By Joe Higgins; from Daily Mail, March 18, 2009
In February, Chief Executive Officer of SR Technics, Berndt Kessler, flew in from his Zurich Headquarters and told 1,150 workers at their Dublin aircraft maintenance facility that they were closing. With biting irony, Yvonne, a worker in the plant said in a letter to public representatives, ‘He was very nice about it, very sympathetic too, took him a whole 15 minutes to explain why, then just said if we have any questions to redirect them to our supervisors and managers, who by the way only found out 30 minutes before us.’
Mr Kessler blamed serious challenges facing the aviation industry and rejected any proposals to save the jobs. He suggested that aircraft maintenance in Dublin was too expensive. This is untrue but costs here were recently distorted by having to service very old Gulf Air planes which require far more staff hours than new aircraft. However, 157 modern Easy Jet aircraft were booked into Dublin over the next three years but SR Technics is now sending them elsewhere to suit its own corporate agenda.
The aircraft maintenance facility now being closed by SR Tecnics began its life as Aer Lingus Maintenance & Engineering, servicing its aircraft as part of the national airline. In 1989 it was hived off to be a separate entity called Team Aer Lingus. Thus began the road to its destruction.
Eleven years ago, on November 27, 2007, I challenged the then Fianna Fail Minister for Public Enterprise, Mrs Mary O’Rourke to come into Dáil Éireann to explain the Government’s position on the news that its management wanted ‘. . to sell off 100 per cent of TEAM Aer Lingus to a foreign concern, in other words, total privatisation, a total sell-out to a multinational company.’
I continued, ‘This privatisation proposal of TEAM Aer Lingus is utter treachery against a premier publicly-owned company of strategic importance, against a dedicated workforce whose skills and commitment have made this company a top quality aircraft maintenance firm. Proof is that its order books are full for this year and for next year………
Let us make no mistake, if they get away with it, whichever multinational giant comes in will have loyalty to one thing only, maximisation of their profit. . . . . When the Asian flu now convulsing the sick tigers in the East spreads to the West, which it inevitably will even if it takes years, maximisation of profits and new strategies will mean that these foreign multinational corporations will abandon this country and Dublin workers. . . . . Communities in north Dublin . . . will suffer badly. Swords, Balbriggan, Rush, Lusk, and The Naul are quaint Irish placenames when it comes to the offices of big multinationals in the United States and elsewhere, but no pity for Irish communities will determine their decisions.’
And so it has come to pass. Team Aer Lingus was sold to Danish FLS Aerospace in 1998 and again to Swiss based SR Technics in 2004. It didn’t take any special insight to see where the story would go.That is the brutal logic of neo liberal globalization which dictated privatization of public enterprises, meaning that the fate of millions of workers are dependent on the whim of vulture capitalists scouring the globe to maximize profits.
Minister O’Rourke responded to demands for no privatization with the usual weasel words, ‘I am concerned to ensure that the prospects for maintaining and strengthening employment opportunities at Team are maximized in the years ahead.’ She and her Fianna Fail colleagues should be arraigned for the economic treachery that has now threatened this jobs massacre.
This crucial facility, the tremendous skills of the staff and their jobs must not be lost. Yvonne also says in her letter, ‘This is a viable business, with orders on our books. SR Technics Zurich asset stripped us and we need to fight back. . .’
The giant maintenance hangars are still there, the workers are there, there are aircraft to be serviced. The entire facility should be taken back into public ownership. A structure of democratic management involving the workers at all levels should be constructed.
The Government won’t want to do this. The pathetically weak leadership provided so far for workers in this economic crisis by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions suggest that it won’t fight. But the workers themselves can take control of the agenda.
Before the hangars close and before a machine is moved anywhere abroad, they can occupy the plant and mount a massive campaign to put it up to the Government to undo what they did in 1998. With unemployment threatening to reach a half million, a fight to save thousands of jobs, directly and indirectly, would garner massive support among working people in Dublin and throughout the country.
CHECK OUT OTHER RELATED ARTICLES:
- Jobs Massacre At SR Technics A Direct Result Of Privatisation
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- State must launch a successor to Team Aer Lingus
- Hangargate – we need a publicly owned maintenance facility
- Save the jobs at Quinn Group – Bring the Group into public ownership
