Join Remploy Strike Action in Leicester This Thursday

With the breathtaking announcement of the government’s plans to close or sell-off the 54 factories that provide employment for disabled workers, on the 19th and 26th of July disabled workers across the country will be taking strike action (from 6am onwards) to oppose the coalition’s brutal attacks on their livelihoods. Please join the Socialist Party in showing solidarity with these workers by supporting the strike at their Leicester factory in Beaumont Leys (1 Boston Road).

On July 5, 2012, an important report making excellent suggestions for how Remploy can be run in a manner that benefits everyone (except perhaps greedy managers) was published titled “REMPLOY: A New Approach for the Sustainable Employment of UK Disabled People.” This report builds upon the Consortium of Trade Union’s other contribution published in January 2012: “A New Strategy for the Employment of Disabled People.” Taken together these reports mark the most recent attempt by the trade union movement to make Remploy work for all of us (disabled or not) and not just for fat cats. An intervention, which like all previous interventions, is yet again being steadfastly ignored by the government and Remploy’s managers.

Phil Davies, the national officer of the GMB, makes it clear in the foreword to the report, that far from Remploy factories acting as so-called employment “ghettos” (as they are described by some reactionary politicians), these factories actually provide “strong and positive communities uniting and supporting people.”

Attacks on Remploy’s ability to function effectively are longstanding, and Davies notes that the onslaught started in earnest when Michael Portillo “abolished the priority suppliers scheme” which led to a massive decline in Remploy contracts. (It is perhaps fitting that Portillo, the man who launched the government’s brutal attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in society, went on to become a non-executive director of the job-slashing bomb-makers BAE Systems.)

The report points out how in 1995 over 9,000 disabled people were working for Remploy, a figure that has now declined dramatically to less than 2,500. Over this time the number of factories was reduced from 95 to 54 (with 29 closing in 2008), but amazingly the number of senior managers increased from around 250 to over 400.

Likewise the salaries of these (mis)managers also increased disproportionately in relation to their employees. In fact while the average pay for an executive director was some £27,000 in 1992 it has now risen to a phenomenal £176,000! Meanwhile as a result of the factory closures in 2008 over 86% of the disabled workers who were thrown out of work by their ever-expanding bonus driven management are still tragically without jobs.

As one might expect, Remploy’s current board of directors is a veritable ruling class leviathan, with a chief executive (Tim Matthews) who came to this position after serving as the senior vice president of the engineering giant, Parsons Brinckerhoff; and a chairman (Ian Russell) who recently acted as the chief executive of Scottish Power. New Labour stalwarts get a look-in as well, with the deputy general secretary of the Community Trade Union (Joe Mann) residing on Remploy’s board room alongside charitable sector neoliberals such as Disability Rights UK’s chair Kate Nash.

Here it is important to observe that while Disability Rights UK bills itself as the country’s “leading pan-disability organisation” it is headed by the infamous Liz Sayce — the well paid author of last month’s sickening Sayce report, which provided further ideological ammunition to support the closure of Remploy factories.

In addition to being the chair of Disability Rights UK, Remploy board member Kate Nash is the former business development manager at the Employers’ Forum on Disability (launched in 1991 by Tory traditionalist, the Prince of Wales): a body whose current president is former Barclay’s head honcho John Varley. The Forum’s founder and chief executive, Susan Scott-Parker, is evidently proud of her role in enforcing austerity on the disabled as just last year she helped launch a consortium of eight national disability charities called Disability Works UK to help force the disabled into the government’s highly regressive ‘workfare’ schemes.

Join the Leicester branch of the Socialist Party in opposing such repressive attacks on the disabled and come down to support the strike outside Remploy’s Beaumont Leys factory (1 Boston Road) this Thursday.

For a rousing talk summarising recent Remploy attacks on workers given in March 2012 by Les Woodward at GMB’s National Equality Conference, click here. Also see the web site of the campaigning group Disabled People Against Cuts (which was formed in October 2010). Please send messages of support and solidarity to les.woodward@ntlworld.com and phil.davies@gmb.org.uk