London: Picket in solidarity with Ford-Visteon workers in Spain

Location: Brownes of London 349-351 Norwood Road, Brixton, London SE27 9BQ
Time: Friday, August 19 · 3:00pm - 6:00pm

This is a picket as part of an international day of solidarity with workers at the Ford-Visteon factory in Cádiz, Spain, who are fighting against the closure of their car factory and their subsequent redundancies.

Visteon are claiming that the factory's closure is necessary due to bankruptcy, but this fools no one. They tried the same trick in 2009 in the UK, when Visteon bosses created new businesses in order to transfer their profits being closing all three of their factories. It was an attempt to avoid paying severance or pensions to their employees, but the factory workers responded by occupying the sites in Enfield, Basildon and Belfast. They received their severance but are still struggling for their legally-entitled pension contributions in the European Court in Strasbourg. In Spain, the workers, many of whom are with the anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT, don't buy Visteon's tales of financial hardship, remembering that Visteon itself is a subsidiary of Ford. This is why we believe that it is ultimately Ford themselves who are responsible for this sleight of hand, which we see as an attempt to cheat their workers.

This is a picket organised by Solidarity Federation, the British section of the International Workers Association (IWA), in solidarity with the CNT, our Spanish sister section. We are a revolutionary union initiative which seeks to create a new world, democratically controlled by its inhabitants.