The founders of Britishvolt intended it to be a battery maker for electric cars, and secured funding to build a gigafactory in Northumberland. The firm thought it had found an ideal location with strong transport links.
Unfortunately, the business ran out of money and went into administration earlier this year, and the administrators sold the firm to an Australian startup, Recharge Industries. The buyer pledged £8.57 million total, with £6.1m paid upfront.
Recharge Industries fired the majority of Britishvolt staff but kept on 26 workers. It recently emerged that it hasn’t paid those staff in four months however, and half of them have left the company.
Those who do remain are apparently unable to work because the company hasn’t paid its IT contractors, who have locked Britishvolt staff out of their systems as a result.
This once again demonstrates the falseness of the idea that it’s capitalists who take on the majority of the risk when running a business. The staff who’ve been cheated out of their wages have likely had their finances devastated, and those who were fired will have been harmed too.
As anyone who’s had to work for a living knows, you don’t usually lose a job one day and walk seamlessly into another. There’s usually a period of stressful unemployment, where you drain your savings, possibly get into debt, and scramble to find new work.
The economy doesn’t have to function this way though. There’s enough useful work to go around for everyone, and enough resources to give everyone a secure living.
We should demand an economy with guaranteed full employment, where everyone is given useful and well paid work. When the economy is structured around what’s most profitable for private owners, however, that’s impossible. We need socialism.
