Trade unionists on the march against Tata Steel job cuts in Port Talbot (Picture: Guy Smallman)
Around 1,500 steel workers in Port Talbot and Llanwern, South Wales, have voted for strikes over Tata bosses’ plan to close blast furnaces and destroy 2,800 jobs.
If they take action, it will be the first time in over 40 years that Port Talbot steel workers have gone on strike.
Workers in the Unite union backed action despite Tata threatening the workers with the loss of enhanced redundancy pay if they did.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said, “In the crucial weeks to come, Tata’s workers and Unite will put up picket lines to prevent the company from taking this disastrous path.”
The union promised that strike dates “scheduled to cause maximum impact will be announced soon”.
It is important to start the action as soon as possible. Recently Tata announced the immediate closure of its coke ovens. These ovens create the fuel that ultimately powers the blast furnaces.
As Unite announced the strike vote, Community, the biggest steel union at last said it would begin its own ballot. It has been hesitating to do this for weeks. It may now fear it will lose members to Unite unless it does so.
The Community vote goes on until mid-May. If that vote is for action, then the whole workforce could stop. But in any case, if Unite calls action no workers should cross the picket line.
It will take real action to win. Bosses have presided over a catastrophic fall in steel jobs, and union leaders have failed to challenge them effectively.
In the early 1970s, the industry employed around 320,000 people, excluding those employed in steel processing and in supply chains. By 1978 this figure had fallen to 271,000, and by 1991 it had plummeted to just 44,000.
In 2020, the steel industry employed a workforce that was less than 10 percent of the size of its 1971 workforce.
Labour nationalised steel in 1951, Winston Churchill’s Tories reversed that in 1953, Harold Wilson’s Labour nationalised it again in 1967 and Margaret Thatcher privatised it again in 1988.
But the key issue was less the formal ownership but the fighting capacity of workers. The 13-week national strike over pay in 1980 was betrayed by union leaders and the wider union movement. Even before privatisation, the workforce fell from 142,000 in 1980 to 52,000 in 1988.
As a stream of private firms grabbed sections of the steel industry and tried to make quick profits, the unions responded with slogans about “national security” and demands for more state cash to keep the corporations running the industry on board.
Workers have to push for a complete break from that approach.
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