Save Vestas

Sep 10, 2009 by phinharper    No Comments    Posted under: Span That World

In April 2009, workers at Britain’s only wind turbine blade manufacturer, the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight, were brought into a mass meeting to be addressed by their management. Private security guards were all over the building – no-one had given much thought as to why, but when the announcement was made the reason was clear. To the total surprise of the hundreds of workers assembled, the works manager, Paddy Weir, announced the closure of the factory. 600 jobs would go on the Isle of Wight, and so would wind turbine manufacturing. Many of these workers would have to move house. Others had taken on large loans – no-one had expected the closure. It later emerged that Paddy Weir was getting a £70,000 bonus to oversee the smooth closure of the factory.

On a Monday night in July, in the same week that the government announced its intention to create over a million new green jobs in coming years, a group of several dozen workers approached the factory, carrying ropes, chains, food and banners. They snuck inside, locked the factory down, and barricaded themselves into the management office block at the front of the building. They hung a banner out of the window with the slogan, “Gordon Brown – Nationalise THIS!”. So began the biggest industrial dispute in living memory on the Isle of Wight, the latest in a string of factory occupations in the UK and Ireland, and a large-scale political battle waged by the ecological movement and the workers’ movement, to make the government take its green energy promises seriously.

What happened? How did the factory occupation come about? What lessons does this hold for the environmental movement? Part of the answer to these questions lies in the ideas and actions of a small network of climate activists, Workers’ Climate Action.

In May, several members of Workers’ Climate Action heard about the planned closure of the Vestas factory. Production would still be running until July, so we had the time to go down there and talk to workers before the plant closed and they were scattered. We decided that we should go to the plant and talk to the workers about resisting the closure. Other environmental groups might have gone and chained themselves to something or done a banner drop, or organised a demonstration – in other words, a lot of the ecological movement would have responded to the closure of the factory in a way that overlooked the ability of the workers themselves to respond to it. We didn’t want to go it alone as an elite group of super-activists; we didn’t want to replace the workers as the prime agency in the dispute.

Workers’ Climate Action believes that the destruction of the environment is caused by capitalism. The world’s industries, which should be the property of everyone, run democratically and logically in the interests of all society, are instead divided up as the private property of a small group of capitalists, who are only guided by one goal – making profit. Health and safety, environmentally friendly ways of operating, human rights, security, dignity – all these things go out the window when they stand in the way of maximising profits.

The majority of people in the world experience this system on a daily basis – at work. The drive for profit which means the reckless pillaging of the environment also means the reckless pillaging of workers’ bodies; dirty and dangerous working practices; the disruption of sleep patterns; bullying on the job; poverty wages; and an education that is tailored to churn out obedient workers and squash independent thinking. The struggles that working class people wage against these abuses, for socially responsible, democratic control of industry are fundamentally the same as the fight against the destruction of the environment. In Workers’ Climate Action we believe that in order to challenge the irrationality of the market and assert social control over the economy we have to tap into workers’ struggles – to engage with workers’ concerns at the workplace level and the national level; to bring ecological ideas into the trade unions and the labour movement and create a mass movement that fights for an ecological transformation of society as well as for social justice. We think that in order to be successful, the climate movement cannot wall itself off from the majority of people, by attempting to substitute for a mass movement through isolated direct action or media stunts.

So with this in mind, what did we do on the Isle of Wight? In June, three members of Workers Climate Action came to the Island and pitched up a tent. We spent a week going around talking to members of the local trade unions and councillors. We discovered that the trades councils were small and moribund; that the unions were disorganised, and, worse, that the workers at Vestas weren’t in a union at all. But unions aren’t the be-all and end-all of workers’ struggle: and we reckoned that with a little help, the workers at Vestas, union or no union, would be able to find the courage and resourcefulness to organise themselves to fight back. Just because the workers’ movement in an area is weak and its members demoralised, that doesn’t erase the basic contradiction in capitalism – that it exploits workers, but that it is potentially very vulnerable to them when they organise because it relies on them obeying. Armed with that understanding, we took a leap of faith.

We wrote a basic leaflet, which talked about the experience of a recent occupation by car factory workers at Visteon in Enfield and Belfast; and the case for keeping the factory open. We found out shift change times by watching the factory and asking around, and then we went and leafleted shift change twice a day. We had a lot of conversations with workers there, and in light of the stuff they were telling us – about health and safety, about the arguments management were using to justify the closure, about the general air of demoralisation, that what we were doing was ‘too little too late’ – we wrote a new leaflet every two days, so what we were saying really chimed with the workers and made them feel like there was an ongoing process happening.

Leafleting the factory was very demoralising work for us. We had come to the dispute quite late – a lot of the original anger had ebbed away and most workers seemed to be accepting the closure as inevitable. On the gates, workers repeatedly told us that it was all hopeless, that no-one was up for doing anything, that we were pissing in the wind. But we kept stabbing away at it for a fortnight, because we knew that it would only require a small group of workers to start organising inside the factory to get the ball rolling.

We called a big meeting in a local venue, jointly with local trade unionists. The secretaries of the local trades council invited a high-ranking trade union bureaucrat to the meeting; we had one of our activists on the platform, and we invited a rank-and-file union organiser from the Visteon car parts factory who had led the occupation there. The Visteon activist and the WCA speaker made rousing speeches about what workers can win when they organise and fight; but the bureaucrat made a very hostile speech, essentially telling workers that there was nothing they could do to save the factory, that they should abandon our crazy ideas of direct action, take up union membership and sit tight and do nothing. The effect of the bureaucrat’s speech was very demoralising, and although we had some good conversations with workers afterwards, we left the meeting feeling low. We had got a few phone numbers off workers who seemed interested, but we didn’t expect anything to come of it. We had actually packed up our tents after three weeks and headed home when we got a phone call from someone who worked on a finishing shift saying that they would be having a secret meeting down a pub in Newport that evening!

About a dozen workers met in the pub over the next few nights, and drew up a plan for drawing more workers at the plant into the action. A fortnight later we were having organising meetings with over 30 workers in a local church hall, and the plans for the occupation were well-laid. There was a glitch at the last minute: someone informed on the organising committee to the bosses, and so the occupation had to be sprung prematurely, with greatly reduced numbers.

The campaign around the occupation is still ongoing, and it has sparked a new wave of militancy in other groups of workers on the Island – particularly in the Post and the buses. Find out how you can help HERE

If you are interested in the politics that Workers’ Climate Action argues for, get in touch with us HERE and come to our Conference in London on the 10th of October.

Awesome thanks to Edward Maltby for finding time to write this article for us.