This week, high street giant Arcadia, owners clothing shops such as Burton, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge went into administration. With 13,000 jobs in the balance, retail workers in these stores will be rightly concerned about what this will mean for them, only a few weeks before Christmas.
Arcadia workers will also rightly be concerned about what this means for their pension scheme, which already faced a £350 million deficit. For workers below the retirement age, this could mean at least a 10% cut to their pensions even after being placed in the Pension Protection Fund.
At the same time, the threat of job losses at Debenhams has re-emerged, with JD Sports pulling out of a potential takeover after a brief statement saying “discussions with the administrators of Debenhams regarding a potential acquisition of the UK business have now been terminated”. This is, in part, a knock-on effect of the crisis in Arcadia, which was an important concession holder for Debenhams.
Already this year, Debenhams announced it was going into liquidation, without even any concern for its workers – announcing over 6,000 jobs cut in the first half of 2020. At the same time, the company closed all its stores in Ireland, sacking 1,000 workers in the process. The latest announcement now puts a further 12,000 jobs at risk. In total, over 25,000 high street jobs are on the line.
2020 has seen a rapid acceleration of the high street collapse, initially started by the rise of online retail giants such as Amazon. What was once a slow move online has been transformed into a brutal slashing of jobs in the retail sector. The furlough scheme has proven that it is unfit for purpose, and has failed to protect tens of thousands of workers.
Socialist Alternative actively supported action from Debenhams workers earlier this year fighting against the announced redundancies. And our sister organisation, the Socialist Party in Ireland, has been directly involved in the heroic, ongoing struggle of workers of Irish Debenhams workers for a decent settlement. The example of the Irish Debenhams workers should be built upon, with protests and where necessary strike action and workplace occupations to defend jobs and fight callous layoffs.
Debenhams and Arcadia must open their books to the workers to show where the money has gone. In 2015, Arcadia Group, owned by multi-millionaire retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, famously sold off the failing BHS department store for £1, but not before Green took £400 million out of the company for himself! In addition, Green himself should be forced to plug the gap in the pensions deficit to ensure full pay to the workers, many of whom have worked for Arcadia for decades.
If the company’s accounts are opened to scrutiny, it will be abundantly clear that even after government bailouts during the pandemic, this money has been squandered. Instead of parasites such as Green, it should be the workers who own and who make the decisions about how the company is run. The big companies threatening job losses during this crisis must be taken into democratic public ownership, under workers control and management. Likewise, furlough payments should be paid directly to the workers, rather than to keep the bosses afloat, and should be topped up to cover full wages.
This is just the latest development in an ongoing wave of redundancies which low paid retail and hospitality workers have found themselves on the sharp end of, and which is predicted to leave 2.6 million workers unemployed over the next 6 months. It is abundantly clear that the market is incapable of protecting the jobs of ordinary people. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we get organised to defend jobs and fight the jobs massacre that is taking place.
