Ford pulls the plug

Vanguard June 2013 p. 3

From this.....

 

As Vanguard goes to press, the Yankee boss of Ford Australia announced last week that the company would cease manufacturing cars in Australia in 2016, closing down the large plants at Geelong and Broadmeadows in Victoria, and tossing 1200 workers onto the scrapheap.

 

...to this!

Thousands more jobs in industries and services directly and indirectly dependent on Ford will go as crisis bites into the nearby communities. Workers from these communities have long been at the core of the manufacturing industry in Australia, highly skilled and reliable. Now many face an uncertain future with few prospects of picking up work.

 

So, after nearly 100 years of making cars in Australia, why has Ford pulled the plug?

 

For decades their production lines have operated at a good profit, thanks to the surplus value exploited from their workforce, along with regular injections of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars handed over by weak or intimidated governments. In fact, Ford has screwed billions in government subsidies over the years.

 

In the last few years, the economic crisis of global monopoly capitalism has hit the company’s rate of profit. The bosses in Detroit have decided to prune back. Stuff the small Australian market! Stuff their workers! Stuff their unions! It’s cheaper to build cars in Asia!

 

Capital always flows to where the rate of profit is better – in many Asian countries workers can be exploited over longer hours, with lesser working conditions and fewer rights and protections. They work in huge modern plants that spit out motor vehicles at a faster rate than the older and smaller factories in Australia. Ford plans to increase its sales into the Chinese market, with partnerships with Chinese companies as well as its own expanding manufacturing plants.

 

What a rebuke to the grovelling politicians who try to convince us that ‘globalisation’ and foreign investment are the only things that will save Australia! That imperialist domination is good for us?!

 

If the US-driven ‘free trade’ TPP deal is signed off, other Australian industries and services will be cherry-picked by foreign corporate monopolies, squeezed dry, and then discarded when something more profitable comes along.

 

Key industries, such as car manufacturing, should be nationalised. Our workers have the skills and energy to transform these plants to produce fuel efficient and electric cars and vehicles suited to Australian conditions, as well as trains, trams and buses for a rapid expansion of modern public transport. Not only would national planning and production meet the needs of the people, it would increase the diversity of the component supply industries and bring greater security for all workers.

 

This is a practical alternative to just rolling over and copping it.
 

 

It would be a significant victory in the struggle to win national independence from the claws of imperialist domination.
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Further reading:

Opel, the German partner of General Motors, announces a plant closure last December.

Watch this video of a new bus design from China. 

It gives a new dimension to “smart manufacturing” and shows what’s possible regarding utilisation of design, engineering and production skills that exist in Australia.