Monday, June 24, 2019

lucas plan

Factories in Willesden and Birmingham,
Not where you’d go unless you got paid,
To build parts for bombers and tanks,
For this is where these were made;
And those who made those weapons knew,
What the things that they made could do,
To men and women like them.
But then again,
You must sell what you can sell,
To pay for food and a roof as well.
The system that sets a worker’s price
Isn’t ever kind or nice,
And in the case of Lucas Aerospace
Compassion had no place
In such calculations
So redundancies were the fix
Applied in nineteen seventy-six.
The workers’ unions would not comply,
 ‘We can still work’, they said, and they asked why
They couldn’t now make machines
Not intended to kill and burn
‘We could design the blades that turn
With the wind to make clean power
Devise car engines that make fewer fumes
We could be building kidney machines,
Be saving lives not taking’.
And none of this was just wild dreams
Because they built the prototypes
Of socially useful technology.
But Management refused to see
And only words and sympathy
Came from Labour and the TUC.
So, it all amounted to a might have been,
But one that some still remember
To remind us that we could have seen,
Instead of planetary destruction driven by greed,
A world where workers control their work
And produce for human need.





No comments: