Enough is Enough - Give All Public Sector Workers a Decent Pay Rise Now

Rumours have been circulating ever since the Tory government lost its Parliamentary majority at this year’s general election, that the government is to re-think the 1% cap on pay rises for public sector workers. Today came news that the cap will be lifted from 2018-19 onwards for most public sector workers, with the exception of the police who will get a 2% rise and prison officers who will get a 1.7% rise. The Prison Officers Association, who represent those working in prisons, say 1.7% (inflation is at 2.9%) is not enough and will ballot for strike action. 

The government’s divide and rule strategy cannot be allowed to succeed when all public sector workers have suffered huge pay cuts since the Tories got into power in 2010, and introduced their unfair pay cap. The Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, is quoted in The Guardian as saying:

“In the first six years of Conservative rule, public sector pay rose by just 4.4% yet the cost of living soared by 22%, and to rub salt into those wounds, the pay of top bosses rose by a third in one year alone.”

The public sector unions support ending the pay cap, including those that represent health workers, teachers, civil servants and local government workers. Calls are being made to coordinate industrial action across the public sector, which threatens to bring the country to a standstill. Len McCluskey, the general secretary of UNITE said coordinated action from public sector workers was “very likely and very much on the cards”. He even said that unions might break the law on 50% turn out for strike ballots, introduced earlier this year by the government, which further tightens laws allowing industrial action.

If the 1% cap does remain in place, then the value of median public sector earnings will fall a further 3.9% behind inflation (CPI measurement, 6.9% on the old RPI measurement). Average earning across the economy as a whole are expected to rise by 8.5% meaning public sector pay will fall even further behind private sector comparators.

In addition, where I work, since 2010 pension contribution rates have increased and you need to work an extra five years to get the full value of your pension. On average these increases in pension contributions have reduced take home pay by around a further £1,000 per year.

To make matters even worse, there has been no incremental pay progression on pay scales. I have worked in the same job now for over four years, and I am still at the bottom of the pay scale. If someone on my grade were to start tomorrow, they would be on exactly the same pay as me, which doesn’t seem fair at all. It also means that those lucky enough to be higher on a pay scale than me, get paid more for doing the exact same work, with no prospect of this gap ever closing. This is all despite promises from management that the issue will be addressed since 2014.

We know that the Tory government has an ideological dislike of the public sector, and have privatised many services over the years, usually to the detriment of the services provided, where making a fast buck is the only thing that matters. The public service ethos, is at best, viewed as some sort of quaint relic of the past. But the fact remains, that public sector workers do try to do their best for the public that they serve, under extra pressure from spending cuts imposed by the government on providing these essential services.

Unless the government changes its tune, public sector workers will be more than justified in coordinating a massive withdrawal of their labour. It would demonstrate to the government, and to the public at large, just how vital the work they do is. One day without us, might be the slogan, or maybe one week without us will have a more forceful effect. Enough is enough, treat public sector workers with respect, and give us a long overdue decent wage rise, now.     

Victorian Era Diseases and Poverty Return to England

The Independent reports NHS statistics that show that cases of malnutrition have increased by 50% (from 4,883 cases to 7,366) since 2010, when the Conservative government (in coalition with the Lib Dems then) came to power in the UK. Other diseases from the Victorian era, including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have also increased since 2010.

The figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that in the worst affected areas, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, 2.4 people out of every 100,000 were admitted to hospital with a primary diagnosis of malnutrition.

The Trussell Trust, which runs a national network of Food Banks estimates that tens of thousands of people are going hungry, even with their and others efforts to distribute free food parcels.

The two major reasons people give for going to food banks are benefits problems (delays, sanctions and changes) and low incomes. There's evidence to suggest that the former has been exacerbated by the government's 'crackdown' on benefits claimants and their changes to social security. The latter reason, which explodes the myth of people being able to 'work their way out of poverty', reflects the fact that wages have stagnated in real terms for a decade now.

Chris Mould, chairman of the Trussell Trust said: “We often see parents who are going without food so that they can feed their children, and these parents often struggle to afford enough nutritious food for their children, too.”

Older people are a another group with increasing levels of malnutrition. Dianne Jeffrey, of the charity Age UK said:

“Estimates suggest there are at least one million older people who are malnourished or at risk of malnourishment and cuts to social care provision mean many older people are being left to cope on their own.”

Meanwhile, parts of London have higher rates of tuberculosis than Rwanda or Iraq, according to a report by the London Assembly. One in three boroughs in the capital suffer from high rates of TB, with more than 40 cases per 100,000 people and some wards in Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hounslow and Newham have rates of more than 150 per 100,000. The borough with the highest rate was Newham in east London, with 107 cases per 100,000 people. TB is often linked to homelessness, and there are an estimated over 7,000 homeless people in London.

Figures from the World Health Organisation in 2013 showed that the rate in Rwanda was 69, while in Iraq it was 45 per 100,000 people.

This news comes amid the government’s defeat in the House of Lords over the introduction of savage reductions in working tax credits, where the Institute for Financial Studies finds 8.4 million working age households who are currently eligible for benefits or tax credits and who do contain someone in paid work, the average loss from the cuts to benefits and tax credits is £750 per year. Of this 3 million people will be affected by an even worse £1300 per year.

The facts make a mockery of the frankly absurd claim by the Conservative government that they are ‘now the party for working people’, if anyone was ever fooled by this rhetoric in the first place. Taken with the government’s aim to return to a nineteenth century industrial relations policy, through the Trade Union Bill, it is clear where their sympathies lie, and it is not with low paid workers.

How shameful, that a country as rich as this one, should be regressing towards Dickensian levels of health and poverty in the twenty first century.

Workers are the Real Wealth Creators

The mainstream media are obsessed with making life easier for what they call ‘entrepreneurs’ who, they claim, are the creators of wealth in our economy. No stone is to be left unturned in the effort to encourage these individuals to ‘innovate’. Employment protection laws, commonly referred to as ‘red tape’ must be cut, legal protection though must be given to businesses in the form of copyrighting, trademarking and patenting and we must reduce corporate and individual taxes, or allow them to be avoided completely.

We will no doubt hear a lot about the ‘wealth creators’ at next week’s Tory party conference, as these most revered people are exalted from the podium by speaker after speaker. These individuals are treated like rock stars by the conservative and liberal politicians and media. They are the very essence of cool.

Now, I suppose you can see that some business people are genuinely ‘entrepreneurs’, the likes of the now deceased Steve Jobs at Apple or Bill Gates at Microsoft, in that they created something new which people like and want to buy in their millions. It should be pointed out though, that the adaptation of tech products that have proved so successful would not have been possible without the invention of the internet and world wide web, which originated in the public sector (for defence and espionage purposes). As well as fibre optic cable being invented by BT engineers in the days when it was still publicly owned.

But this wealth creator’s club membership has been expanded in recent years to include characters like Richard Branston, who has probably never had an innovative idea in his life, but through a flair for egotistical self publicity and a parasitical ability to exploit government contracts for providing public services, is being hailed as an ‘entrepreneur’.

Then we have our old friends the bankers. What do these people invent other than financial packages delivered sometimes through legal loop-holes (sometimes by outright fraud) in financial services regulations? They basically push money around the capitalist financial system and cream off a healthy profit for themselves. In what way is this entrepreneurial in any way?

One of the reasons that are often cited to justify the huge financial rewards on offer to ‘entrepreneurs’ is that they are ‘risk takers’ with their own money. What risk is Branston taking by taking over public service monopolies like railway travel? What is the risk for bankers when if it all goes wrong, the government (tax payers) step in and cover their losses, because the banks are ‘too big to fail?’

In the real economy, wealth is created by the workers who make products or provide services that people want. There is also a huge support network of other workers, transport workers, office cleaners, window cleaners and restaurant staff. Beyond this, there is an outer network, doctors, teachers, nurses, care staff, police, refuge collectors, security guards and communication workers. None of these people is given anything like the same acclaim as our ‘entrepreneurs’, but wealth creating is pretty much impossible without them?

Indeed, if these workers have the temerity take strike action, like London Underground staff which results in businesses losing money, the law must be tightened to make it more difficult for their unions to operate. The media wage a campaign of vilification against workers who just don’t know their place.

In his book Rebel Cities, David Harvey gives several examples (mainly in South America) of workers who cannot even afford to live in the cities that they serve, coordinating strike action that paralyses the city and slowly squeezes the life out of it. It takes something like this for the essential work that these workers do, to be recognised, and as Harvey points out, gives cities and their workforce revolutionary potential.

London is becoming so expensive to live in these days that we could have a similar scenario here in the not too distant future. If something like this happens in London, then we will discover who the truly important individuals are to wealth creation in the conurbation, and it won’t be those parasites who spend their time quaffing champagne and the rest, in the Square Mile.   

Tory Attacks on Trade Unions is Escalating a Class War

Ever since Edward Heath’s Tory government was brought down by the National Union of Miners (NUM) in the 1970s, the Tories have been determined to emasculate trade unions in the UK. 

Margaret Thatcher didn’t make the same mistake as Heath in the 1980s, devising a meticulously planned, and ultimately successful campaign to destroy the NUM as a force for working class advancement. All the powers of the state, including violence, were unleashed upon the union by the Thatcher government, which broke the 1984-5 strike and had a devastating affect on all workers’ confidence in the powers of trade unions to influence industrial relations.

Following Thatcher’s fall in 1990, the subsequent Major Tory government rammed home the message with employment legislation severely restricting union’s abilities to operate effectively. Laws on picketing and those requiring postal ballots before industrial action (including tough and expensive rules for record keeping which allow loop holes for employers to gain court injunctions against action) were introduced. New Labour only slightly liberated unions from these laws in 13 years in government.

Trade union membership has more than halved since the high point of the late 1970s in the UK, with the majority of members (around 6 million) employed in a shrinking public sector. The various privatisations and the increasing ‘flexibility’ of labour wrought by employment laws in this country make it difficult for unions to organise, compared to the life long, all working at the same factory model of those now distant days.

Where workers are employed on zero hours contracts, insecure temporary contracts or are involuntarily self employed, with scattered (often in their own homes) workplace locations, it is very difficult to organise and even convince people of the value of union membership.

Some of this changed landscape is down to technological change, internet, telephony etc which also leads to off shoring of some types of work. But mostly it is the legal and economic changes over forty years that have seen to the decline of union membership and effectiveness.

I would say that some of the unions have been slow to adapt to the new labour market and could have done more to recruit this disparate workforce, but this pales into insignificance compared to deliberate politically induced situation faced by them.   

The latest Tory attack is in the shape of the Trade Union Bill (2015), and will once again make even more difficult for unions to operate.

It will require that strikes are made unlawful unless 50% of those being asked to strike vote in the ballot and at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike in most key public services. This double threshold would have to be met in any strike called in health, education, fire, transport, border security and energy sectors – including the Border Force and nuclear decommissioning.

Further changes to the existing laws will:

Propose that unlawful picketing should become a criminal as opposed to civil offence and new protections should be available for those workers unwilling to strike.

Compel unions to renew any strike mandate with a fresh ballot within four months of the first ballot and give employers the right to hire strike-breaking agency staff as well as require a union to give the employer at least a fortnight’s notice before the industrial action starts.

Empower the government to set a limit on the proportion of working time any public sector worker can spend on trade union duties.

Give the government certification officer powers to fine trade unions as much as £20,000 for breaches of reporting rules including an annual audit on its protests and pickets.

Require a clear description of the trade dispute and the planned industrial action on the ballot paper, so that all union members are clear what they are voting for. This is riddled with loop holes for employers to exploit and get strikes ruled illegal.

End the ‘check off’ system whereby employees can have their union subs deducted from their wages by their employer.

With wages falling for most workers since 2003 in the UK and strikes at an all time low, and union membership in steady decline, and with inequality rising sharply, this is an ideological move by the government, pure and simple.

Rather than address the skyrocketing pay of company bosses, industrial scale corporate tax-avoidance, unscrupulous managers, exploitative employment agencies and the crippling effect of the supermarket monopoly, the government instead turns its fire on trade unions and seeks to regulate them out of all existence.

There appears to be a determination from trade union leaders that this Bill is indeed a ‘die in the ditch’ matter and civil disobedience, direct as well as industrial action is being talked about as a way to fight this assault on working people and their representatives.

All on the left in Britain should support the unions attempting to fight off this blatant opening of a class war by this nasty and vindictive government of the wealthy.   

How will we challenge and resist the Trade Union Bill

Corbyn mania was well in evidence at yesterday's Rally on resisting the Trade Union Bill. Corbyn supporters were leafleting outside the NUT's Hamilton House and pressing JC stickers on anyone and anything in the vicinity.

The Corbyn factor was clear from the beginning when Dave Prentis announced Unison was backing him for Labour leader and ended the rally when John McDonnell pledged that Corbyn would mount real opposition in this Parliament to the Bill and when elected to  power in 2020 would repeal all anti-trade union legislation.

Clearly Corbyn's campaign is still to be won and if he does win the problem of what to do about a Parliamentary Labour Party that failed to make a comprehensive stand against the Welfare Bill will loom large.

If he does not win and an austerity-lite candidate becomes leader what happens to the relationship between Labour and the unions?

Another issue that emerged during the speeches was the extent to which unions would be prepared to break the law. There was a sober warning towards the close about what happened previously when unions found their funds sequestered by a hostile Tory government.

Would the Labour Party back breaking an unjust law?

The details of the Trade Union Bill are still to come and there are likely to be amendments from both sides. The Green Party opposed previous anti-union legislation and are almost certain to oppose these both from within parliament and outside when they meet at Conference in September.