LAYOFFS
Fifteen thousand workers marched into Dortmund, West Germany, in a recent demonstration, waving red flags and singing the “Internationale.”
The workers were coal miners protesting the mid-October announcement by Gelsenkirchener Bergwerk AG that it was shutting down the "Pluto" pit at Wanne- Eickel and the "Hansa" pit at Huckarde. About 5,400 men are slated to lose their jobs.
Neal Ascherson, writing in the November 5 London Observer, says that the “inefficiency and high prices" of the privately owned coal companies have "infected the mighty Ruhr steel industry, whose soaring costs are beginning to make German steel uncompetitive."
Government subsidies to private coal companies have doubled in the last year from US$112 million to US$224 million.
The stockpile of coal which can't be sold now stands at 28.5 million tons and will continue to grow as cheaper American coal invades the German market.
If the mine owners cut back production, as many as 70,000 jobs could be destroyed. It is this bleak prospect that has galvanized the miners into action.
At the end of their mid-October march they were met by the prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. They greeted him with whistles and boos.
The union officialdom have not demanded that the mines be nationalized, but have thus far limited themselves to a demand that the various coal companies be compulsorily consolidated into a single, private monopoly which they imagine would be more efficient and easier for the unions to deal with.
According to the Observer, union officials have agreed to the closing of the pits, but want it to be done "slowly in the course of five or six years."
So far new industries have failed to absorb the thousands laid off in the pits and to a lesser extent in the steel industry. Neither the mine owners, the government nor the present union leadership can promise the miners anything but an increasingly desperate spiral of permanent unemployment.
END OF THE ROAD FOR GRIPPA?
The "Communist Party of Belgium," headed by Jacques Grippa, was recognized at the time of its foundation as the largest and most important Maoist organization in Europe outside of Albania.
last June the Grippa group suffered a debilitating split when most of the Walloon members left, charging