the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 18, 2013
The following is a statement of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the revolutionary workers organization active in France:
After ArcelorMittal announced big losses, the Peugeot (PSA) bosses did the same–a loss of 6.7 billion dollars announced on February 12. How handy to get people to believe that PSA can’t do anything but close factories and lay workers off. Except that most of the loss–6.3 billion dollars–is an accounting trick that, according to PSA’s financial director, will allow it to start up on a “healthy basis.” And he adds that these losses are “reversible, so if the economic outlook gets better, we’ll do a reverse accounting trick.”
In other words, they cook the books! For example, they write off 400 million dollars as closing costs at Aulnay-sous-Bois and getting rid of 11,000 jobs. In reality, at the end of 2012, PSA had 14 billion dollars in “financial security,” an increase of almost two billion dollars for the year. Its financial statement declared, “the financial structure of the industrial and commercial companies is solid.”
Whatever they say to justify getting rid of jobs, the PSA corporation is hardly penniless. Even if its management juggles with billions of dollars of the company’s money, we can’t let them juggle with the jobs of Peugeot-Citroën workers!