Support Remploy Workers: Come to the Edinburgh protest

Unemployment is rising. Benefits are being slashed. Among the latest to face the Con-Dems’ axe are 1,700 disabled workers in skilled, productive jobs as 36 Remploy factories face closure. The announcement of the closure of 36 Remploy factories and the privatisation/closure of a further 18 in the near future has left Remploy workers bitter and angry.

The consultation process was a sham. A vast swathe of the disability lobby allowed themselves to be used by the government to add some sort of justification by saying that the Remploy model was outdated and disabled people do not want to work in “segregated employment”.

With 13 jobs being lost in the public sector to every job ‘created’ in the private sector, the stark truth is that most working class people with disabilities would love a chance for employment either in a Remploy factory or anywhere else.

And the rather limp promise of full support for Remploy workers to find alternative work is an illusion.

There are few if any jobs out there, even less jobs with the same level of understanding, support and quality of terms and conditions that were trade union negotiated in Remploy.

This attack on a vulnerable group of workers by a vicious, nasty little government made up of public school toffs who will never know what life is really like in Con-Dem Britain, illustrates the lengths that the ruling class will go to, to prop up their sick, rotten capitalist system.

Remploy receives a £111 million subsidy to employ disabled people – nothing compared to the billions of pounds of public money used to bail out the banks or the £4.5 billion spent annually on the occupation of Afghanistan.

With jobs in jeopardy, benefits being cut, and no possibility of employment, Remploy workers have no alternative but to fight hard to protect their jobs and their factories.

Remploy workers will be demonstrating outside the Apex Hotel, Grassmarket, Edinburgh on Thursday 22nd March from 8.30am where Liz Sayce, the signatory of the death sentance on Remploy, is speaking at a Scottish Union of Supported Employers. Please get along and show your support.    

Messages of support can be sent via les.woodward@ntlworld.com