Get lost, partner

If it had been more honest, it would have declared openly that offshoring offers a combination between technology and Third World wages to guarantee bumper dividends for its shareholders.

And the only losers in this best of all possible worlds are the nearly 1,000 workers in Norwich, Perth and York whose jobs will disappear.

True to form, as with all transnational corporations, Norwich Union Life chief executive Gary Withers blames his customers' continual search for "better value for money and quality of service" for boardroom greed.

How many Norwich Union customers have demanded that the company sacrifice jobs in this country in the search for better value for money?

And what evidence has Mr Withers for his claim that "quality of service" improves by transferring work to south Asia?

The company is one of those that claims to be in favour of "partnership" with trade unions - amicus in the case of Norwich Union - but such an aspiration has not survived the offshoring debacle.

After previously accepting the need for consultation and positive engagement with amicus, it altered its stance radically at the beginning of the month.

Union representatives were denied access to workplaces and even to on-site trade union offices in response to amicus opposition to plans to step up outsourcing.

It is clear that, for Norwich Union, partnership lasts while amicus accepts that its duty is to support corporate strategy. Failing that, "Get lost, partner."

But neither amicus nor any union worthy of the name could accept a policy of axing jobs here and investing in other countries on the spurious suggestion that profits made overseas would be further invested in jobs and skills in Britain.

Big business doesn't work that way. If Norwich finds it profitable to invest abroad, it will reinvest the further profits generated by its savings on salaries overseas too.

Its admission that it intends to slash 25 per cent of jobs in Britain by 2007 can leave no-one in any doubt about its intentions.

Norwich Union and other financial institutions are treading in the footsteps of other transnational corporations in the manufacturing sector that have turned their backs on their workforces in Britain, using profits made here to invest in cheaper facilities and lower wages overseas.

Many of these outfits pass themselves off as British companies, but they have no allegiance to anyone in this country.

Their Britishness extends only to requests that they make of the British government to back them in moments of difficulty.

Just as Jaguar workers have declared that they will fight against the eradication of their jobs in Britain, so finance and other sectoral employees will need to take a similar stand.

That will require not only a determined attitude in the workplace but a change in the neoliberal laissez-faire approach favoured by this government.