How should we stand towards voluntary redundancy?

[Q]

Voluntary redundancy is where you're offered money by your boss in exchange to get you out. The topic came up in this week's Weekly Worker:


Rights for jobs?
I’m sure Weekly Worker readers will be interested in a question raised by the Socialist Workers Party central committee in the second of this year’s SWP internal bulletins (Pre-conference Bulletin No2, November).

Responding to a submission in Pre-conference Bulletin No1 from four rank-and-file comrades, which included the statement that voluntary redundancy can seem like “a victory on points” to workers threatened with compulsory dismissal, the CC was outraged. It took the time in its own rambling perspectives statement on ‘Politics in the workplace’ to dismiss the notion that voluntary redundancy (VR) is ever acceptable: “We are against all redundancies. We think that a VR is a job lost. These aren’t our jobs to sell and we should ‘fight for every job’.”

Not content with voicing this frankly idiotic opinion, the CC goes on to threaten any comrade who might be tempted to leave their job in exchange for cash with dire consequences: “No SWP member can take a VR. There may be cases where there are extenuating circumstances. But any decision can only be made in conjunction with the industrial department and/or the CC. If there is no consultation with the SWP, disciplinary action will be taken against anyone who takes a VR.”

To my mind this is absolutely crazy. It is completely the wrong way to view the question. Revolutionaries do not defend and promote the thing called ‘jobs’, but instead fight for the rights of the workers who do them - along with those of former workers, future workers and the unemployed. Those rights must include the freedom to leave a job, whether to seek a better paid or less unpleasant one, to take early retirement or whatever.

The notion that it is a betrayal of your fellow workers or future employees to take voluntary redundancy is a nonsense. Presumably SWP members who have reached 60 or 65 must on no account accept retirement in workplaces where management are looking to cut staff through ‘natural wastage’. That would be another “job lost”, after all.

While we must not compromise on our opposition to cuts in public services, this is different from demanding the indefinite continuation of all current posts. We are for the scrapping of Trident, for example, and we would positively welcome the transfer of workers employed in producing it to useful work. Surely the demand should be for no loss of income for workers no longer required by either their capitalist employer or the state, not the insistence that everything must remain the same.

Concretely, all workers occupying posts considered ‘redundant’ must be offered either another job with no loss of pay or status, or benefit at the same rate while they are being retrained at state expense. To win this sort of ‘voluntary redundancy’ would be more like a knockout than a “victory on points”.

While, obviously, we are very far from having won such demands, today there are thousands of workers who would jump at the chance to escape a dead-end job (the equivalent of building Trident) in exchange for something like a year’s wages. Good luck to them - and to SWP members who feel the same!

Ray
Surrey

I'll leave this open for discussion.

[human strike]

I largely agree with the sentiments above. Taking VR is not an easy thing to do, losing your job never is. When being forced to compete with their colleagues for jobs some people would rather take VR than go through that stress and hostility. I think that actually that can be quite a brave decision to make and I sympathise.

[brigadista]

however it is often a device for employers after the redundancy to then recreate a job as an amalgamation of several the subject of the redundancies , with an altered job description offering less wages and worse working conditions for that new created amalgamated job

[human strike]

I agree. I don't actively support the idea of VR but nor do I demonise those who take it.

[Peace on Earth]

Applying blanket ethics to every worker is ridiculous. The conditions, both in the workplace and at home, relating to family, friends, health, etc., can vary to incredible degrees. If someone truly needs to take VR, then so be it. It is not the worst thing in the world. We should still be focused on changing the system rather than ganging up on those who are pressed to dire economic conditions.

[Sosa]

I agree, it depends on your personal situation. I'm not for or against it per say.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It is all dependant upon circumstances.

If, for example, a 40 year old with a wife and 3 kids to support was offered voluntary redundancy, their need to reject this might be far greater than a 59 year old woman whose husband is still in work and whose children have moved out, for example. It really isn't a simple, black and white question.

One point where I do feel strongly is the issue of disciplinary action. No party should be so arrogant as to discipline an individual member for a decision taken in relation to their own personal economic circumstances. The statement from the CC, in this respect, really is grotesque, authoritarian and displays everything that is wrong with the leadership of the far-left.

[Sam_b]

I don't think Ray from Surrey is aware that Voluntary Redundancies are often used within sections of the workplace to weaken resistance, and if rejected in favour of all-encompassing action has been stepped up specifically to target those individuals for standing up to all workers in the workplace. I'm also pretty sure that the IB2 never used the word 'betrayal' in its rationale.

[Thirsty Crow]

I agree. I don't actively support the idea of VR but nor do I demonise those who take it.
Absolutely agree.
In my opinion, it is a completely idiotic, and moreover, despotic, position to take, that is, to ostracize those workers who, out of any reason, decide to take the cash and run away.
And any self proclaimed socialist should be able to understand and sympathize with these reasons. Working as a wage slave nowadays is no picnic. And what the person wishes to do with the cash is an entirely personal matter. How would VR bear on the politics of members belonging to any revolutionary organization - well, that is just beyond me. I guess I lack any understanding of party discipline. Poor me.

[Devrim]

I don't think Ray from Surrey is aware that Voluntary Redundancies are often used within sections of the workplace to weaken resistance,

To be honest Sam, I think this formulation is a bit dubious. I can see what you mean, but I don't think that you express it very well.

In the current situation, both internationally and in the UK, states are instituting programmes of 'voluntary redundancy', and 'early retirement' whilst putting a freeze on recruiting.

The first thing that anybody with an ounce of working class consciousness will understand from this is that it means the people who remain are doing more work.

There are two things about job cuts. The first is that your fellow workers are being put out of work. The second is that the rate of exploitation increases for those who remain.

Generally when workers react to capitalist attacks , they do so when it really effcets them.

Of course 'voluntary redundancies' are a direct attack on working class living standards, and as you put it 'weaken resistance'. When you look at it though if sombrero you worked with was kicked out of a job, or one person in a workplace of, say, 200 took 'voluntary' redundancy, you would look on it quite differently.

People react when things effect them directly, and a mate being kicked out of work effects you a lot more than doing 0.5% more work a day.

I think there are some people , though I am not saying you are one of them, who expect there to be an immediate reaction.I was in England a couple of weels ago, and the first newspaper headline I saw in a shop after arriving was '500,000 public sector jobs to go'. Yet the working class did nothing about it.

Really we can expect people to react against direct attacks upon them. We are not in a period where the mere announcement of potential redundancies will cause a massive working class reaction. Here in Turkey we had '4C', changing of contacts for state employees, on the statute book for moths before there was any working class reaction. People reacted when it was implemented against them.


Not content with voicing this frankly idiotic opinion, the CC goes on to threaten any comrade who might be tempted to leave their job in exchange for cash with dire consequences: “No SWP member can take a VR. There may be cases where there are extenuating circumstances. But any decision can only be made in conjunction with the industrial department and/or the CC. If there is no consultation with the SWP, disciplinary action will be taken against anyone who takes a VR.”

If this is the SWP position, and we don't know that it is, I think it is very wrong. I think that members of a communist organisation should be conscious of class politics, and not need a CC to inform them they are doing the wrong thing.

If it is true, it seems to me that it is very wrong that workers who want to take voluntary redındancy have to discuss it with the CC, and if not will have 'disciplinary action' taken against them. Whether this is a serious threat or not is unclear. When members of the PCS union executive who were members of the SWP voted against strike action, the SWP's 'disciplinary action' was that they had to apologise to the membership, which, really is pretty pathetic.

Devrim