Visteon Dispute Latest

An excellent article on the Visteon Dispute from The Morning Star.

The struggle continues
Thursday 16 April 2009
Paul Haste

"Occupations and protests are what seem to get results. Whatever happens, you have got to get together, organise and do something. Don't just sit there and take it," says Piers Hood, Unite deputy convener at Visteon's Enfield factory in north London.

The company's 600 skilled manufacturing workers, who were summarily dismissed without redundancy pay on March 31 after their bosses claimed bankruptcy, are maintaining an occupation of the Visteon plant in Belfast, a mass picket at the Enfield factory and continuous protests at the car parts manufacturer's site in Basildon.

A "derisory" offer from Visteon executives at negotiations with Unite in London this week was thrown out without ceremony by the workers' reps, and their bosses' failure to concede even basic redundancy pay has left them more determined to fight on.

"All the reps to a man turned round and said this offer wasn't good enough and we want people treated with dignity and respect," Unite national officer for the automotive industry Roger Maddison explained at the time.

"But, if it hadn't been for the sit-ins, we wouldn't even have had this meeting with Visteon."

The workers' determination not to become just another statistic in the never-ending litany of mass redundancies has been fuelled by revelations that Visteon intended to close its British plants long before the recession hit.

Investigations into the murky circumstances surrounding Ford's decision in 2000 to spin off Visteon as a separate company have led to the discovery that executives deliberately planned to run down the Belfast plant and move the work to factories in South Africa, China, India and the Philippines.

The chief executive of Visteon's Basildon plant has also been exposed setting up a separate car parts firm just weeks before the mass sackings, raising concerns that he intends to reopen the factory after the dispute, employing new workers on lower wages.

Copies of the secret Project Protea plan to run down Visteon's Belfast plant, obtained by the Morning Star, spell out the depths of bosses' cynicism.

Despite claims that the company has no links to Ford, the Project Protea document states that management will "engage Ford for assistance in transferring products to new locations, and actively work with Ford to re-source business out of Visteon."

Executives are also instructed to "minimise information leaks by creating isolated project teams," at the same time that these bosses were transferring their pensions to Visteon Engineering, a part of the corporation that was to remain open.

Visteon workers insist that this evidence of collusion with Ford proves that the giant US car firm has a responsibility to honour the agreements that it signed with their union in 2000.

"We're not going to rest until Ford live up to the agreements they gave," stresses the Belfast site's Unite convener John Maguire.

"The separation agreement they signed clearly states that Visteon will 'adopt and honour Ford collective agreements,'" he adds.

Bosses told workers at the time that, "for the duration of your employment with Visteon, your terms and conditions will mirror Ford conditions. This means lifetime protection while an employee of Visteon of all your contractual conditions of employment."

The documents add that "accrued seniority and all existing terms and conditions, in particular pension entitlements, will be transferred to the new employment contracts," but now Visteon's pension fund is in deficit and no-one seems to know where the money has gone.

Hood explains that executives must have been "fiddling the figures, because we have found that money has been moved from one place to another because they still kept two separate entities going - VES and VCTC.

"But VES is an engineering company and, even though we weren't having anything engineered, they were still draining off millions of pounds," he relates.

Meanwhile, Ford executives have washed their hands of any responsibility, claiming that the mass sackings and the closure of Visteon's plants are "nothing to do with us."

"Since 2000, Visteon has been an independent company supplying parts to Ford. Ford has no contractual or other responsibility towards the Visteon UK workforce. Ford has acted responsibly and met, or exceeded, its commitments under the Visteon agreement of 2000," a Ford spokesman coldly stated on Thursday.

But such denials of responsibility are treated with contempt by the sacked workers.

"These are Ford terms," declares Dan, brandishing his employment contract at the gates to Visteon's Enfield plant, "so we want the same conditions that we've always had."

In a strategy to broaden the dispute and hold Ford to account, Visteon workers have sent delegations to Ford's Southampton and Dagenham plants, returning with pledges to boycott Visteon products which have come from factories in South Africa or Spain.

The workers have also been handing out leaflets at Ford motor dealerships and have been deluged with solidarity and donations from teachers, postal workers, bus drivers and London Underground workers.

Unite convener Kevin Nolan says that the mass pickets at Enfield will continue, pointing out that the workers had already succeeded in turning away representatives from administrators KPMG, which is suspected of wanting to sell the stock, machinery and tools left in the plant back to Ford at knock-down prices.

The north London workers have barricaded the plant with huge rubbish containers and are keeping up shifts of pickets through the night to prevent the factory being stripped, while workers in Belfast are determined to continue the three-week occupation of their workplace.

"If this isn't sorted out we plan to step up the protests," states Maguire. "If we have to be here for six months, we'll be here."