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.
