Pawns in rich man's game

As far as the Cadbury board is concerned, they have what they wanted - an increase in the share bid, which benefits shareholders and leaves 7,000 workers in fear of their future.

The higher price that Kraft has been forced to fork out may well be a necessary sweetener for Cadbury's corporate shareholders, but it will also provide a stimulus to the new owners to cut back on labour costs as a means of trimming its existing massive debts.

As with, most recently, the abandonment of Corus steelworkers on Teesside and Bosch car components workers in Miskin near Cardiff, workers are treated as numbers on a balance sheet.

Bosch was bribed with £21 million of Welsh Development Agency money to site its factory in the Vale of Glamorgan.

And it won't have to return a penny of this after blaming mythical "market forces," in the shape of lower orders for the alternators that its Miskin factory produces. But there doesn't seem to be such an orders problem for its plant in Hungary, to which the work of the 900 Miskin employees will be transferred, no doubt because wages there are about two-thirds of those in Wales.

In short, the workers in Wales have been sacrificed on the altar of Bosch corporate profits.

Tata, the India-based conglomerate that owns Corus, is in an even more fortunate situation with regard to its closure of Teesside.

It stands to gain about £160 million in the financial charade that is the market in carbon emissions trading by dint of closing Teesside and eradicating the plant's output of greenhouse gases. And it could then double this sum by investing in a new facility in India, replacing an existing heavy-polluting steelworks with a state-of-the art "green" plant.

The beauty of this wealth-creation scheme is its simplicity. Public finance from European Union governments is transformed into megaprofits for a major transnational corporation and the only losers are the 1,700 workers on Teesside.

In what way will Kraft's takeover of Cadbury be any different from Corus and Bosch?

Once again, the entire deal has been done with no involvement of the 7,000 Cadbury workers or their union Unite and, once again, the workers know that neither the company nor the British government gives a toss about their predicament.

They must also be aware that Gordon Brown's suggestion that the government is "determined" that investment levels in Cadbury will be maintained and that jobs there will be secure is nothing more than an outburst of hot air.

He cannot order Kraft to do so because he and his government have been strident in their advocacy of non-interference in the private sector.

Private manufacturers have had carte blanche, just like private bankers, to concentrate entirely on the bottom line and to ignore social factors such as unemployed workers, devastated communities and an increasingly deindustrialised Britain.

As Unite national officer Jennie Formby says, events at Kraft and, in fact, throughout Britain's economy, are dictated by "short-term City interests and institutional shareholders."

Until that is changed and government adopts an interventionist manufacturing strategy, including increased public ownership, workers in Britain will continue to be pawns in a rich men's game.