Aerospace industry workers take action against cuts

Tom Ruddell, Young Socialists Scotland, Prospect Scotland Regional Branch Environment Rep (Personal Capacity)

Workers at Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd (HIAL) are intensifying industrial action in opposition to the “remote towers” project which would make nearly 50 skilled workers redundant at the same time as wasting £70m of public money. 

Airport bosses are continuing to push the project through despite opposition from airport workers, the local community and all the local authorities. HIAL, which is a public corporation wholly owned by the Scottish Government, concluded in their own report that the project would cost £70m more than the current situation and is “the most difficult and risky [option] to implement”. 

The project will result in the loss of highly skilled jobs in working-class areas in the highlands and islands and workers organised in the union Prospect have been withdrawing all work that helps the bosses prepare for the cuts since the start of 2021 – they have now voted overwhelmingly in favour of further action, including strike action. 

Workers must stand together in their union to defend jobs and services

We call for all workers to join their trade union and to stand together against cuts and measures which impact them and against the bosses who want to make them. These workers are right to demand their say in the decisions that affect them and to defend their jobs with strike action if that’s what it takes.

Workers across the whole aviation industry are facing attacks on pay, terms and jobs. Workers at Prestwick Aircraft Maintenance Limited (PAML) were forced to work in unsafe conditions at 50% pay during the pandemic when their employer refused to implement the furlough scheme. Workers who refusing to accept the 50% pay cut were shamefully sacked. If there’s no money left then we say open the books to worker and trade union scrutiny to see where the profits have gone!

Workers and unions must push the Scottish Government

The too-little too-late intervention of the Scottish Government at PAML (despite the land being publicly owned) and the willingness to waste money and cut aviation services at HIAL show that the Scottish Government is not run in the interests of the workers or their needs – but we say that it can still be forced into concessions by trade union action. 

Under capitalism, the implementation of labour-saving technologies, machinery and computing are often used to lay off workers when it suits the bosses. Under socialism the outputs of society will be fairly distributed according to the needs of workers, not profit. New technology would be used to improve society, reduce the burden placed on workers and reduce the working week.

This is why we call for the boss’s capitalist system to be swept away and replaced with democratic socialism, run in the interests of ordinary working people. While workers in the aviation industry will be concerned about the impacts of plans to cut carbon emissions, under socialism the urgent transition to a sustainable society would be an opportunity, not a threat.

The Lucas Plan

This is proven by the way workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation organised an alternative to the boss’s plans to cut 18,000 jobs in the 1970s. They developed the “Lucas Plan” and proposed that the workers could retrain and redeploy equipment to make “socially useful products” such as ventilators, renewable energy equipment and even battery-electric cars – instead of military jets and weaponry. This offers a glimpse at how workers might organise society when free from capitalism.

Socialist change needed to secure work for all

Capitalism is run in the interest of profit for the bosses, not the needs of ordinary people. We must fight with our unions for every improvement we can win under capitalism, but also fight for an economic system run in the interests of ordinary people – socialism. 

To achieve this, we must build a new mass workers party aligned to the trade unions and workers’ movement. As a step in that direction, the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is standing in the elections on May 6 on a platform of public ownership, an end to cuts and a socialist recovery for the working class.

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