Pensions fight: plan now for the New Year
The government has dramatically raised the stakes in its class war assault against public sector trade unions. George Osborne wants to see national pay rates for public sector workers abolished, and has written to the heads of pay review boards for teachers, nurses, civil servants and prison officers giving them until April 2013 to find ways of cutting workers’ pay. The government claims it will achieve the cuts by slowing down pay increases rather than directly cutting wages, but the plans amount to a massive attack on workers in poorer areas as Osborne wants localised pay reviews to be tied...