Statement by Mersey Port Shop Stewards' Committee
The latest recruits to come to the aid of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC) against the 500 sacked Liverpool dockers are Professor Patrick Minford and Professor Peter Stoney, of the University of Liverpool's Economics Department. When the Merseyside Port Shop Stewards held the international dockworkers' conference, the employers took out several full-page adverts in the 'Liverpool Echo' and the 'Liverpool Post' to spread more lies and half-truths about the strike.
On 29 February Minford and Stoney, were wheeled out as 'innocent bystanders' to add weight to MDHC, the Chamber of Commerce, the shipowners, freight-forwarding companies and the chartered shipbrokers who demand that the sacked dockworkers call off their action. Increasingly desperate, the employers, terrified of the international solidarity actions decided by dockers around the world, try to spread black propaganda about the true nature of the issues involved in the struggle.
Who are these Professors?
Amazingly, these gentlemen present themselves as people 'with no axe to grind'! Coming from two of the most reactionary economists in the land, that takes some cheek. Minford has been one of the longest-serving and most strident advocates of Thatcherism, a man who pontificates on workers' rights while himself having two wage packets - he is also Visiting Professor at the Business School, University of Wales, Cardiff. Stoney also has (at least) two wage packets: this 'innocent bystander' is on a retainer with none other than MDHC!
At least no one can accuse Professor Minford of jumping on to the Thatcherite bandwagon. He was there from the start - a close adviser to the Baroness's court long before she became Prime Minister. He claims to speak in the name of reason, but he is an advocate of what is laughingly called the 'rational expectations' school of economics. Behind this high-sounding name stands utter reaction.
For Minford, Stoney and their ilk are complete worshippers of 'the market'. They say:
If only markets were allowed to work efficiently all economic problems would disappear. It is only malcontents, like the sacked dockers, who insist on trying to interfere with the operations of the 'free market', who cause economic problems.
If there is unemployment this is due entirely to the fact that workers meddle with the 'proper' workings of the market. They have the audacity to form trade unions to try and defend their wages and conditions. They have the impudence to refuse the dictates of the employer for slave wages and the conditions that go along with them.
That is why these Professors along with the rest of their right-wing friends, demand 'flexible labour markets', where workers are stripped of all rights and protection from either unions or the law. Minford worked with the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and the Institute of Directors. The CPS was founded in 1974 by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph to combat Edward Heath's U-turn in front of working class resistance to his anti-union legislation. The Centre became the home of a group whose aim was to place Thatcher at the head of the Tory party. It was while he was working for CPS that Nicholas Ridley drew up the Ridley plan against the miners.
It is Minford's and Stoney's sort of economics that celebrates the low-wage economy, individual short-term contracts and the withdrawal of welfare benefits. They advocate the drive to casualisation, where employers can hire and fire as they want, take people on for longer or shorter periods as they see fit and sack any 'militants' who interfere with their plans.
That is why, despite all their protestations of 'neutrality', they thoroughly approve of what the port employers are aiming to do. In the case of Stoney: for a number of years he has given evidence on behalf of MDHC to justify their applications for European grants of millions of pounds. In 1992 the Professor was paid by MDHC to produce a report for a further application for millions of pound of European taxpayers' money to fill the coffers of that company. In his report he estimated that the port of Liverpool, owned by MDHC, generated between 49,000 and 105,000 Jobs on Merseyside. He said that once the government grant aid and the Euro-money was given to the company, the additional trade generated by its programme would lead to the creation of between 9,000 and 23,000 jobs on Merseyside and 29,000 to 76,000 jobs throughout Britain.
In evidence given to the inquiry in February 1996 to justify MDHC's need for the grants, Stoney produced the 'basic Keynesian income multiplier model' thus:
[Lengthy mathematical formula. Can't be reproduced in HTML 2.0]
Working class families and their needs are reduced to algebraic formulae!
We challenge Stoney: where are the jobs generated by the millions pumped into MDHC? If the company is so keen to create lobs why have 500 dockers been sacked? What 'jobs' do they want to create? Casual jobs! Where workers should be thankful for one or two days a week and then sign on for the rest. So the taxpayer not only gives the company grants, but is forced to pay benefits to casual workers!
Even on government figures there is 18-per-cent unemployment in Merseyside and every week more people are made redundant. So who does the grant money benefit? The 'rational expectations' of these Professors and their paymasters mean that they consider the dockers and their families to be irrational when they refuse to put up with the debilitating effects of the domination of the 'free market'.
At the international dockworkers' conference Doreen McNally, speaking for the dockers' wives and partners said:
'In 1989 Mersey Docks and Harbour Company began a programme of demoralisation of the workforce. their aim was to return to the cheap casual labour of Victorian times. The men were constantly threatened with dismissal if they didn't agree to sign contracts, accepting disgraceful working conditions.'
'They intruded in our family lives, with daily telephone calls. Sometimes men had only been at home four or five hours. If they couldn't contact them by phone, they would send hand-delivered messages that were often left with neighbours if you were out The men were quizzed about their whereabouts, as though they were accountable 24 hours a day.'
'Social lives came to a halt, because arrangements were constantly being cancelled due to pressure of work. The men suffered noticeable personality changes commented on by family and friends. They became irritable and were always tired and depressed. Continuous 12-14 hour shifts, daily changes from days to nights, or being rung in the early hours to come into work, or twilight shifts, upsetting their body clocks and general health and their families struggling with the knock-on effects this has on family life.'
Minford's and Stoney's economics are a fraud. For the 'free market' they worship is a world market dominated by a handful of financiers, speculators and big business chiefs. Far from being 'rational' it is this capitalist market that is plunging the world into increasing chaos and irrationality. Just look at some of the results of the Professors' much-vaunted 'market economy'!
Of the world's 5.6 billion people, one in five live in poverty (UN definition below $275 per year). After 50 years of World Bank 'development plans' over 1.5 billion lack access to clean drinking water or basic sanitation.
London has 40,000 registered homeless; nearly a quarter of a million of New Yorkers have stayed in shelters over the last five years, including more than one in 12 of its black children. Over 26 million people in the US are on food stamps - one in ten of the population.
Of the planet's nearly 3 billion labour force, there are 120 million people actively looking for work without result or hope. Technical changes in production, dominated as they are by the needs of capital, far from bringing the 'affluent society' nearer, are destroying jobs in the 'rich' and the 'poor' countries alike.
This is the corrupt and immoral system that Minford and Stoney defend. Let us look at the charges that these 'scholars' have levelled against the dockers.
CHARGE 1 They say that the dockers are wrecking the Merseyside economy and threatening the livelihood of thousands of workers.
FACTS: 1. It is the labour of generations of Merseyside portworkers along with all other workers that has built up the wealth of the area. It is MDHC, along with its backers, that has sacked tens of thousands from the Mersey ports and brought unemployment and misery to thousands of ordinary people. 2. It is international capital, with its insatiable drive for profit that is wrecking the whole world economy, never mind Merseyside as the above figures show.
CHARGE 2
Minford and Stoney allege that the dockers are only holding out 'so they can force the company into granting them yet bigger payments.' (Fine words from two-job professors!)
FACTS:
This is a blatant lie. Many of the dockers were offered and refused even more than 25,000 pounds over the last few years to sell their jobs. Throughout the dispute the dockers and their families have made it crystal clear that their jobs are not for sale at any price.
That is why the fight in Liverpool is not just for the present generation. It is a fight for our children and all those, yet unborn, who will follow them. It is this fight of the working class to defend all the conquests of the past that alone can ensure a rational, decent and human future for working people in Liverpool, Britain and throughout the world.
So the dockers and their allies throw Minford's and Stoney's charges back in their face. It is not the dockers, but these Professors and the employing class, whose faithful servants they are, who confront the world with barbarism.
The dockers who attended the international conference in Liverpool from 17-23 February came because they too are facing privatisation, casualisation and anti-trade union laws to deprive them of the right to defend their jobs and their families.
That is why the fight against these Professors' rationalism, the rationalism of capitalism in decay, is winning the hearts and minds of workers throughout the world.
People like Minford and Stoney will never understand this!
