The announcement of over 760 job losses at FG Wilson, an engineering company, originally locally-owned, taken over by The Caterpillar Corporation, in the Larne (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) area of the north-east of Ireland, shocks citizens.
It does not shock Alastair Hamilton, CEO of Invest NI, the government-funded body charged with promoting investment in Northern Ireland.
We're shocked at the numbers, but not about the trend. The trend is there right across the board.
John Ford's shocking film of John Steinbeck's great novel The Grapes of Wrath details the experiences of the Joad family of Oklahoma (35 degrees North, 97 degrees West), share-croppers in the early 1930s. They are driven off their meagre holding by the land-owning corporation.
Among the many shocking black and white images in the film are those of the Caterpillar bulldozers. The Cats pulverise crops, fields, roads, machinery and homesteads.
The Cats pulverise the families that look on, aghast. Shocked to the core.
As are the families of FG Wilson staff. But not the CEO of Invest NI.
Shocked.
If there was a law, they was workin' with maybe we could take it, but it ain't the law. They're workin' away our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, takin' away our decency.
Alastair Hamilton, the CEO of Invest NI, is presented by the media as a hard-headed business man. As if this was a good thing to be.
When asked if he would have made the same decision to move some of the manufacturing to China he said: If I was in that job, in all possibility, yes.
The CEO is a free market ideologue, in a well-paid, publicly funded, government job, paid for by taxpayers, including the sacked FG Wilson staff.
One of his tasks is to 'rebalance' the economy, which is the current euphemism for the shifting of public money into fewer and fewer private hands.
There is pressure to lower corporation tax, which amounts to an award to global corporations like Caterpillar, enabling them to coalesce and repatriate profits from a most-favourable tax environment.
FG Wilson do exactly what the CEO of Invest NI advises manufacturing companies to do: succeed in export markets. Then Caterpillar comes in and pulverises them. They find a local competitor in FG Wilson, exporting diesel generators to markets in the east, buy them over and close them down.
Unemployment in Northern Ireland is running at about 8.2%, the highest in the U.K.. It is even higher among young people.
The CEO of Invest NI presents no regard for the human consequences of the actions he advocates from a secure position of power and privilege. His remarks are as heartless as the treads of a Cat bulldozer.
Will there be any FG Wilson aka Caterpillar engineering workers in the north-east of Ireland in five years time?
Resist the wrath of the Cats. Don't buy the boots. Or the bulldozers.
They trample all over families.
Moreover, these flexions are taking place every where, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:
The Grapes of Wrath: film; John Ford; Twentieth Century Fox; 1940
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19596343
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: book; James Agee and Walker Evans; Peter Owen Limited; London; 1965
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