It’s not just London: Visteon factories occupied
April 1st, 2009At risk of being lost in the G20 meltdown London protest flood comes the news that workers in Enfield and Northern Ireland have decided to occupy their factories in response to getting fucked over by Ford.
Yesterday workers at the 3 factories owned by Ford Cars subsidiary Visteon in Basildon, Enfield and Belfast were called into the offices by management at 2pm and laid-off with immediate effect. They were not even given time to collect their belongings or provided with any redundancy pay (other than an initial week’s wages that had been held back from them in the first place.
Visteon is a tax dodge that was set up by Ford in 2000. It has been variously used as a way by Ford for not providing normal legal provisions for workers. Recently, it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after shares dropped from 7c to 2c.
the workers demands are:
- Full back pay
- Full legal notice in compliance with UK law
- The same conditions of redundancy that Ford workers receive
October 25th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] Although the judge in this case called SSE out on their nonsense, the attempt itself shows that companies are ready to take this Act to places where they’ve succesfully used the Prevention of Harrassment Act. If a single picket can be branded a threat to “national security”, what about a whole group of them occupying their factory? [...]