This is turning into a bit of a sketchpad. Musing on the previous evenings BBC Newsnight. That’s ok.
Labour Party Conference ’11 / BAE shedding 3000 defence jobs.
One of the problems with the Labour Party being so closely linked to the trade unions is that a specific trade union needs to stand up for the current workers in a particular trade, and not necessarily the economy as a whole. If i am made redundant (as i was a few years ago) i expect to union leader to be on my side, personally and not the side of the company or the general economy. Whereas, a responsible political party or government has to look at the situation, say at BAE (where 3000 have been made redundant) and think the following – this is a company who employs over 100,000 people in the UK, and contributes tens of millions in tax revenue, that figure is always going to fluctuate up and down depending on how many people want to buy their products. If there is a slowdown in demand they have to be free to readjust the workforce in line with that, up or down. They have to make the best business decisions as they see fit, if they were to decide not to let these 3000 go, perhaps in ten years time all 100,000 would go because the company had made many such bad business decisions. Perhaps they have let too few go, perhaps they should be letting 10,000 go, and if they did that they would be in a position to employ 25,000 more over the next ten years. That’s not a question that a union leader will contemplate.
A trade unions purpose is to defend the current employee, not future potential employees. Thus the Labour Party/Trade Union dichotomy.
