The High Court in Belfast last week refused to order the eviction of the occupying Visteon workers in the city.
The Visteon workers fighting for jobs and justice have put Ford onto the back foot. They are threatening a major escalation in their dispute that would hit Ford’s production in Britain.
Socialist Worker can reveal secret plans going back as far as 2001 to shut at least one of the plants at the heart of the current Visteon dispute.
Monday 23 April 1979 was a stormy day in west London. Schools were still on Easter holiday. Ealing’s arterial Uxbridge Road was strangely quiet because the buses were on strike, as were many food and textile factories.
When the Nazi NF announced that that they were to hold a general election meeting at Southall town hall people in the area were sickened.
Outsourcing is the business model that human resource managers love. It is what lies behind the sacking of around 600 workers at the Visteon car components company, which is a supplier to Ford, and countless other companies.
Steve Gawne is the managing director of Visteon UK. He was behind "Project Protea" and "Project Kennedy", the secret schemes to run down the Visteon plants from 2007 onwards.
Ford set up Visteon in 1997 and outsourced it in 2000. An internal Visteon UK document in the possession of Socialist Worker reveals the method underlying the outsourcing process.
England and Holland emerged as powers representing a new capitalist logic of production by the end of the 17th century.
What happened to us could have happened to anyone. It just happened to be us.
The ongoing occupation of the Belfast Visteon plant continues, despite attempts by KPMG, the administrators, to evict the workers.
