Massey Ferguson (Redundancies) (Hansard, 22 April 1987)

§ Mr. Dave Nellist (Coventry, South-East)

I beg to ask leave to move the Adjournment of the House, under Standing Order No. 20, for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration, namely, the announcement of 1,000 redundancies by Massey Ferguson in Coventry". Last Thursday, 16 April, Massey Ferguson announced 1,000 redundancies at the Banner lane tractor factory in Coventry. That is effectively a third of the work force. If the cut is allowed to go ahead, the work force will be 2,500 compared with 9,000 some seven years ago. The announcement follows two months of short-time working which workers were promised would safeguard 450 jobs that were under threat. After two months of working a three-day week, the workers, many of whom have been loyal to the company for many years, are being rewarded with mass redundancies and even demands that those who remain should take a cut in wages.

It would be ironic, if it were not so tragic, that the announcement came within 48 hours of claims by members of the Tory Cabinet that unemployment was improving and the economy getting brighter. Massey Ferguson has given the lie to that dubious Tory claim. Such an announcement demands emergency action. It follows on the heels of the major job losses announced at Caterpillar and Westland. If publicly owned, planned and integrated, all three firms could play an enormous — [Laughter.] Yes, it is funny. Those firms could play an enormous role in producing equipment or airlifting grain to famine-stricken areas of the world. However, in the arcane and anarchic capitalist system, the needs of the hungry millions and the skills of thousands of engineering workers are driven apart. That problem has been compounded by the halving of the real aid given abroad by the Government and by the leeching of the international banking system on the debt crisis.

674 About 110,000 people—equivalent to one third of the population of Coventry—die every 24 hours because of hunger or hunger-related diseases. However, now 1,000 skilled and experienced workers in our city, which is still referred to as the Western world's tractor capital, are to be sacrificed because of what the company call a "lack of orders".

The matter is urgent and important. Quite literally, hundreds of thousands of lives in the so-called Third world demand it. So equally do thousands of jobs in Coventry, the 1,000 direct workers, the £10 million of local spending that will be lost as a result of those redundancies, and the hundreds of other families who rely on the workers at Massey Ferguson having money in their pockets and spending it in the shops and in other areas such as the service industries. If those redundancies go ahead, another hole will be punched in the local economy of Coventry.

I have been elected by thousands of workers in Coventry to come here to defend the interests of working people. However, the unelected, unaccountable extremist management of Massey Ferguson announced the redundancies of thousands of workers in our city, without debate or prior warning. I urge you, Mr. Speaker, to grant the debate so that a genuine Socialist alternative to mass redundancies can be put forward in this House of Commons to give hope to the thousands of families in the city of Coventry.