Time to nationalise GMH!

Vanguard May 2013 p. 4
Nick G.

(Above: workers at Elizabeth GMH, Adelaide)

US giant General Motors showed its complete contempt for Australian workers and governments with its decision on Monday April 8 to cut 400 jobs in SA and 100 in Victoria.

The acronym “GMH” should really stand for “Getting Massive Handouts”.  It is really nothing more than a sinkhole of US corporate greed.

According to the Australian Financial Review, GM Holden has received $1.8 billion in state and Federal Government assistance in the past 12 years.

In 2009 politicians gathered at Holden to announce an A$149 million government grant that they claimed would support 600 new jobs at the Elizabeth facility.

Not only did those jobs not eventuate, but more were cut.

GMH axed 100 jobs at the plant in February 2012, another 170 jobs in November 2012 and 400 jobs this week.

This is despite getting a $275 million federal government “co-investment” package in March 2012 that Julia Gillard declared would “support thousands of jobs at Holden that would have been lost if the company had stopped making cars in Australia.”

It is despite a further $50 million from the SA state government personally negotiated with GM bosses in Detroit by Premier Jay Weatherill and which supposedly contained guarantees about minimum employment levels.

“It was an agreement with the chief executive of General Motors Holden, Mr Dan Akerson,” said an angry Weatherill after the job cut announcement. “It was an agreement that I shook my hand with that man on.”

Weatherill’s naivety aside, illusions still run deep within the Labor Party and the trade union officialdom about the future of General Motors in Australia. Part of this is due to the fact that at the same time as they reduce the workforce, General Motors are still investing in new equipment at the assembly plant in Elizabeth.

However for the first time, a General Motors spokesperson today said that there were no guarantees about the future of General Motors manufacturing in Australia and that the cost of producing a car here, largely because of the high Australian dollar, had risen 60% in 10 years.

So all the signs are there for either a closedown within 5 years or so, or perhaps the engine plant in Melbourne stays and the assembly plant at Elizabeth shuts down completely.

Rather than waiting passively to see what GMH decides to do, governments should grasp the nettle and make some decisions of their own.

SA Unions executive, condemning GMH, has called on Weatherill to redirect SA’s $50 million to retraining laid-off GMH workers.

But the best course of action would be for GMH to be nationalised without compensation and run as a state-owned advanced manufacturing facility with a focus on green technology and cutting-edge sustainable productive tasks with a highly skilled workforce.

It is impossible to see this happening under capitalism, whose fate it is to preside over the destruction of the productive forces.

Such a move to create and develop advanced new productive forces would be a step towards a nationally independent economy led by the working class.

It needs to be part of our agenda for an independent and socialist Australia.

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Further reading:

http://vanguard-cpaml.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/its-been-going-on-too-long-time-to.html