More job losses in Dunedin

So Cadbury has announced that 145 jobs are to go at its Dunedin plant – adding to the local redundancies already announced this year at Fisher & Paykel, Sealords, PPCS and Tamahine Knitwear.  As usual the employers are claiming that it’s all about remaining competitive in the global marketplace and maximising efficiency, and in a sense they are right – capitalism forces firms to produce goods more and more cheaply and that can only be achieved one of two ways – either through increased mechanisation, or through a reduction in the price of labour power.

What’s interesting about the job losses at Cadbury’s is that unlike (say) Fisher & Paykel and other firms that have looked to move production to lower wage companies they have instead announced an increase in investment in plant equipment and machinery in NZ and Australia – a classic example of what Marxists like to call a shift in the organic composition of capital.

So does this promise of more local capital investment make the redundancies any more acceptable, as the union official interviewed in the article linked to above seems to imply?  Definitely not!

The fact that fewer workers are now going to be working to produce more goods, with each individual employee generating a greater amount of surplus value for the capitalist directors and shareholders, means that the remaining workers are going to be more – not less – exploited.  Added to this of course the fact that a whole lot of workers no longer have any jobs at all, even though from a rational point of view there exists the same amount of work as there did before, and clearly this is hardly the rosy Panglossian scenario that some liberal bloggers would have us believe.

The irony is that long term even from a capitalist point of view the whole exercise is self-defeating, since the rising rate of constant as opposed to variable capital will lead to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Meanwhile as I pointed out during my 2007 Dunedin Mayoral campaign, the real scandal is that in recent years the city council has been doling out millions of dollars in rates relief to businesses like Cadbury’s which at the end of the day has proved to be only so much corporate welfare, contributing nothing to the lives of ordinary citizens!

Tags: Cadbury, Job Losses, Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall