Does the far left need trade unions?
Even with New Labour now in urgent need of a major bail-out from the unions simply to stay solvent, Gordon Brown has apparently decided that he has better things to do than attend next week’s GMB conference.
Most delegates will privately be relieved not to have to sit through the inert expanse of boilerplate, platitudes and waffle that passes for a prime ministerial speech on these occasions. But the arrogance of the snub is both palpable and somewhat distasteful.
Perhaps one of the reasons for Brown’s no show is that a call for disaffiliation from the Labour Party is on the GMB’s agenda. Meanwhile, the Communications Workers Union will discuss the issue at its annual get-together, also planned for next week. Smaller unions such as RMT and FBU are already out of the fold, of course.
continue reading… »
Public sector workers are more productive
Workers in at least parts of the public sector are significantly more likely to do unpaid overtime than their private sector counterparts.
This new paper finds that people in the not-for-profit caring sector (education, healthcare, childcare and care homes) are 12 percentage points (40%) more likely to do unpaid overtime than comparable workers in the profit-making caring sector.
This suggests that what Julian Le Grand called “knightly motives” are significantly more common in the public sector – because people with a strong sense of vocation are likely to avoid working for someone else’s profit.
The TV detective motivated by a desire to nick villains rather than get on with the top brass is a cliche because it contains some truth.
This doesn’t just mean that the neoliberal idea that everyone is motivated by narrow self-interest is wrong. It also means that there are dangers in “reforming” the public services. Reforms that introduce profit motives, or alienate workers by introducing heavier-handed management, might add to costs by reducing donated labour.
Where is the Agency, John?
There is an article by John McDonnell published in yesterday’s Morning Star, which I feel at once encapsulates the reasons why people on the left feel a lingering affection for the Labour Party and also why that Party is in reality a no-goer. And indeed I think McDonnell himself is emblematic of that same duality.
In the article, McDonnell begins with his ususal rallying cry “New Labour is dead” and seeks to take us forward via the construcation of a new set of economic policies (dare one say an Alternative Economic Strategy?) based on left-wing and socialist politics. He appears to be offering the notion that thus we will be able to take control of the Labour Party’s political direction via victory in a sub-Gramscian war of ideas.
continue reading… »
Proud to be ‘indecent’
A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.
With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric.
I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot:
continue reading… »
The return of working class militancy?
Personally I’ll only believe that there is really an upturn in the class struggle at the point of production when Leicester Square is knee-deep in rubbish, at least a dozen bodies remain unburied, and the ghost of Red Robbo bestrides the now presumably deserted Longbridge car park once again.
But as someone schooled in the quasi-syndicalist brand of Marxism that sees industrial action as the first step to imminent world revolution, the co-ordinated public sector stoppages involving 350,000 workers does have a sort of seventies retro ring about it. Just in time for the Rock Against Racism 30th anniversary gig, too.
continue reading… »
The NUS’s dying gasp
Last week the National Union of Students threw out a proposal to drastically restrict its campaigning and representative powers by an approximate ten-vote margin. Frustrated by this narrow defeat at the annual conference, Labour Students, ‘independent’ Labour affiliates and other centre-right groups have already drawn up plans for an extraordinary conference to attempt to pull the changes through.
If they do go through, NUS democracy will be re-focused upon “celebrating the achievements” of the union, with a cutback in constructive debate and a much larger role for external, unelected political and corporate ‘advisers’.
NUS radicalism has been so eroded over the past decade, however, that there’s barely been a murmur of fuss has been made about all of this outside the narrow alley of student politics: as a former NUS rep for Goldsmiths commented, “It’s been coming for a long time.”
continue reading… »
Helping temp and agency workers
Tomorrow the second reading of a Private Members Bill put forward by Labour MP Andrew Miller, which aims to end exploitation of temp and agency workers, takes place. The unions, which have been quite vociferously pushing this, are hoping that over a hundred MPs stick around to push it through.
There’s only a day left but you can still write to your MP to urge them to support it. The Unite website has model letters, in addition to testimonies from temp workers illustrating the problems they face under the current rules.
A wasted opportunity
I was there five years ago, one of the two million or so. I’ve never regretted attending and I still think the cause was fundamentally good.
But even at the time I and many other comrades had our worries. The self-congratulatory carnival atmosphere was all very well, but where were the Iraqi socialists, democrats and trade unionists amongst the assorted Quakers, sloanes, hippies and Islamists? Why was that disgusting pro-Saddam apologist Galloway on the platform but no representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions?
Why had left-wing Iraqis been excluded from the national committee of the Stop The War Coalition?
continue reading… »
The fight continues
As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the story of the Fremantle Trust careworkers who spent much of 2007 striking against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The dispute is unresolved.
Part one of this series.
A year’s a long while to fight your employer. Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust’s Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there’s much point to it. She will “keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,” but she doubts that Fremantle will budge. “Fremantle doesn’t give a shit about its staff. It’s gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.”
One thing everybody is specially stressed about is Barnet Council’s recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home – that’s the carehome that Jones works at.
Fremantle says it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere. Careworkers say families of residents at the carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect that being dragged out of one home into another will have on their elderly relatives.
continue reading… »
Gordon Brown, Thatcherite?
Gordon Brown, Thatcherite? I wouldn’t dream of saying that myself, of course; it’s just too damn Dave Spart for me to get away with. Oh no, I’m simply quoting the succinct title of a chapter in Simon Jenkins’ recent book ‘Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts’.
Not being a particular fan of the man’s newspaper columns, I don’t know whether or not I’ll get round to buying a copy. But according to the synopsis, the central thesis is that Major, Blair and Brown essentially constitute the apostolic succession in terms of the Iron Lady’s project.
Summarising the charge sheet against Britain’s current prime minister, Jenkins reportedly rails against:
‘Brown’s unbridled enthusiasm for the privatisation of public services and public investment, his aversion to the public sector ethos in favour of private profit, his crushing of union power, his introduction of workfare into welfare and his patronage of money making above all other virtues’.
None of this a particularly controversial assessment for much of the far left. But coming from Sir Simon – former editor of The Times and all-purpose member of the great and the good – it hasn’t gone down well among New Labour supporters.
continue reading… »
Your money for nothing
[The first part in this series on trade union issues is here.]
It is 1pm on a crisp afternoon in North London’s Burnt Oak, and a hundred or so Fremantle Trust carehome workers and supporters have gathered in the St Alphage church hall on Playfield Road, where they’re waiting to be addressed by various lefty speakers and political worthies.
There’s a bit of a buzz in the hall this afternoon: the carehome workers have just finished a very noisy (whistles, horns, hooting, honking, yelling, etc) protest march through the town centre, where they again aired their grievance about the harsh cuts that the Fremantle Trust has made to their sick pay, holiday allowances and salaries.
Most of the workers here are middle-aged women, and they are from a variety of – charming term – ethnic groups. They say they have no intention of abandoning their fight to win back the salaries and working terms that the Fremantle Trust forced them to sign away in April this year.
Longtime Barnet carehome worker Breege Kelly is one of these women. She’s worked in the laundries and kitchens of Barnet Council and Fremantle carehomes for about 18 years. She says that she got her letter telling her to agree to the new terms and conditions just before Christmas 2006.
“Yep,” she says. “It was saying that we had to sign the new terms and conditions by the 31st of March (2007). A lot of people put it off for as long as they could, but in the end, we had to sign it, or we would be sacked.”
Indeed, Unison says that some members of staff who refused to sign were sacked. “They (Fremantle) work on putting pure fear [into everybody],” Kelly says. “I had to sign the new contract. I’ve got a mortgage and people got a mortgage, you know. They made it so that we had to stay and take it, what they were giving out.”
continue reading… »
Working for nothing
This is the first in a run of stories in which this liberal lefter asks: Why are so many people taking strike action?
Where is New Labour at with the low-paid people that the Labour party was established to represent?
Why does the UK still have some of the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe?
In the London Borough of Barnet, a large number of careworkers who work for a grim outfit called the Fremantle Trust are planning another day of strike action this Saturday. Their dispute isn’t a Grunwick yet, but it’s on the road.
Fremantle careworkers Carmel Reynolds, Anne Quinn, Lango Gamanga and Sandra Jones say they knew their working lives were about to take a turn for the perverse when Fremantle management began talking about cutting careworkers’ sick pay and holiday allowances late last year.
It didn’t take long for the talk to evolve into policy. “It went from ‘we’re going to have to take your holidays and your sick pay’ to ‘we’ll do all that and we’ll freeze your pay and cut your weekend enhancements,” Reynolds says.
She and the other careworkers had been worried about their salaries and terms and conditions ever since Barnet Council outsourced its care contracts to Fremantle and transferred staff to the trust’s employ, but the council had fallen over itself to reassure careworkers their new employer would be as great as their old one. God knows those of us on the union circuit have heard that one a million times in the last few years, but unfortunately, there are hundreds of consultants out there who can still make it sound fresh at negotiating meetings, and even more local councillors who are dopey enough to fall for it, so it’ll be a factor until such time as leading members of the New Labour cadre stop privatising public services (fat chance) and/or decide to legislate to consolidate worker protection (ditto).
“Oh yes,” Reynolds says. “They said it was all going to be super-duper and we were going to be fine.”
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
|
66 Comments 20 Comments 13 Comments 10 Comments 18 Comments 4 Comments 25 Comments 49 Comments 31 Comments 16 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » McDuff posted on Why I'm defending Ed Balls over immigration » damon posted on Complete tits » Sunny Hundal posted on Complete tits » sunny hundal posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Lee Griffin posted on The Labour leadership's token contender.. and it's not Diane Abbott » dan posted on Defend the urban fox! » Richard W posted on Boris rise for Living Wage left of Labour » Julian Swainson posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » sally posted on Complete tits » Joanne Dunn posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Lovely Lynnette Peck posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Nick posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Bob B posted on Complete tits » Nick posted on Complete tits » Mike Killingworth posted on Complete tits |
