Public Sector | ukwatch.net

Public sector pay: how to win

tim — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:39:32 +0000

If anything sums up New Labour as a Government for the rich, a cuckoo in the labour movement nest, it has to be their year-on-year drive to keep public sector wages below the rate of inflation.

According to a report on the Joseph Rowntree website, and based on 2007 statistics, “the public sector is a large employer of workers earning less than £7 per hour, accounting for a quarter of all such employees… the public sector employs relatively few adults of the age group where low pay is most prevalent, namely those under the age of 25. If this age group is excluded then the share of low paid workers who are in the public sector rises to 30%. Just about all of these are women.” (The £7 per hour low pay threshold is commonly used; it was, until recently, roughly two-thirds of median hourly earnings in Great Britain.)

But the Joseph Rowntree figures exclude those employed by contractors in the state sector — including tens of thousands of cleaners, catering and security staff, messengers and others on very low pay and denied the occupational pension schemes, sick pay rights and annual leave granted to directly-employed public sector workers. When these workers are included New Labour’s responsibility for low pay rises even more.

PCS, the largest civil service union, points out that “...a quarter of the civil service [earn] less than £16,500 and thousands earning just above the minimum wage… Forty percent of staff in the Department for Work and Pensions, which includes Jobcentres, will have no pay rise whatsoever this year, 30% of staff in the Identity and Passport Service are in the same situation, whilst coastguard watch assistants received a special pay rise to keep their pay above the minimum wage.”

Even amongst relatively better paid public sector workers in the civil service, local government, education and the NHS, the picture is one of increasing hardship. For instance teachers’ pay increases for 2008-2011 do not match the current rate of inflation. And teachers’ pay increases have already been below inflation every year from 2005 onwards. Teachers have had real-terms pay cuts of up to £2000.

While the Government charges interest on student debt at the rate of RPI (the inflation rate measurement which includes mortgages), it bases its pay policy for teachers, including newly qualified teachers trying to pay off their student debt, on CPI (an inflation measurement which excludes mortgages). The hypocrisy is astounding. The fact is that New Labour is consciously cutting the real living standards of hundreds of thousands of workers.

In any case the official rate of inflation does not properly measures the inflation actually experienced by millions of workers. Most of the tabloids are now running “alternative rates of inflation” based on shopping basket essentials. The Daily Mail calculates, “…someone spending £100 a week on food last year will have to find another £712 this year to put the same items on the table.”

Against this backdrop the decisions of the PCS and the teachers’ union, NUT, to ballot their members for national industrial action over pay is the best labour movement news in a long while — in terms of sheer numbers of trade unionists involved, the potential for the dispute to widen to other unions such as UCU (college lecturers) and the potential for activists to link up across the unions.

PCS will ballot 270-280,000 members between 24 September and 17 October for three days of strike action (two days of national action and an additional programme of rolling civil service sectoral action), to take place between November and the end of January. The NUT ballot of its 250,000 members will start on Monday 6 October. It now looks certain that PCS and NUT will coordinate at least one day of strike action in November, but if we are to shift Brown, both unions will need to plan for more strike action.

Gearing up to win

Every PCS and NUT member who doesn’t want to accept years of real pay cuts should be putting all their energy into securing a high turnout and a massive majority for the planned action.

However, the unions belong to their members, and members should be seeking to exercise democratic control over their leaders. And activists and branches also need to draw conclusions from the experience of recent public sector strikes:

• a public-sector-wide fight back must be focussed on a few key demands that unite the unions and can be won by all unions — such as the demand for pay rises exceeding RPI.

• The demand for a public sector wide fight back to defeat a public sector wide pay policy is absolutely right but it should not be on the basis, increasingly argued on much of the left, that major public sector unions cannot win in their own right against the government. Such a lack of confidence and drive is wrong. It ties each union to the least reliable and the least confident of the union leaderships and enabling each union leadership to blame another for any settlement on less than adequate terms.

Each union must therefore work out what it needs to do to win and to be determined to do so irrespective of any backsliding amongst union leaders elsewhere. For example, the PCS rolling strike strategy is a considerable step up from the Executive’s previous flawed, and much criticised, strategy of one-day strikes separated by months. Its new strategy reflects the pressure of activists who wanted more, and the ongoing criticism of the PCS Independent Left, who have repeatedly warned that sporadic one day strikes would not force New Labour to retreat on pay.

Unfortunately, the PCS leadership is not indicating whether, if need be, it will call any further action after the second national strike in January. This is a mistake. The Executive should be clear that it is planning national, sectoral, rolling, and selective strike action. Both PCS and NUT members — and for that matter the Government — need to know that the PCS are fighting to win.

Levies should be collected to build up an additional war chest as quickly as possible. The PCS leadership has resisted this call for years but in a union with many low paid members, and where the industrial muscle varies enormously, a levy can play a vital role in supporting members and action.

PCS and NUT activists and branches should be demanding that their national unions set up joint local coordinating committees, inviting representatives of other public sector unions to attend in an effort to build up the pressure for action elsewhere. Better organised PCS and NUT branches can of course just get on with the job of establishing local committees which can build support, hold their leaders to account, and win the dispute.

Accountability

We need to counter the “spin” of the PCS would-be left leadership. A few years ago they claimed that they had been promised a “fair pay system” by the head of the civil service (he made no such promise) and earlier this year they claimed to have “achieved the first national pay negotiations in 15 years to address massive inequalities in pay.” (Left Unity National Executive election leaflet on its website).

They were not the first talks in 15 years (the NEC had already spent five years in fruitless talks) and there was little or no likelihood of those talks resulting in real pay improvements for members — hence the current ballot!

We need to insist on straight and prompt reporting of all national negotiations so that we are not suddenly presented with a fait accompli deal that does not deliver on our demands. The old CPSA Broad Left (the old left grouping of a forerunner union) always argued for special pay conferences in an effort to prevent the old right wing leadership from just doing what it wanted. The need for democratic control does not disappear when would- be left-wingers control the union.

Implementation of the TUC’s decision to call days of “action”, including a national demonstration against the government’s pay policy, has to be fought for, and built, at the rank and file level. The TUC’s national pension demonstrations of a few years ago were woefully ill-prepared, resulting in small turnouts relative to a major threat to hundreds of thousands of workers. The day of the first coordinated PCS-NUT strike should see joint lunchtime marches and demonstrations taking place in every town and city.

Those demonstrations and marches should be the beginning of the labour movement’s political response to the present economic crisis, and the attempt to dump its effects onto workers’ shoulders. Calling for “fairness” is pitiful — as if ministers, the Tories, big business, and the press will not play divide and rule by dishonestly comparing public sector workers (as if they are pulling down a fortune) to private sector workers. Private sector workers, including those working for contractors in the state sector, are also sharing the misery of job cuts, low pay, and below-inflation pay increases.

We need a workers’ alternative plan that can be fought for in the labour movement, that will answer the most immediate concerns of workers (repossessions, mortgage costs, job losess, maintenance of living standards). The unions need to link these issues clearly in their publicity, emphasising that the fight for pay is the fight for decent services. And that means raising the demand for more funding through taxation of the wealthiest who have done very well under New Labour.

It is all very well the PCS General Secretary saying, “If the Tories win the election and industrial strife breaks out, the fault lies with Gordon Brown and the government.”

We understand what he means — don’t tell us to not to rock the boat when you’re cutting our living standards — but it sums up the predicament of the labour movement. The New Labour cuckoos took over the Labour Party and sectarians stood aside from the fight to stop them. The leaders of the affiliated unions were complicit in that takeover. Now all we are left with is “don’t blame us if the Tories win” when a triumphant Tory Party will simply renew the attacks.

The unions urgently need to consider a political response to the current crisis — a programme to be positively fought for, industrially and politically, on the governmental terrain. Our aim should be to defeat Brown industrially and to assert the labour movement on the governmental level as an alternative to both New Labour and Cameron.

Bank Role for the Left

Ellie Keen — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

State intervention and nationalisationare both back with an incredible bang. Suddenly, the neoliberal orthodoxy of “Tina” – “there is no alternative” – to the free market looks as hollow as Brown’s promise to end the cycle of boom and bust. It reconfirms that in this age of hyper-globalisation and neoliberalism, the state and market regulation are still important.

The bail-outs we’ve seen in Britain and the US are nationalisations by the neoliberals and for the bosses. If they were carried out at the behest of the left and for the workers, taxpayers and citizens, they would look entirely different.

So when the senior management was changed when Northern Rock was nationalised one set of capitalist managers was merely replaced by another. The same will be true of Bradford & Bingley. The nationalisations were not to safeguard jobs or workers’ conditions or people’s savings but the British financial system upon which profits heavily depend.

If the left is to make headway right now, it must start getting its ideas about public ownership out into the media, into union members’ heads and onto people’s radar screens.

The left needs to start off with what public ownership is and what it is not. This would make it clear the left was not calling for a return to the age of nationalisation, where civil servants ran the industries in an undemocratic and unaccountable ways. Jobs were not safeguarded and services were often poor. It would also make it clear the left was not calling for a situation of a command economy, where the centre dictated what was produced without consulting the consumers and the localities.

The lessons of history are that while coordination and planning are needed, there should be decentralised structures that allow participation and that the process is one of bottom-up democracy, not top-down diktat.

One model of public ownership, for say, transport would be that the boards of management consist of a third of seats allocated to representatives from the travelling public, a third from the workforce and a third from the local authorities. Here, there would be a balance between producer and consumer interests.

The issues to be resolved would include whether the unions would be the only representatives of the workforce, whether businesses would be entitled to seats and whether local authorities are closely connected enough to be the genuine representatives of the public at large.

Another model would be that all members of the board of management would be elected directly by citizens and those wishing to be board members stand on platforms of representing workers’, business and passengers’ interests and so on.

These are all issues which can be explored in more depth later once the debate has been won on the need for this version of public ownership. The key thing here is that the primary purpose of these services (including financial services) being in public ownership would be that they are run on the basis of social need and not private profit.

What this means is that the constitution or articles of association of these organisations would be changed from the objective of pursuing private shareholder interests to providing services. The organisations would not then have to be concerned with chasing profits, market value, market share or being taken over by a rival.

The banks would then operate under this system by creating social justice and social inclusion by keeping open wide branch networks (with one in each community), practice safe lending, work by the principles of ethical investment and return surplus back into their operations to increase service provision.

The way in which the left can do this is by questioning each and every action of the governments by saying “Whose interests are being served by this?”, “Whose money is being used for this?” and “If public money is being used, where is the public control?”

There is a role for left MPs like John McDonnell in laying bills before parliament to put organisations into public ownership instead of allowing this Labour government to remain the bankers’ friend by doling out hand outs to them.

The unions need to use their influence inside and outside parliament to support these moves. Rather than being overly fixated on windfall taxes and curbing bonuses, they could tackle the underlying causes – rather than just the symptoms – by supporting social ownership. The odd call for public ownership of the utilities needs to be made writ large.

Deep sense of fairness?

tim — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:00:00 +0000

With the Labour Party conference and the Convention of the Left running concurrently, Manchester is going to be a city of contrasts for the next week.

And it started even before either conference had got fully under way, with the colourful and vociferous peace march on Saturday and the Unite rally on Sunday providing an inside and outside contrast which may well, in its own way, provide the pattern for the week.

While new Labour loyalists in the conference were desperately mounting a rearguard action to save the Prime Minister – and new Labour’s – bacon, and Mr Brown himself was doing a mea culpa on TV, admitting that mistakes have been made and pledging, like a naughty schoolboy, to do better next time, thousands of peace activists were on the streets outside the conference campaigning against new Labour’s biggest mistake, the Iraq war.

And as Unite the union joint general secretary Tony Woodley called on marchers to remember the “many thousands of innocent victims of the lunatics that have taken us to war,” one of the chief lunatics was being praised by Cabinet Office Minister Ed Miliband for his “deep sense of fairness.”

On Sunday, this deep sense of fairness was put centre-stage again, with furious public-sector workers demonstrating outside the conference against the below-inflation pay deals that are being thrust on them as a result of government policy, while that same deeply fair government is doing absolutely nothing to curb the swingeing power company price rises that are producing a profits bonanza for the privatised utilities.

Deep fairness again prompted Mr Brown to observe that the City’s bonus culture encouraged “excessive” risk-taking, but that it was difficult to regulate as bonuses were part of a global system.

It’s a bit difficult to work out what the difference is between speculators working for foreign-owned banks and factory workers employed by foreign-owned manufacturers or NHS privateers, but we are sure that deep fairness means there is a reason why one set should have their wages pegged and others not.

But we probably shouldn’t get carried away with blaming it all on poor Mr Brown.
After all, he is only doing what he is told by his masters in the banks, who have made it very clear that, if their mistakes are not covered by taxpayers’ money, then the entire global financial system will collapse.

Does the blame, then, lie with the global capitalists who are holding a financial gun to the otherwise good-hearted Prime Minister’s head?

Or is it that, lacking the courage to face them down, this country’s government is doing its best to preserve and underwrite the system that has brought the world’s most developed countries to the brink of ruin?

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the trade union movement on the exercise of industrial muscle.

But the movement cannot exercise the power that it has without the full-hearted support of the people of those countries who, at the moment, have swallowed the biggest lie in history, that there is no alternative to capitalism, warts and all.

Therein lies the lesson for the Convention of the Left. Unite and refute the big lie that is capitalism.

Or stay divided and stay powerless. The trade union movement needs the left and the left needs the trade unions. And everybody needs a movement united under the banner of defeating the money-men who have made the City their own and who easily control Labour governments that are utterly divorced from their working class.

NHS strike looms as GMB reject pay deal

tim — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:37:52 +0000

Published online 31/05/08

A threat of industrial action across the NHS intensified yesterday when health workers in the GMB union voted by an overwhelming majority to reject the three-year pay deal offered by the government.

If their decision is confirmed by the 450,000 NHS workers in Unison next week, the government may be forced to abandon its attempt to reach a long-term settlement.

In those circumstances Johnson has warned that he would be obliged by the Treasury to cut the pay increase that staff are banking on getting this year. Such a move would be likely to provoke a wave of hostility across the NHS, including overtime bans that could derail ministers’ plans to cut waiting times for patients.

GMB members, representing 25,000 NHS staff in England and Wales, rejected the deal by more than 96% in a ballot with high turnout. The offer was worth 8% over three years, with 2.75% paid immediately this year – the best terms available in the public sector in the current pay round though still way below inflation, amounting to a cut in real wages. Ambulance workers, porters and cleaners in Unite had already voted to reject the deal by a majority of six to one. This week the Royal College of Midwives said a consultation of members found 99. 7% were opposed.

The GMB, which represents ambulance crews, porters, catering staff, ancillary workers, blood collection, nursing assistants and practitioners, cleaners, laboratory workers, drivers and maintenance staff, said it would seek a meeting with Johnson. Dame Karlene Davis, general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said this week: “Given the outlook for the economy in future years, acceptance of the three-year deal would represent a vote for a real terms pay cut.”

Unison and the Royal College of Nursing negotiated the deal on behalf of the smaller NHS unions and were expected to recommend it. But the Unison leadership failed to win a majority on its health executive. The RCN is poised to accept the three-year deal.

This represents the stirring of health workers as part of the wider movement of unrest amongst public sector workers with the threat of strike action also coming from civil servants, refuse collectors, teachers, academic staff, local government and others.