workers | ukwatch.net

Support and strength

tim — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:10:09 +0000

Unite general secretary Derek Simpson hit the nail on the head in arguing: “If people feel that they can get the kind of support and strength that they need from a union, I don’t think they mind what you call it.”

Trade unions exist to do a basic job – to defend workers’ pay and conditions.

They can and do take on other responsibilities and fringe benefits – everything from credit cards to concessionary insurance rates; but securing the best price for members’ labour power and safeguarding their health, safety and workplace respect is always the priority.

If Unite members are convinced that merging with the large north American union USW will assist them in that task, they will jump at the opportunity.

And, certainly, at a time when a relatively small number of transnational corporations are dominating global production, anything that minimises the prospect of national trade unions accepting the “reality” of a race to the bottom to price members into a job is welcome.

These corporations must be laughing all the way to the bank to see unions in one country after another agreeing to cut corporate costs; basic pay, fringe benefits, overtime rates etc – in a bid to persuade them not to relocate overseas.

If international union mergers can ensure a co-ordinated principled approach, they can only be positive.

However, there are two major phenomena that will work to undermine the principles of internationalism and working class solidarity.

One is the existence of stultifying anti-trade union legislation, especially in Britain and the US, and the other is trade unions’ poverty of ambition.

Solidarity action is specifically outlawed in the US and Britain, forcing workers in struggle to fight employers with one hand behind their backs.

Employers can ship in scabs from elsewhere in the country or from overseas. They can act in concert to undermine industrial action.

But woe betide any set of workers who act out of natural decency to try to tilt the balance of power in favour of members of their own union who are out on strike.

Think back to the efforts by workers at Heathrow airport who showed solidarity with the Gate Gourmet strikers and the storm of rage generated by employers, the media and the Labour government.

New Labour is now on the bones of its backside, abandoned by increasing numbers of its once generous boardroom donors and sinking into debt-laden oblivion.

Unions are ready and willing to bail Labour out, but they still seem to accept that Labour is only electable if it pursues Tory-style policies and gives up on any demands for real justice.

And previous union leaders who have copped the ermine, such as Baroness Prosser, are the most strident in rejecting the case for trade union freedom and for close Labour-union links.

The ability of a merged Unite-USW international union to punch its weight and to affect salaries, conditions and investment policies on a global basis will be enhanced by the capacity of its constituent parts to operate freely and effectively on their home turf.

A trade union freedom Bill in Britain is not only a prerequisite for effective international trade union solidarity but for domestic social justice too.

A Price still to be Paid

Ellie Keen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:07:23 +0000

(Sunday 27 April 2008)

AS any labour movement activist will tell you, it is always useful, when facing an important event in the trade union calendar, to have some small preparatory events to publicise the major item in advance to make others aware of the event and book the date.

There is one date in the movement’s calendar, however, that no trade unionist wants to see marked in that manner and that is Workers Memorial Day.

Unfortunately, it is the one date on which one can almost always expect to see related and, in this case, unwanted events happening.

This year, the weekend before today’s memorial was marked by the deaths on building sites of two, as yet unnamed, workers, who met their end by falling to their deaths from London sites.

They were both men in their twenties and they will leave grieving families and friends who will be left with a gap in their lives which will never be filled.

They will be remembered on Monday, but remembrance is simply not enough for them.

Nor is it enough for the other 220 to 250 people in Britain who the Health and Safety Executive estimates will die each year as a result of their work.

Neither is remembrance sufficient for the 20,000 to 50,000 people who die each year of illnesses caused by work-related ill health, including respiratory diseases, various cancers and heart disease.

UNISON is demanding that Workers Memorial Day should be officially recognised as a national day of remembrance, and that is only right and proper.

But much more is required. Rail and road drivers, pilots and shipping staff can be, and are, held responsible for deaths resulting while people and equipment are in their charge.

Prosecutions occur frequently and stiff sentences are handed out for any negligence uncovered.

But, as construction union UCATT points out, only around 30 per cent of companies involved in killing a construction worker are ever convicted of an offence and that statistic is broadly typical across the whole spectrum of British industry.

And, despite the recent introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter Act, it remains virtually impossible for a company director whose negligence causes the death of a worker to be jailed.

Scottish Trades Union Congress general secretary Grahame Smith has accurately described the new law as a “fudge,” pointing out that this legislation will not allow for prosecution of individuals, but only of the company and, “even then, only if the failures of a senior manager can be identified.” UCATT described it as “the dampest of damp squibs.”

There has always been public outrage at the repeated collapse of prosecutions over disasters such as the Southall rail crash.

And organisations such as Families Against Corporate Killings and the Construction Safety Campaign can attest to the private anger that has been generated among the families of victims.

But, somehow, the HSE and the government always wriggle out of making bosses personally liable to punishment, claiming difficulty in allocating individual responsibility.

Yet it should not be difficult. Decisions on how much of a company’s resources are spent on the health, safety and welfare of staff are made at directoral level.

And it is at the level where the decisions are made that the buck should stop – where a boss weighs the firm’s profits and workers’ lives in the balance and decides that the cost of a worker’s life is insufficient reason to curtail company profits.

Waged London: photographer Larry Herman on his new project

JamieSW — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:40:33 +0000

Larry Herman was born in New York, and moved to Britain during the Vietnam War. Since then he has lived in Glasgow and Sheffield, but mostly in London.

At art school Larry trained as a sculptor. He started taking photographs in his mid-20s and has since produced several books.

In the early 1980s he stopped photography to work in steel mills, foundries and on London Underground. He returned to professional photography in 1993.

His most recent book, Land, Land, Land! looks at the living conditions for rural African Americans in the US South.

What prompted you to start the Waged London project?

I always need something to do that I think is important, something with enough scope to occupy me for the several years I take to work on my independent projects. Clearly our period of time is marked by war – but it is also marked by mass migration.

According to the United Nations, today there are more people living in towns and cities than there are living in the countryside. That will have a profound effect in the future. We are living in a world where more and more people have no other means of sustenance than selling their labour.

I’m from New York, and when I was a child New York and London used to compete for the title of the biggest city in the world.

Now they are mid-ranking cities as other huge cities have grown – though London is still one of the “heartland” cities of the world, of course.

So millions of people are being economically compelled off the land and towards the cities. They will starve to death unless they accept being forced into selling their labour.

I wanted to put that process of people selling their labour in the centre of this project. So I photograph wherever people work. I define that quite widely, but all the photographs in the project will relate to people’s working experiences in some way.

What sort of difficulties have you encountered with the project?

I had to narrow the project down, so I chose to focus on people who sell their labour by the hour, rather than salaried workers – though, at one level, that is a false demarcation.

Initially the project was called Low Wage London, but I felt that title was too subjective. For instance, I met a family with six low incomes that when combined meant they did OK. In contrast a family with one income of £18 an hour would be really struggling.

I have come across difficulties taking pictures of people in work. Managers have a lot to hide and often simply don’t want me around. Getting access can be difficult.

I don’t want to put people in any sort of jeopardy with their employer.So I do a lot of photographing from the rear or with people’s faces hidden. I also don’t photograph people without their permission and I deliberately don’t use names or even identify specific workplaces.

It’s beyond my comprehension how a person can be “illegal”. I don’t care whether they’re here with the sanction of the state or not. People have a right to be where they are simply on the basis that that’s where they are.

Is the Waged London project partly about bringing the hidden into view?

Many migrant workers certainly are hidden from view – but so, in a way, is everyone who sells their labour. The media keep us all hidden – most notably during strikes, but also in many other ways and on a daily basis.

When images of working people do emerge, they tend to be shown as entertainment, or as victims, or as people who just produce distress and heartache for us all.

For example, Africa is full of intense political activity. Millions of people struggle every day to organise a better society that can meet the needs of everyone. All of this is either ignored or reported in a way that portrays people as helpless, as passive victims and nothing more.

I am in awe of people’s dignity – the dignity that comes from an ability to put two feet on the floor every morning, but also from the determination to resist and organise.

How do your political convictions fit into your work as a documentary photographer?

I am inspired by the world as it is. I see myself as a political person who happens to be a photographer. I define myself politically.

Of course, I also have ideals of how the world should be, but my motivation and inspiration come from the reality of the world.

As a social documentary photographer, I am recording my the world around me as part of the process of influencing it.

I’m very aware that we have all sorts of things that we don’t have to fight for, because other people have fought for them in the past. But we do have to constantly defend those gains.

For instance, there is an appalling attack on women’s rights in Britain at the moment – the growth of porno‑culture, and the chipping away at the time limits on abortion.

But there is always a level of resistance that provides inspiration and a sense of dignity. If there wasn’t resistance, they wouldn’t need violence to defend the status quo.

The real thing, the interesting thing, is to photograph the world in resistance. People refusing to acquiesce, refusing to be passive. I want to move people from being the passive objects of history to being its originators.

What do you look for in an image to reflect this political commitment?

It’s important not to have anything redundant in the photographs – everything in the image must contribute to the succinct statement I’m making.

In this sense still photography is closer to poetry than to film, because it says something very precise.

I also always use captions, sometimes long ones and sometimes very brief ones. They give a context to the image and help prevent it from being used in an abusive way.

If I was the only photographer in the world, I would do things differently. But as it is, it is far too easy to photograph people with their dignity down – it is too easy to photograph degradation.

So at one level, I’m using people as metaphors to tell the world what I think of it. When I photograph, say, a cleaner in a hotel, I want that image to ram home what that person is doing in numerous different ways.

I also want the image to be aesthetically pleasing. I’m not a news photographer in the sense of simply firing the camera into events. Some news photographers criticise me for being too “arty” – but I also get art photographers criticising me for being too “newsy”!

What do you think of the idea that photography should be “neutral”?

I am recording my period of time, but I am not a camera. I don’t see my role as some kind of “community photographer”.

I want to show the reality of people’s lives. This means interpreting and editing the world in a certain way.

There is a battle of ideas in our society. Millions of people die for reasons that are eminently solvable. Natural events turn into catastrophes because of the system we live under.

So you can rebuild New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina – but not for the people who lived there, apart from those who will be needed to service the tourists.

But people are resisting everywhere – though not always in a particularly organised way. In that context, it is important to throw your lot in with the people who are resisting.

There is immense coverage of the US election, but I hardly ever hear a report that makes sense. People parachute in and observe – but they don’t relate to the reality in front of them. At best it’s pretentious and at worst downright erroneous.

They never, or rather hardly ever, interview ordinary people – instead they interview themselves. When I was last doing a project in the US I never met anyone who owned a single thing – yet those are precisely the people who are kept out of the debate.

The dominant values are those of the status quo. We are products of society where there are sides. And if you say you’re neutral, then you are in fact taking sides.

Class struggle permeates every element of our society. Sometimes it is difficult to see – but it is there. You sometimes have to fight hard to bring to light – but it is there. And in the face of class struggle there is no neutrality. You either align yourself with the oppressors of the world, or you take the opposite side.

Whenever I’ve been in a situation, I’ve chosen sides – in Ireland, the Miners’ Strike, or wars in southern Africa. And whenever I’ve done that, people have defended me back.

———————————

Waged London will be on show at the Marxism festival of resistance in July this year. For more details about Larry‘s work go to www.larryherman.net

The Post Office Test

JamieSW — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:54:15 +0000

Let us be absolutely clear. The Post Office is being systematically and deliberately destroyed. And the British government is standing by and letting it happen.

It was Charles II who established the General Post Office in 1660, and Rowland Hill who introduced the penny stamp (1840) and recognised that the cost of handling mail was not the distance the letters travelled but the number of times they were handled. The postal service in the 19th century was the equivalent of the internet. Local post offices were a public service too: in the early days, if you paid a shilling the postmistress would write a letter for you and explain how to deal with social security forms.

But now this great service is being challenged. First by the EU, which has insisted on liberalisation and demanded competition. If there were real competition, however, the competitors would have to put up their own blue pillar boxes, employ postal staff and open post offices, deliver to the most outlying areas at the same price, and deliver braille materials, free, for the blind.

Of course none of that is happening, and the “competitors” are being allowed to pass on their bulk post for the Royal Mail to deliver and being charged less than the 34p we pay for a stamp, thus being subsidised by the Post Office. Post office closures are going on apace and postal workers are threatened with the sack, a worsening of conditions, and the prospect of a reduced pension. Meanwhile the government does nothing, and that is why members of the Communication Workers’ Union are striking.

In the old days the postmaster general was answerable to the Commons, with parliamentary questions about deliveries. It was not a very good system because the Treasury collected the money for stamps sold and gave the Post Office a grant to run the service – which is why I, in my then position in that role, recommended it be turned into a public corporation. It was obvious it had to change and expand, which is why we set up the National Data Processing Service, the Giro, which was a public bank run through the Post Office and used its vans in the countryside as buses. The Giro was sold off by Margaret Thatcher, and the Post Office is now concreted in to the mechanical function of delivering mail, while urgent communications now go by electronic means.

The CWU knows better than most the need for change, but in its dealings with this management its members are back to the master-servant relationship that prevailed in industry 200 years ago. If they take action that is “unofficial” they risk being taken to court under Thatcher’s anti-union legislation, which New Labour promised to repeal but never did – and I would love to see stronger support for them from all unions, many of which face similar problems.

We are told the Post Office loses money – but so do the police, and if we are going to follow this neoliberal doctrine, what about establishing low-cost private police forces, to challenge the “police monopoly”? This is a big, big issue, and it is a test of our society as to whether we are to organise everything to make a profit, or see that needs are met.

If the Post Office is to be run on a competitive basis, it could charge pounds and not pennies to deliver in the Orkneys and Shetlands, and make those who depend on braille pay the huge charges that the heavy material would attract on a commercial basis.

And if Digby Jones, the former director general of the CBI, can work with the government, what about asking Brendan Barber from the TUC to be postmaster general in New Labour’s big tent, which now appears to include Thatcher herself?