notes from the visteon rally – enfield

By Joe Thorne

At 2pm last Tuesday, 565 workers at three sites of Visteon, a car component manufacturer tied to Ford, were given six minutes notice of redundancy.  They did not get their last week’s pay, though it turned out that the Friday before around four or five hundred quid had been deposited in each of their accounts in place of redundancy pay.  The same night, Belfast workers occupied their factory demanding jobs or proper compensation.  And the next morning,1st April, appropriately just before midday, workers at Enfield standing around outside, waiting to collect their things, decided to seize the moment and take over their site too. A side door was either found open or broken down, and the occupation begun.

voices from the visteon/ford occupation

On Tuesday March 31^st workers at Visteon factories – making car parts for Ford brands – across the UK were told that Visteon Corp could no longer prop up the UK branch, and so they would all lose their jobs with immediate effect. That night a hundred workers at a plant in west Belfast occupied their workplaces, and the next day were followed by their colleagues in Enfield (north London) and Basildon in Essex. We spoke to a number of the workers involved in the sit-in at Enfield, and have gathered some of the occupiers’ comments below.

“I’ve been working here for nineteen years. I’ve always been working for Ford and we were Ford workers, but in 2000 this place was farmed out to Visteon. At the time the union signed a deal with the chairman of Ford Motor Company to guarantee all Ford workers the same terms and conditions under Visteon. We had a contract with Ford. They’ve broken it. It’s disgusting. Can’t they see that we had a contract and we need them to stick to it? It was signed by the union – I was at first in the AEU, but now it’s Unite – and what we’re demanding is that Ford sticks by their side of the agreement. We don’t want any trouble – there’s been lots of redundancies before, down from around 1100 when I started to around 220 today – and it was always voluntary redundancies. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to say yes sir, thank you sir, and lie down and let them walk all over us. We’re staying until they honour their side of the deal”.