BY HAJERA BLAGG
STOP THE NIGHTMARE Labour would take action to protect UK firms like Thomas Cook
When travel firm Thomas Cook went bust on September 23, it was as though British workers had been beset yet again by a recurring nightmare.
Home retailer BHS, construction giant Carillion, airline Monarch, café chain Patisserie Valerie – the list of companies collapsing, taking down with them thousands of jobs, goes on.
Though the reasons for their failures may have differed, they all had one thing in common – a government refusing to intervene to protect ordinary workers, while executives and accountancy firms swooped in to pick at the carcass of once successful firms.
That every single Thomas Cook subsidiary airline in mainland Europe continues to operate today, while the vast majority of Thomas Cook UK airline workers remain jobless, reveals a Tory government wilfully failing to act.
With intervention from their governments Thomas Cook Scandinavia and German subsidiary Condor continue to fly.
The profitable Thomas Cook UK airline, meanwhile, immediately went to the wall after the British government refused a £138m financial guarantee. Instead, the Tory government chose the option vastly
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more costly to the taxpayer, spending hundreds of millions of pounds repatriating stranded holidaymakers.
A business select committee inquiry revealed shocking indifference at the very top levels of government – in the days leading up to the Thomas Cook collapse, not one minister contacted the firm.
Thomas Cook’s top bosses raked in millions in bonuses, the inquiry also found, while a Unite survey in November revealed that 93 per cent of former workers still have not found work with another airline, with 67 per cent not having secured any work at all. Respondents told of extreme hardship and delays to Universal Credit payments.
“Highly skilled and dedicated workers, who lost their jobs through no fault of their own and without warning are finding it incredibly difficult to return to employment,” said Unite assistant general secretary Diana Holland.
“The struggle of workers to return to employment further highlights both the government’s failure to understand the nature of the Thomas Cook business and a complete absence of political will.”
And it’s precisely political will that a Labour government will deliver to ensure
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another failure of corporate governance, paid for invariably by workers and consumers alike, never happens again.
This was an cast iron pledge Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reiterated at a Unite Thomas Cook rally outside Parliament in October. “[Labour] might not be in government yet, but I say this to you – any problem like this in the future, a Labour government will intervene; it will protect a public asset; it will protect jobs,” he said. “And a Labour government would protect a company with such a great name as Thomas Cook, which after all was publicly owned for a very long time.”
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Any problem like this in the future, a Labour govern- ment will intervene; it will protect a public asset; it will protect jobs. A Labour government would protect a company with such a great name as Thomas Cook, which after all was publicly owned for a very long time
Jeremy Corbyn MP Labour leader
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Mark Thomas
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