Determined Tax Scammer Has No Money Left For Employees!

Michael Barker reports on tax avoidance by the rich, including 2 Sisters Food Group boss Baljinder Boparan, the ongoing dispute at the 2 Sisters owned RF Brookes factory in Leicester, and the lessons to be learned from the MMP Bootle workers.

On Monday 25^th June, tens of thousands of HM Revenue and Customs staff took strike action across the country as part of the Public and Commercial Services Union’s sustained campaign to defend jobs and services, vital for tax justice, from cutbacks and privatisation. As ever, the rich are united in their calls for brutal cuts to the hard-won services won by the rest of us; determined in their efforts to privatize schools, health services, and, as reported at the weekend, scrapping housing benefit for under 25 year-olds.

Of course, the mega-rich prefer not to pay tax if they can help it, which is why each year £120 billion goes uncollected in tax from the ruling class. 2 Sisters’ boss Baljinder Boparan is no different in this regard. As noted in this weekend’s Financial Times, Baljinder was found to be among the 289 investors in Eclipse 35, “a film partnership ruled to be an ‘aggressive’ tax avoidance scheme by a tax tribunal in April,” who collectively “could end up paying several times more than the total of £117m tax they sought to avoid as the Revenue & Customs examines the large bank loans they took on to participate in the scheme.”

Through their participation in the Eclipse 35 tax avoidance scheme each ‘investor’ has deprived the British taxpayer of £404,000. And of the nearly 300 “highly paid City bankers and chief executives” who comprise the “vast majority” of the members of this tax scam, we might observe that ten are former or current Goldman Sachs bankers. Goldman Sachs of course being the notorious firm that currently employs 2 Sisters chairman, Charles Allen, as one of their senior advisers.

Baljinder Boparan, like her capitalist colleagues, is quite content to both avoid tax and viciously attack her workers pay and conditions, while simultaneously patting herself on the back for throwing a few pennies to the poor through her charitable (read: public relations/tax break) work with deprived children. In the United States, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein does exactly the same through the support he lends to the cynically-named Robin Hood Foundation.

2 Sisters’ lust for profits knows no bounds, and none of their nearly 20,000 strong global work force will sleep soundly until they are able to collectively demonstrate they will not stand for any attacks on their pay and working conditions. Workers at RF Brookes’ factory in South Wigston, Leicester, have thus taken the lead, and every effort must be made to spread their principled show of opposition amongst all of 2 Sisters employees around the world.

Workers need to stand united across different industries, be they employed in the private or public sectors. In addition, useful lessons may be gleaned from previous struggles taken by workers faced with similarly leach-like capitalists determined to profit from their workers impoverishment.

Take for instance the prolonged industrial action taken earlier this year by employees at Liverpool packaging company, Mayr-Melnhof Packaging (MMP). In February, MMP — much like 2 Sisters — “unfairly selected 49 people for redundancy, forcing workers into accepting poorer redundancy terms.” “As an example, one man there for 25 years says he was offered a £17,000 pay-off not the £46,000 he was due.”

Outraged at this disregard for their rights, workers protested with a series of 24-hours strikes that began on February 10, and which resulted in MMP locking out over 140 workers on February 18. This initially led to a brief occupation of the factory, which was reluctantly called off when the management agreed to return to the negotiating table for emergency negotiations. Yet, as ever the capitalist managers were full of hot air, and “Three days of discussions from February 20-23 produced nothing.”

Moreover, as the Socialist Party reported in March, later offers by the management seemed “designed to divide the workers as a section of them have been invited to individual meetings for ‘informal discussions’ without a union presence, as to redundancy terms.” This was at the same time that “Others remain sacked.”

Much as 2 Sisters tried to sideline their own (unnecessary) attacks on workers by citing a loss of contracts (from M&S), MMP fallaciously “blamed the loss of a key contract with Kelloggs” for their latest round of job cuts. Not however put off by such blatant lies to disguise MMP’s attempts to turn a profit on the backs of their employees, MMP picket lines continued, and workers planned further ways in which they could escalate the levels of pressure exerted on their bosses.

Targeted demonstrations then took place at supermarkets around the country, which were combined with legal proceedings against MMP; while Unite called upon “the Norwegian government – which has an 0.88% stake in the Austrian-owned company – to urge the employers to restart negotiations on a fair redundancy settlement for the workforce.”

MMP’s locked out workers were now firmly on the offensive, and took their protests to London, to the heart of the ruling class. Here they succeeded in raising awareness of their campaign by temporarily blocking and occupying a major road in Mayfair, just outside of the Dukes Hotel: the significance of Dukes Hotel being that one of the Hotel’s board members resided on MMP’s board of directors. Protests however were not confined to England, and with the support of Unite, a contingent of workers flew to Austria to hold a demonstration outside a shareholders’ meeting in Vienna.

The MMP bosses of course had plenty of money — money derived from their profitable exploitation of their workforce — with which they could fairly compensate workers, but they were never going to pay up to the workers unless they were forced to. Therefore the workers persisted in their struggle, and despite having lost their jobs, succeeded in forcing MMP to return to the negotiating table. Finally extracting a generous financial settlement from them for their months of hard struggle.

Capitalists will always slash jobs to increase short-term profitability, and so it is up the workers of the world to unite to oppose such inhumane and ultimately counterproductive policies. Organised resistance always makes it harder for bosses to exploit workers. More importantly it perhaps gives workers a sense of their power to change the world for the better; helping more people realise that we don’t have to follow the dictates of profit before life. Pay and conditions should be improved, not attacked; and it is the bankers who should pay for the crisis that they caused (and were then rewarded for causing), not the rest of us!

It is the Socialist Party’s view that it is the millions of honest people who pay taxes who should run society, not just a handful of millionaires extremely averse to contributing to the public good. However, to make this vision come true, workers around the world must stand strong in their workplaces, fight to repeal the government’s anti-trade union laws, and extend their workplace demands to political demands for a rich society for all not just for the few.

For further detailed reporting on the MMP workers, see the archived articles at Union News.

Please send messages of support and solidarity to tony.lewis@bfawu.org