The long term implications of last week’s budget

Many people have described last week’s budget as against the young and for the pensioners I think this miss's the glaring point that it was for me probably the most class based pro elite budget George Osborne has come to the house of commons with to date. The long term implications for this budget and what it could do to the economy could be wide and quite stark. I do think the grounds are being laid now for the next economic crisis around the globe and the UK will not be able to avoid this so much this time. China which has a huge shadow banking system worth an estimated 50% of GDP is very unstable and that isn’t starting to mention the USA with its huge debt overhang and the euro crisis which on the face of it seems like it has gone away although things are still not right across the single currency. We have seen austerity budget after austerity budget since 20011 from the coalition government and even on George Osborne’s own omission he has failed to eliminate the deficit this parliament which he promised to do. The reason why our loyal opposition is not making more of this you ask? Well they too are wedded to the same financial path of austerity as the Tories and the lib dems. They are all quite literally in this case all in it together. Some may think the recent "recovery" if you can call it that is cause for optimism but I’d be far more cautious personally. "The scars of 2008 remain and the UK economy is in big trouble with austerity and declining living standards here to stay. Below are five things about this year’s budget; a document which outlines a ‘recovery’ based on presumptions that, quite simply, aren’t going to happen 1. Low interest rates are setting the stage for another bubble just like the one that preceded the crisis of 2008. Yesterday Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, criticised the BoE and his predecessor, Mervyn King, when he said that its almost exclusive focus on low inflation meant it had failed to also keep an eye on financial stability. In other words the BoE had no problem stoking bubbles with low interest rates if that meant it also kept a lid on inflation. Interestingly enough Carney also pointed out that “It doesn’t take a genius to see that similar risks exist today”. He noted how risks were brewing because of the current period of of ultra-low interest rates – historically without precedent – saying that this could breed “potential complacency and excessive risk-taking” in financial markets. Sound familiar? Near 0% interest rates are necessary for any growth at all in the UK at the moment but they are also creating similar conditions which led to the last financial crisis. 2. The OBR is plucking numbers from the air on projected productivity gains (again). The economy can grow for a while yet, especially if unemployment falls to 5-6%. Alongside big numbers entering work (and workfare) is however the unresolved (and often ignored) problem of falling productivity. If and when unemployment does fall as low as 5-6% productivity *will have* to increase for growth to continue. The Bank of England expects productivity (output per hour worked) to go up in the next quarter as does the Office for Budget Responsibility. Indeed the OBR is today saying that they anticipate 1.2% productivity growth in 2014 and 2.2% growth the following year. The only problem is that this’ is completely at odds with all the data since 2008 and all of the BoE’s predictions over the same period. Where do those numbers come from? My guess is that it’s a case of the OBR and the Bank of England collectively sitting on their hands and saying ‘productivity has to go up sooner or later, right?’ For more on why productivity matters for any prospective economic ‘growth’ check out the recent video we did for #NovaraTV 3. Its also making ridiculous claims on future wage growth. Sooner or later the Bank of England is going to have to increase interest rates. That will probably happen later this year and if wages are still not keeping up with inflation by then (as has been the case for the last six years), consumer demand - and growth – is likely to take a hit. If wages don’t grow this year and rates go up, even by half a percent, that has huge consequences for the economy. As I recently wrote on the LRB blog: “Late last year the bank reported that average outstanding mortgage debt remains high, at £87,000, and that any rate rise not accompanied by an increase in real wages would cause serious problems. The number of households ‘most at risk of financial distress’ would double to nearly one in six if their mortgage rates went up by 2.5 per cent and their incomes did not improve.” Wages have been in decline for six years. If it stays that way and interest rates begin to inch back towards their historical average (even that of the recent past) the government has big problems. Wage growth is now crucial and without it any increase in interest rates might prove politically difficult. Furthermore the projected increases in household consumption - around 2.5% between 2014-18 – make little sense if interest rates are going to go up even a few percent. 4. … and on exports. The OBR expects export growth of 2.6% in 2014, rising to 4.7% in 2015 and 5.0% in 2016. In 2012 exports of goods and services increased by 1.1% (with imports increasing by 3.1%), while in 2013 that figure was 0.8%. That was in the context of reasonable global growth with the US and the BRIC economies seeing more demand than they probably will after 2015. In spite of that the OBR is projecting increases in UK exports not seen in the last several decades. That is all within a context where one of the UK’s biggest exports - oil – is seeing falling output. The projected numbers on UK exports - averaging around 5% over the period 2014-18 – is utter nonsense and without precedent. Seen alongside falling North Sea output I would argue it is impossible. While industry surveys have been pointing to increased export orders for a while, Samuel Tombs, an economist at Capital Economics, claimed these have been “misleadingly upbeat . . . we would not place too much weight on them”. The OBR is making claims for the next half a decade on the back of confidence surveys and figures for very short period – it’s a bit like when your mate shows you a video of a 12 year old wonder-kid on YouTube saying they are going to be better than Cristiano Ronaldo. 5. …and yeah, on fixed investment. Business investment is still 26% lower than it was in 2008 and while there was a dramatic increase in business investment in the final quarter of 2013 – 8.5% – that was the outlier in the data, not the norm. The OBR is now confidently predicting that kind of growth in business investment not just for the next three months, or even the next year, but all the way through to 2018. Compare that to 0.7% growth in business investment in 2012 or, worse still, the 0.5% contraction in 2013. It’s a bit like saying that your best striker scored a hat-trick in the last match of the season and is therefore going to score 150 goals next year. Clutching at straws doesn’t do it justice. The UK, in spite of a massive currency devaluation in 2008, still has a major trade deficit and if there is any truth in this year’s budget it is the realisation that the UK is not going to become a net exporter any time soon. Alongside that massive trade deficit – and exports of goods fell in the three months to November last year – is a budget deficit of over £100 billion. The Treasury is now saying that that deficit will be eliminated by 2019 with a small surplus being run that year – a ‘return to normal’. This is of course complete nonsense: the UK has only run five budget surpluses since 1980 and that was with the bonanza of North Sea oil and the cash garnered from privatisation of, well, pretty much everything. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that budget surpluses - without outlandish projections of growth, investment and productivity gains – are impossible. Final point. This data states that by 2020 households will be as indebted as they were when the economy tanked it in 2007/08. Less ‘march of the makers’ more march of the mickey-takers." 5 things about this year’s budget came from the excellent Aaron Bastani Over at novara media on residence Fm every Friday afternoons. Always a top listen http://wire.novaramedia.com/2014/03/front-bubble-and-bluff-5-things-about-budget2014/

Green shoots of recovery or another false start

? There is certainly a growing mood of optimism in the business world that a recovery is under way. Is this something as socialists we should be pleased for or not ? We must always remember workers and boss's interests are not the same. Its a tricky one. It’s true, however, that employment is a lagging indicator – it looks backward to what has happened and not forward to what will happen. And the consensus is that faster growth is on its way, and along with it, a rise in real incomes and employment. This optimism is based on the significant rises in the Purchasing Managers Indexes (PMIs) around the globe in the last few months. The PMIs, are the best high-frequency measures of the level of activity in capitalist economies that we have. They are really measures of what company managers think about the state of their industries and markets. They are not measures of actual sales or production. Thus they show what might happen in the future. ). For the first time, in August, that indicator (data from the ISM) went close to what is considered boom territory So perhaps the US economy is finally on its way up? Similarly, across the globe, PMIs rose in August. But let’s be careful. This does not mean every region of capitalism is expanding. It means that each region is now doing better (or less worse than before), according to the PMI indicators. Also, the OECD announced its latest update for forecast real GDP growth in the advanced economies of the OECD, revising up their measures slightly. Many of the forecasts for capitalism are tentitively confident of the coming period. Even during longer term trends of a recessionary period or slow growth there can be smaller trends almost micro trends within a trend. The OECD reckoned that growth was “proceeding at encouraging rates in North America, Japan and the UK” and the Eurozone was “out of recession, although output remains weak in a number of economies”. But, although some advanced economies looked like growing faster in the rest of this year than previously thought, some larger emerging economies were slowing down: “the numbers for advanced economies are a tad higher, and for France and the UK more than a tad higher”, but the average rate of growth in emerging economies would be about 1% point a year lower than in the recent past. And remember what the OECD is talking about is growth of about 2% a year or less for the major economies , hardly a ringing endorsement of economic strength. It would seem contary to what was previously thought the more advanced economies appear to be returning to growth all be it on a small scale and the emerging economies are slowing down especially China and India now. The IMF has also begun to raise its forecasts a little for the advanced capitalist economies. But the IMF has dropped its rosy view of the emerging economies which it had considered were the ‘dynamic engine of the world economy’, instead noting that “momentum is projected to come mainly from advanced economies, where output is expected to accelerate”. It is now admitting that the faster growth in economies like Brazil, India, China etc was partly a product of a flow of cheap credit (fictitious capital as Marx called it) into the emerging economies. The huge expansion of credit generated by central banks printing money had not gone into new investment in the productive sectors of the advanced economies, but instead into buying financial assets (bonds and equities) The fact that optimism about UK recovery is based on its services sector is no accident. What has been recovering is the property market. Residential property prices are rising at over 10% a year in London and around 3-5% a year elsewhere. It is the same phenomenon in the US, where home prices are rising at over 12% a year. The boom in these economies is concentrated in the unproductive sectors of finance, property and the stock market, not in investment and employment in manufacturing, industry and exports. Indeed, UK industrial output was completely flat in July And exports to non-EU countries fell by over 16% in July, the largest monthly decline since January 2009. As much of the UK’s ‘better’ real GDP growth in the last quarter came from exports this does not suggest that this current quarter will deliver much faster growth. I get the sense that the slight boom we are seeing in the UK and teh US is a fictitious boom based on credit and the housing market will have to crash at somepoint it is simply unsustainable forever. There is not a permenant slump in capitalism it is a much more complex thing than that there is growth in some areas all be it slow and contractions elsewhere too. Recent optimistic noises from the capitalists and their industrial voices is unconvincing to me as a longer term thing as there still remains the case that the rate of profit has still not recovered to its pre 2007 levels. There is still a lot of capital in the system which is being a barrier to new capital and further investment. For me, the key indicators of sustained recovery in capitalism would be rising rates of profit, a sharp pick-up in business investment and substantial falls in unemployment. There are little signs of any of this. with extracts and sections from Michael Roberts at http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/autumn-pick-up/

The long term view of capitalist development or degeneration

There is much talk in the financial press and among economists of the risk that the major capitalist economies could be slipping back into recession. Economic data for the US and Europe are indicating a significant slowdown in economic growth and a weak recovery in employment and investment. Is this just a temporary blip or does it represent a significant downturn? I would like to answer that by returning to the long view. The long view I’d describe is Karl Marx’s law of the tendancy of the rate of profit to fall which I believe is the underlying cause of the capitalist crisis and indeed is the cause of most if not all crisis’s and is Marx’s 3rd law of capialistmotion which we must look at to understand the changes in capitalism and how we stand today. Just taking the post-war period, there was a Golden Age of profitability from 1946 to 1965 when the rate of profit (ROP) was high and even rising. During this period, economic recessions were few and relatively shallow. Then there was a period of crisis when profitability fell steadily until it reached a nadir in 1982. During this period, economic recessions were more frequent, violent and deep i.e. 1969-70, 1974-5 (the first simultaneous post-war economic recession) and 1980-2 (the deepest recession since the 1930s). After 1982 there was a recovery in profitability right up to 1997. This was the period of so-called neoliberalism that many have argued constitutes a completely new structure of capitalism based on ‘financialisation’ and neoliberal policies of privatisation and weakening of the labour movement (see my comrade Steve Dobson’s excellent post “neo liberalism a new stage of capitalism” a http://socialismiscrucial.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/neoliberalism-a-new-stage-of-capitalism/ There was only one significant economic slump in 1990-1. What next? Once the ROP starts falling, it takes a few years before an economy moves into recession. The ROP has usually been falling for three to four years before that happens. On that basis, the US economy will not drop into a new recession until about 2014 onwards. The debate continues among Marxist economists, but if the underlying cause of capitalist crisis is a falling ROP, then a new slump is unlikely to develop until 2014. But it confirms that even the Great Recession of 2008-9 was not big enough to restore a sustained rise in the ROP. That is because it has not destroyed enough value in accumulated capital or in the excessive build-up of debt (fictitious capital) before 2007. More destruction of value is necessary to do that. That there is still much fictitious capital in the system is revealed by the value of the stock market relative to a measure of the real value of the companies the stock prices represent. James Tobin, the leftist economist, developed a measure to tell if the stock market was overvalued or not and whether it would be heading down. It is called Tobin’s Q, measuring the stock market’s value against the replacement value of all the assets of the companies in a stock market index –for the US S&P-500 stock index (the top 500 companies It is difficult to fully predict how the economies of the world will develop by focusing on Marx’s works in volume 3 of capital and especially the chapters on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are crucial to understanding crisis I feel. I am studying all sorts of facts and figures trying to get to grips with crisis and Marx understands there are many views out there with lots of figures which prove something different. We must be careful to pay attention to all sides of the debate and be sure to uphold the law of Marx who was sure of the cause of capitalist crisis’s despite not finishing volume 3 all his work was there if not published it was in draft form ready for Engel’s to publish and edit and place in order the content was always there. Marx didn’t call this law the most important in political economy for no reason at all. Let’s get with the programme and take up Marx’s ideas again and apply them to 2013.

Is the UK economy picking up?

We have heard in the last few weeks a set of upgrading by various monetary agencies including the IMF who have upgraded the UK’s growth figures for the coming period. Is this optimism to be believed or is this the markets reacting to a quieter time in the summer months as markets tend to slow during the summer months somewhat. It is a bit of a mixed picture on the global scale with China still rocketing ahead there is still this hard landing being talked of and how China can land as softly as possible without crashing the system. China is hugely in debt and is increasing that debt all the time. “The interesting development is that there has been a pick-up in the pace of expansion since April in the UK and Japan. This would seem to confirm that the fear of a ‘triple-dip’ or ‘double-dip’ recession in the UK was unfounded. Indeed, now all the economic forecasters are raising their guesses on UK expansion, including the IMF, from their dismal forecasts of a few months ago. But just as the forecasters overdid their view on the UK to the downside, they are probably now swinging to be over-optimistic on the upside. At best, UK GDP is going to grow by just 1% in real terms this year and even less per head of population. And the world economy as a whole is slowing down in its expansion. driven by slower growth in China and the other major emerging capitalist economies. Just as the very weak recovery in the advanced capitalist economies dragged down overall global growth between 2009-12, now it seems that the supposedly fast-growing emerging economies will dampen the impact of any relatively faster growth in the advanced economies. In particular, the Chinese economy slowed to 7.7% a year in Q1-2012 from 7.9% at the end of 2012. It is going to be even slower in the quarter just gone and through the rest of the year. Of course, a real growth rate of 7%-plus is huge compared to the rest of the world, but it is not enough to absorb the flow of new labour into Chinese industry and services. Elsewhere, Brazil, India and other major emerging economies are also slowing. But it is the US economy that remains key to the health of the world capitalist economy – it remains the largest, the biggest trader and the dominant financial force. And if we look at the US economy through the eyes of its combined manufacturing and services sector PMI, it remains stuck in a low-growth path, where it has been for almost the whole time since the end of the Great Recession. If anything, the trend is for even slower growth going forward.” So the UK is trapped in an up and down cycle depending on wider forces be it the Euro zone or the US economy which are all linked into the UK. The UK of course exports 50% roughly to the Euro zone so what happens in the Euro zone will be crucial to the UK’s so called recovery. It is true the UK has seen a little bit of growth but I do think the economists who have had gloomy news for a few years now are clinging onto any bit of positivity they can and as a result being far too optimistic now after months of pessimism. “Much has been made of the latest US jobs figures. Employment rose 195,000 in June and after upward revisions for previous months, it seems that average employment growth is now 200,000 a month, higher than the less than 150,000 in the first quarter of this year. But that increase has not made much of a dent in the unemployment rate because more Americans out of work have attempted to look for jobs after having given up for a while. Indeed, the measure of long-term unemployment rose in June, from 13.8% to 14.3%—the highest level since February. This suggests that new jobs are being snapped up by new claimants while those who lost their jobs in the Great Recession remain on the scrap heap, with their benefits being cut or expiring. Moreover, just as in the UK, most of these new vacancies are not full-time permanent jobs at good wages, but part-time, low grade work. The number of people working part-time rose by 322,000 to 8.2 million. These people aren’t working part-time because they want to—it’s because they can’t find full-time work. And of the jobs created in June, 60% were in low-paying positions: 75,000 jobs were created in the leisure and hospitality sector and 37,000 jobs were created in the retail sector. This will eventually translate into low or falling productivity in the US economy, just as it has done in the UK. US corporations are taking advantage of the huge reserve army of labour still out there to introduce part-time and temporary jobs to save labour costs – reduced benefits, no holiday or sick pay etc.” This is one of the tactics currently being used to try and keep the rate of profit up as best they can in the face of huge economic difficulties world over. It will not and cannot last. Capitalism is in a rut it is struggling to get out of. Only re organising society along democratic socialist lines with workers gaining power and owning the means of production and socialising production could we see an escape for the working class’s across the world. With extracts and references from http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/the-world-is-slowing/ “Marks indicate extracts for clarification

The failure of British capitalism

Britain used to be the powerhouse of the world producing and making many things the world needed or at least what they thought they needed. Once described as the workshop of the world the current economic situation in Britain looks very bleak for this once great economic power in 2013. Besieged on all sides, the coalition government in Britain is thrashing around in a desperate search to break the logjam. George Osborne went to Beijing, cap in hand, desperately pleading for the Chinese regime to invest its largess - its huge reserves - in Britain's crumbling infrastructure! What an incredible historical turn around! Gunboats were deployed by Osborne's predecessors in the Yangtze River 'incident' during the Chinese revolution, when the British navy was hailed as heroes because they managed to escape! Now, the representative of enfeebled British capitalism calls for help from this quarter. It is just one manifestation of the astonishing decline of a power which once held the destinies of a quarter of humankind in its hands. The field of foreign policy illustrates the profound change in the position of British capitalism both at home and abroad. We are constantly told that recovery is just around the corner from the media including the biggest establishment of capitalist media Britain has ever had the BBC that the green shoots of recovery are just around the corner. Hardly a day passes, however, without a slew of evidence in the news to the contrary. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicted the economy shrank by 0.3% in the last three months of 2012. That followed 'growth' of 0.9% in 2011. Predictions for a triple-dip recession abound. British capitalism whilst not immune to the hurricane of economic storms on the continent in the Euro zone is still itself in a deep slump ever since manufacturing was sold off by Margret Thatcher we in Britain have not produced much in the way of value. Our economy is limited to service and retail sector with allot of our economy now focused on finance. A conscious turn by the capitalists away from industrial capitalism back to financial capitalism in the hope to gamble more and make more profit on the stock exchange has come back to bite British investors now. Tory ministers still cling to the idea that the private sector will save the day. They cannot understand why it doesn't. The £750 billion sitting in the accounts of big business dwarfs the proposed new lending. It is not for want of cash that private sector activity has not increased. More fundamental is the profit-driven nature of investment for big business, currently a risky venture in the economic turmoil engulfing the world. But for the capitalist politicians Cameron and Osborne, something else must be to blame - the banks, the euro zone - for the failure of their shibboleth to materialize. They have been forced to concede some ground to the reality of the contradictions of capitalism, now, instead of the private sector "rushing in" as the public sector is cut back, it has to be coaxed, coddled and bribed. One of British capitalisms ways it’s tried to jump start its flagging economy has been to devalue its currency which many Euro zone countries are unable to do due to the single currency. The pound has suffered a precipitous fall over the last few years - 30% against the euro and 27% against the US dollar. This reflects low interest rates and the dismal prospects of the British economy. Under certain conditions, devaluation of the pound could boost the economy by making British exports cheaper. However, the worldwide recession, which has hit the US, Japan, Europe and most of the rest of the world, means that there is little scope for boosting British exports. At the same time, a weaker pound will make imports more expensive. This will have a significant impact in relation to energy prices, which will feed through to household gas and electricity bills. So all in all the prospects for this once great powerhouse of the world look bleak and for me there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of a recovery in sight. We may see periods of temporary growth and blips but the overall trend is for continued stagnation and deepening of the crisis.

Uk out of recession but not for the 99%

As today’s growth figures for the last quarter show the UK is out of recession cue the celebrations from the capitalists a whopping 1% growth between June and September is nothing to shout about but if you are in the 1% you may well be recessions never affect you. For the rest of us the 99% the recession continues, pay freezes continue, attacks on our terms and conditions continue and job cuts in the publican the private sector continue so forgive us, the working and middle class’s for not whooping and hollering when we heard today’s news. For us we will still be made to pay for the crisis we did not create, the crisis of capitalism is on our shoulders even further as we are still only roughly 15% into the proposed cuts. So while the rich celebrate over a 1% bit of growth mainly born out of the fact we had the Olympics which doesn’t tell the whole story as we all know other parts of London which were normally busy in the summer suffered hugely due to the Olympics. We the workers will not see any benefits to this bit o growth are there more people in work now ? We are told yes but I highly doubt it with still a million young people out of work and the unemployment figures still high this is nothing to be jumping up and down about. This is in fact one of the longest not yet the deepest but it may be recessions we’ve ever seen. With today’s news of Ford motorcar manufacture in Dagenham and Southampton deciding to close its factories and move to Turkey at the expense of 4000 jobs this news of growth will appear very hollow to many workers facing redundancy. I do hope Unite the union at Ford gets its finger out and shows its full might in fighting these job cuts and factory closures. It’s no good telling us how bad it is these workers are loosing their jobs workers want to see action and a call for national strike action if that’s what it takes. The National shops stewards Network put out this piece earlier today in reaction to the news. The National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) sends its full support to Ford workers and their unions – Unite and the GMB after their company’s announcement that it intends to close two British plants and sack up to 2,000 workers by next summer. We support any action taken by these workers to defend their plants and jobs. At the same time, Ford is shutting its factory in Genk in Belgium with the loss of 4,300 jobs. The closure of Southampton Transit and the Stamping plant in Dagenham which supplies Transit panels is an attack on the whole Ford UK workforce as it will leave it smaller and vulnerable to a total closure or attack on workers’ terms and conditions. In the year 2000, there were 52,000 workers in Ford UK, these closures will leave under 11,000. This is the reward for sacrifices made by Ford workers over the last few years – from outsourcing indirect jobs to agreeing a new starter pension rate and closing the final salary pension scheme to new starters. This announcement shows that no workers are safe, whether they be in the car industry or anywhere else. These redundancies could lead to 20,000 workers losing their jobs in the component industry or related sectors. Unite and the GMB must link workers in Ford with these companies to build a huge army of opposition. Plant closures and redundancies are difficult to stop, but they can be stopped if a serious and determined fight is organised. Unite members in the construction industry and London buses this year have won victories, showing that the bosses’ plans can be resisted. Union policy is to trigger a national dispute over a closure threat. There should be an immediate national meeting of all Ford UK shop stewards and convenors to discuss what action is needed, including the organising of a ballot for national strike action. Action, official or unofficial, should be coordinated with workers in Genk and throughout the European plants. Therefore, an emergency meeting of the union-side Ford European Works Council should be organised, with stewards from every plant invited. This could give Southampton and Dagenham workers the confidence to raise any and all means to fight the closures, including occupations. In Southampton, a call across the city for a demonstration opposing closure of the plant would get a resounding echo and bring thousands onto the streets. The NSSN campaigned on the 20th October 150,000-strong TUC demonstration in London for a 24-hour general strike against the attacks being made by this Tory/Lib Dem government of the bosses. The threat to the Ford plants shows yet again why the unions and the TUC need to link together all workers – in the private and public sectors – to defend all our jobs, pay and pensions. Fords should be nationalised if it refuses to stop the redundancies, in order to save workers’ livelihoods and their skills and the plants they are working in. All Ford workers must fight Looming over both Ford workers and pensioners is the company’s pension deficit of about £2 billion. They will ask themselves how a company of reduced size that is blaming its closures on losses of £1 billion really intends to keep the fund afloat by paying the deficit. Workers should remember how the ex-Ford Visteon component plants were closed in 2009 through administration, which saw 600 workers sacked. Now, over 3,000 Visteon pensioners are taking Ford to court to protect the full value of their pensions because the fund has gone into the Pension Protection Fund. The option to dispense with this financial ‘burden’ must be increasingly tempting for Ford. The Visteon workers would have got statutory redundancy money of a maximum of £9,000 each but won an enhanced pay-off because they fought for it, through occupations and pickets. The immediate launch of serious national and even international action would give workers in the two UK plants confidence to fight and send the strongest possible signal to Ford that the battle to save their jobs and pensions is on. Solidarity with the Ford workers! Rob Williams So forgive me if I don’t get too excited over this bit of news. Its time we fought back on every plain. TUC name the day for joint public and private sector national strike action. Time workers felt their power once again!