Burberry Clothing Castleford

An uneasy truce has settled over the Burberry clothing factory in Castleford, West Yorkshire. The job cuts, redundancies and wage cuts have been implemented and approximately 150 workers, friends, colleagues, workmates are now gone. Those who remain hunker down hoping the worst is over. But is it? The job losses and wage cuts leave deep scars.

Burberry has been a British garment producer since 1856. Its operations are global, its markets are global, it has shifted manufacturer around the world, especially China in recent years. Production has been transported, not for the benefit of workers elsewhere in the world but solely to ensure Burberry’s return on manufacture is maintained if not upped.

The job losses at Castleford, roughly 20 percent of Burberry’s worldwide manufacturing base, were solely about cost cutting. Workers at Castleford were employed at the UK national minimum wage rate (varying depending on age) plus a night shift supplement. No-one was going to get rich on such poverty wages, bordering around state benefit levels. But the company without doubt reaped the benefit. 12000 heritage and trench coats were produced each month, a retail sales range of between £1000 and £10000 per item. It takes 2000 hours of skilled training to produce such goods. The slashing of staffing levels destroys the retention of such skills, the training of the next generation and ensures the employer gets the same if not more of the product from fewer workers.

Workers at Burberry were unionised and questions have to be asked about how the unions functioned. A large number of staff, especially the nightshift, were migrant workers. Not unionised, not identifying with the union, not engaged. The union response was to seek the best deal achievable, be it as enhanced redundancy pay or minimising job losses. Admirable but not enough. The employer will be back for more cuts, more cost reductions, more relocation of work abroad.

Where was the voice of the membership? Angry yes but not moved to action. Lost in the acceptance of achieving the alleged best deal, settling for the lesser of the evil being proposed by the employer? But why not a strategy that called for expansion not contraction?  Why not a strategy demanding fresh investment in the factory? Why not a strategy to reskill and up skill the workforce? The employer may globe trot the world seeking enhanced profits but that does not help the men and women of Castleford.
As an exercise of rubbing salt in the wounds, a jobs fair was orchestrated by the HR department. Workers facing redundancy were presented with career choices – Amazon, Haribo, McDonalds, Morrisons, ASDA, etc. Once more shelf stocking, burger flipping, minimum wage unskilled dead-end jobs.

For the workers who remain, the challenge of rebuilding the union from being a toothless insurance policy that flopped at the first hurdle, to being a genuine organisation of workers, is paramount. Yet again the response of the trade-union leadership was limited by its acceptance of the capitalist framework. Unions such as the GMB generally focus on consultation, redundancy terms, retraining packages, voluntary severance and negotiations over the implementation of job losses. While these measures may secure better conditions for affected workers, they do not challenge the employer’s right to cut jobs in the first place. The struggle becomes one of managing redundancies rather than preventing them or demanding better working conditions.

The weakness of contemporary trade-union practice lies in its tendency towards social partnership – the premise that workers and employers share a common interest in maintaining the competitiveness and profitability of the enterprise, when in actual fact workers and capital have fundamentally opposed interests. We seek secure employment, decent wages and safe conditions, while capital seeks maximum profit and flexibility at our expense.

What we need is a more militant and class-conscious response. Rather than concentrating solely on severance arrangements, workers must be mobilised around the defence of every job, building solidarity with workers in other sectors facing similar attacks, and exposing redundancies as part of a broader pattern of capitalist restructuring. The aim would not simply be to negotiate the terms of decline but to develop workers’ understanding that recurring crises, closures and redundancies are inherent features of the capitalist system and will continue until we act.

If we want better conditions and greater security, we need to put an end to the capitalist system of production for profit that is predicated on our exploitation. We have enormous power; a strong union movement would awaken workers’ class consciousness so that it could be wielded effectively in the short and medium term. The long-term solution of course lies in the replacement of capitalism with socialism, where production is organised according to social need rather than shareholder returns. In other words, we the workers own the means of production and use it to ensure we have what we need to enjoy a good life.