redscare
communist-party.org.uk May 2017
FiGhTinG rACiSm
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We need a pay rise PubliC SeCTor
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he GovernmenT’S Pay remit guidance is now out and no one is surprised that once again pay rises are capped at 1%. our pay in take home terms has fallen by over 10% since 2010. A real pay cut. TuC figures, see below, show that only workers in Greece have suffered a bigger drop in pay than british workers. Other members see their pay frozen either because they have ended in up in the private sector on pay rates above the so-called going rate in their new employer or have been transferred to a lower paying area in the civil service. PCS and other trades unions have analysed the figures behind these cuts in pay but to paraphrase ‘We can interpret why this has happened but we must do something about it’! PCS has once again put in a national pay claim and this is to be welcomed. But much more than a day of action is required. Planning cross-union actions across the public sector would build unity – let’s get meetings of public sector unions at a local level to discuss how we can support each other. We need a strategic joined-up approach across the Civil Service and private sector bargaining areas. It is understandable that Groups faced with endemic low pay and pressure to do something about it talk to their employment areas about additional pay linked to changes to hours and other terms and conditions. These talks should not take place in isolation. The question now is how we join together those members who are covered by longer-term deals in our opposition to pay restraint which still affects them. Regions and National Committees should bring reps together to talk about joined-up activities that expose the 1% pay cap and its impact upon us. Similarly, members in the private sector employed on the same contracts by different companies and in the same companies on different contracts should be brought together to consider crosscontract and cross-company pay claims
and campaigns. Let’s make our demand for a £10 minimum wage a reality. Our union cannot surrender to the employers’ drive to fragment our bargaining strength – let’s press for pay coherence and a prelude to national bargaining – let’s lodge equal pay claims or failing that mass grievances against pay differentials which have no rational justification – let’s really go out to smash the 1% pay cap. In the meantime however, if branches in any bargaining areas are confident and organised enough to take industrial action over pay locally themselves, they should be supported and encouraged to do so by the NEC. Such was the case last year when low paid PCS members in the
National Museum Wales struck for eight weeks in a bitter dispute with a largely successful outcome. This conference is held on the eve of the General Election. Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to lift the public sector pay cap. This makes it clear to millions of workers and their families that electing a left-led Labour government will make our job easier. There is too much to do. We are not supplicants but active partners in the fight for pay justice. We need a programme of action to mobilise our members. They deserve nothing less. COMMUNISTS IN PCS
eTTy nATionAliSm is on the rise. The growth of racism and fascism finds a different expression in every country but it is always a reaction against the failed neo-liberal consensus which has foisted wage cuts and austerity on peoples across europe and elsewhere. Our rulers always seek to deflect blame for their failing policies on vulnerable communities. Theresa May has yet to condemn Boris Johnson’s racist idiocies while inviting Trump for a state visit to the UK clearly signalled that she bows to bigotry. And as Home Secretary her slogans on the side of buses were designed to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment. This government is anti-union and anticollective bargaining. The inevitable consequence of weakened workers’ rights is the super-exploitation of migrant labour– sanctioned by Tory supporting companies such as ASOS. Employment rights are central to fighting racism. Strong unions backed by workers’ rights from day one, restrictions on agencies and gang masters and scrapping of zero hour contracts would cut the ground away from both employers and workplace racists. Capital investment in training, high skilled jobs and technological advance would transform the world of work. Communists are with those who oppose EU-brokered big business trade agreements which empower big business, give nation states less rights than multinationals in trade disputes and reinforce trade inequality with the Third World countries. Given the way the right wing, on both sides of the argument, fought the
referendum campaign – and with voices for a people’s Brexit locked out of the mainstream media – the existing toxic racist undertow in politics inevitably got worse. Freed from the racist Fortress Europe Britain should adopt an anti-racist immigration policy that is fair to all – with help for refugees fleeing famine and war. We say that the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights, the latter derived from the non-EU Council of Europe, must be upheld. All EU citizens currently living in the EU should be guaranteed residence and the unfair anti-discrimination rules imposed on non EU citizens must be reversed. There must be no more mass deportations where mothers, fathers and grandparents are forcibly removed from the UK to Commonwealth countries like Jamaica despite having spent their entire adult lives in Britain. We are concerned at the tactics used by Home Office immigration enforcement, which has been accused of ‘strategically’ detaining individuals to fill charter flights without consideration of their circumstances. We must also oppose and support those peoples being deported due to the problems with housing and homelessness. This is a clear sign of the lack of affordable housing in many of our towns and cities. The Government’s attitude to refugee children – in closing down the right of young people to come to Britain (the Dub’s amendment) – has been widely condemned. Equally disgraceful is the proposal, floated by the prime minister at the UN Special Assembly of the UN last year to tinker with the Convention on Refugees. The Convention was drawn up following the victory over fascism. Many refugees arriving in Europe, speak English because they come from countries long under domination by British imperialism and today fleeing imperialist war. The Tories have sought to shut our doors on anyone seeking asylum in this country, even voting against providing a safe haven for unaccompanied child refugees until a concerted Labour fightback forced a Uturn. The French authorities have hampered efforts to get humanitarian aid into the camps and bear a heavy responsibility for the squalid conditions there. COMMUNIST PARTy ANTI-RACIST ANTIFASCIST COMMISSION
Fight for fairness CCCS
Civil Service Unions, we have moved to a position where the ability of our members to find a job will be based on the will and The second Tory assault on the competence (don’t laugh) of individual Civil Service Compensation employers to redploy people through Scheme and the associated effective workforce planning. redundancy protocols followed These changes will mean that more and overwhelming opposition to the more people will be made compulsorily changes in a PCS ballot. redundant or forced into taking Although the main focus of the PCS ‘voluntary’ redundancy against their campaign material in the run up to the wishes. The union have taken the correct changes was the financial impact of the position in opposing the changes when CSCS attack, we argued that the changes other unions signed up to them. to the protocols (first won through However we have to now organise industrial action in 2008) pose a much within and across groups to fight for greater ongoing industrial concern, given members who face redundancy to be the deep impact they will have on our offered maximum protection. This ability to prevent forced redundancy. includes making groups of employers Whereas before, our members recognise all of the departments within benefited from arrangements which their “family”, including executive agencies meant that, in the event they were made and NDPBs, as being in scope for surplus, they received priority access to vacancies across Civil Service departments redeployment and developing industrial strategies within groups to force this type as part of a package of measures of concession. overseen by the Cabinet Office and the
Vote Labour everywhere organisations will approach local Labour Party bodies in their area with offers of practical campaigning assistance. At the same time and in the light of the eU referendum campaign it is now clear that a vote for the LibDems, greens, SnP and Plaid Cymru will be a vote for eU free-market fundamentalism and the eU’s alignment with nATo. A vote for UkiP will be a vote for austerity, privatisation, tax cuts for the rich and big business and for a narrow, xenophobic nationalism that seeks to divide working Theresa May and the Tories want a people instead of uniting them. bigger Commons majority in order to in order to project our revolutionary force through a raft of policies opposed by strategy for socialism and a programme of many millions of people in Britain, clear, consistent policies for the labour including: movement, the Communist Party will also l Five more years of austerity and privatisation of the nhS and other public promote its own manifesto in this period services. of heightened political activity and l The reintroduction of grammar and consciousness. in particular, we will continue to put therefore, in effect, of secondary modern the case for a progressive exit from the schools. eU and its Single Market and for the l A new round of anti-trade union laws, policies that this then makes possible, aimed at workers in public transport, including: education and other important services. l renewal of the Trident nuclear l State-backed investment in housing, public services and renationalised utilities. weapons system under US control, at a l Direction of private capital into cost of more than £150bn. depressed areas. in particular, May and her closest allies want to negotiate an agreement with l regulation of trade to support exports and protect strategic industries. the eU that would keep Britain in the european Single Market in all but name, l Control over public procurement policy in order to favour equal pay and trade union which would mean no return of rights including collective bargaining. democratic control over trade, capital movements, public investment (including l Drastic reductions in VAT alongside higher taxes on the rich and big business. state aid for industry), procurement l Legislative and trade union action to policy, agriculture or over the superenforce equal terms and conditions for exploitation of migrant labour. Almost imported workers. certainly, too, Britain would have to pay l replacement of the corrupt, high price an extortionate ‘exit fee’ and grant favorable access to eU citizens wishing to and wasteful Common Agricultural Policy by a system of direct production and live or work here – concessions which investment grants. would be opposed by at least some antieU Tory MPs. The Communist Party’s manifesto will The Tories also intend to delete any also ensure that the case is made for eU policies incorporated into British law progressive federalism, a radical that stand in the way of big business redistribution of wealth to the working profits, especially in such areas as class in all the nations and regions of employment rights, health and safety, Britain, abolition of the Trident nuclear consumer protection and environmental weapons system and for Britain's standards. Many of these policies are withdrawal from nATo. feeble, but better than nothing. The maximum possible Labour vote is on the other side, Labour's policies in necessary not only to secure the election this election include more progressive of a Labour government. we also taxation, state bank investment in public recognise that this election marks a further intensification of the left-right services, support for industry, an end to struggle within the labour movement and nhS privatisation, public ownership of the Labour Party. The higher the Labour the railways, community ownership of vote and the number of Labour MPs energy, an end to zero-hours contracts, elected, the more secure will be the the restoration of employment and trade position of Jeremy Corbyn and his left union rights and building half a million allies in the Parliamentary Labour Party. new council houses. Any reverses for Labour will be used The Communist Party is in no doubt as a pretext by the right-wing pro-eU, that this second option is the only one which serves the interests of workers and pro-nATo faction in the Parliamentary Labour Party and its trade union allies to their families. Therefore our members will be campaigning for a Labour victory launch yet another bid to remove Jeremy Corbyn and take the Labour Party back to as the essential first step towards the the neoliberal and pro-war policies of the formation of a left-led government at past. westminster. Thus the Communist Party says: in every general election since the formation of the Communist Party in l eject the Tories – elect a Labour 1920, we have stood our own candidates, government! not least in 2015 when we fielded nine. l reject austerity, privatisation and now, on this occasion, we will not contest imperialist war! any seats, although this does not signal l Leave the eU Single Market and nATo! any withdrawal from the electoral arena l no to any free trade treaty with the eU in the future. that denies workers' rights and the role of we call for a Labour vote in every the public sector! constituency across Britain, despite the l Fight for social justice, public ownership reactionary views of numerous Labour and progressive taxation! Party candidates. Communist Party
The working class and peoples of england, Scotland and wales face a stark choice on 8 June: whether to vote for more austerity, privatisation, growing inequality, militarism and war; or to elect a left-led Labour government with policies to enhance our public services, invest in industry and housing, combat poverty, safeguard the environment, liberate the trade unions, promote social justice and pursue an independent foreign policy based on peace and international solidarity.
s AuF WiDerSehen, PeT! Thousands of british workers have themselves been forced into becoming migrant workers.
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ony benn argued that the five rights we have as british citizens were undermined and lost as a result of our membership of the european union. These rights – won through extraparliamentary struggle – enable us to throw the people who make the laws out of office. But in the EU many laws can only be altered via a trans governmental body that we do not elect. British judges are required to uphold the rulings of EU courts and submit to treaty obligations, particularly in respect of free movement of capital. Constraints are imposed on ministers and the civil service by EU treaty obligations which limit our ability to bring privatised services back into public ownership. And we simply cannot hold our legislators to account. Few people on the left still hold to the illusion that it is possible to change the EU from within. But Labour’s right-wing, some Greens and the Lib Dems argue that the people got it wrong and the clearly expressed will of the majority should be subverted! This contemptuous attitude to democracy – if followed by the Labour Party – would cut the party off from the four million mainly working class voters lost in the Blair and Brown years. Despite the EU’s racist barriers to non EU citizens – which discriminate against the family members of millions of British Black and Asian citizens – some people act as if that the vote to leave the EU was in itself racist. The Communist Party holds no truck with these arguments. We campaigned with the Indian Workers’ Association, the Bangla Deshi Workers Council and other working class black and Asian groups in the Lexit alliance for a
This pamphlet looks at the course of the brexit negotiations themselves: how options are currently being defined by the british government and what their implications are for workers’ rights. it starts by examining the eu: its positive achievements but also its neo-liberal economic framework and the consequences both for the crisis of social democracy and the rise of right-wing populism. The third section looks at the objectives of british big business and the City of london, the relationship with the uS, and most important of all, why british big business and the City will not and cannot resolve the basic problems facing the british economy and why public sector intervention is essential. The pamphlet ends by considering the opportunities and dangers posed by the negotiations for working people in britain. it argues that the opportunity now exists for restoring democratic control over the economy, for addressing the structural problems of stagnation and job loss and for re-establishing workers’ rights. A campaign for such an outcome has the potential to galvanise a wider movement across europe and constitutes the best chance for winning the battle against right-wing populism. The alternative, of the Tory government creating a new rightwing populist base for neo-liberal economics, is one that should persuade every trade unionist of the necessity to campaign for a progressive settlement.
people’s exit from the EU based on working class internationalism and the protection of migrant workers employment and residence rights. Protecting migrant workers rights is an internationalist duty for all workers and serves our collective interests here in Britain. When we take action to raise the wages of super exploited migrants we are protecting our own pay from the employers’ offensive. And thousands of British workers themselves are forced into migrant labour. The lack of democracy and the shift to austerity are central to the neoliberal policies that the EU enforces. These policies have given credibility to demagogic, right wing and neo fascist forces across Europe. Rather than blocking the rise of racism as sometimes claimed, racism has been strengthened. European social democratic parties and their trades union affiliates fell for the illusion that social partnership and class collaboration – under the rubric of the ‘Social Chapter’ would deliver social progress. The collapse of these policies and the anti-union and anti-working class judgments of the European Court of Justice make this ever clearer. Limited social gains that have come from the EU are under threat. UK law enshrined much of these prior to membership and many go further – holiday and maternity rights, the Single Equality Act, health and safety rules are all in many areas significantly better than EU norms and need defending. Labour have pledged to raise the minimum wage and strengthen workers’ rights. These and the approach contained in the Institute of Employment Rights Manifesto for Labour would strengthen the bargaining position of workers and should be supported by trade unionists.
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The Morning Star is the world’s only English language socialist daily paper and has just celebrated its 50th birthday. It was founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker to be the organ of the central committee of the Communist Party and in 1948 became a co-operative, the People’s Press Printing Society. It is run by an elected management committee which currently has ten national trade unions in membership. The paper provides day to day coverage of the fight for workplace rights, equal rights and the struggle against austerity. Until his election as Labour leader Jeremy