not revealed where and when the redundancies are to occur -what is known is that Firth Brown together with River Don Stampings (despite its name part of Johnson Firth Brown) is to merge with River Don to make the country's largest forgemaster with 'peripheral' forges like the one in Glasgow being shut. £27 million of public money is being put into the new venture, though the stock market price of Johnson Firth Brown is put at only £13 million. The profitable parts of the JFB set-up are excluded from the merger.

Requests by Shop stewards and the Sheffield City Council for information have been ignored.

Inadequate

The response of the trade union leadership, particularly the ISTC, has once again been woefully inadequate. Bill Sirs set out 4 options to fight this and other redundancies - overtime bans, limited stoppages, work to rule and refusal to talk about severance pay. As River Don's. convenor Cliff Wright remarked, "These options are not going to deter anybody from shutting down the steel industry. The union movement, including ISTC, has opted for soft options over the years, just doing next to nothing, which has no effect on those closing the industry down.

'We are either here as trade unionists to stop the destruction of the industry in this country or we are playing games. We want total industrial action that will stop the closures and make the government sit up and listen to what we are saying.' Stop Rot Clearly Cliff Wright's words need to be put into action if the rot is to be stopped. Action is needed now if management's waiting game is not to wear down the workforce. The workers must demand full access to the management's plans and take action if details are not forthcoming. An occupation is necessary to stop any movement of equipment and any closures; and a fight by the whole movement to prevent de-nationalisation.