Vol. 75/No. 29      August 8, 2011

The announcement came after the company lost a £1.4 billion ($2.3 billion) government bid to upgrade the Thameslink rail network. The bid went to Siemens, which will produce the trains in Germany.

The ax comes down on these workers amid high unemployment and deep-going government austerity measures, including layoffs of public workers. Official unemployment stands at 2.45 million people. The number of people working part-time because they cannot find full-time work rose by 80,000 to 1.25 million, the highest figure since records began in 1992.

The capitalist rulers across Europe and elsewhere are united in their determination to foist the crisis of their exploitative system on the backs of working people. Meanwhile, rivalry among them, including those “united” in the European Union, is sharpening, along with accompanying nationalist demagogy.

Bombardier, itself a Canadian-owned company, has played up the bid loss to Siemens in an effort to divert workers’ anger from the company and its profit-maximizing decisions. Union officials, the capitalist media, and opposition politicians echo Bombardier’s rationalizations, issuing reactionary nationalist calls to save “British” jobs and “British” industry—pitting workers in the United Kingdom against those in Germany.

“Whitehall [the UK government] did not have ‘balls or brains’ to beat Germans,” was the headline on an article in the Derby Telegraph, a local newspaper.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond says that under European Union regulations, they “had no choice but to announce [Siemens] as the preferred bidder.”

According to BBC, some 6,000 people marched through Derby July 23 backing Bombardier. Speakers at the rally included Bombardier’s UK chairman, Colin Walton; Derby South Member of Parliament Margaret Beckett; Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT (railworkers) union; and Diana Holland, assistant general secretary of the Unite trade union.
 
 
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Striking building workers rally in Queens, N.Y.  
 
 
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