Unity! Communist Party bulletin Unemployment special 2012
A national conference, called by Morning Star Readers’ & Supporters For a People's Britain not a Bankers' Britain Sat. 31st March 10.30 am to 4.45 pm @ Bishopsgate Institute, London For more info:
conference.morningstar@gmail.com
Trades Council into action Bill Greenshields
WOMEN BEAR THE BRUNT unemployment was at its highest for 20 years with 1.05 million women out of work. We knew it would happen! With women making up more Over 517,700 women were claiming Job Seekers than 65% of public sector workers and a TUC prediction Allowance – the highest number since 1996. that 750,000 jobs will be lost Many of those who have lost because of cuts in health, welfare and education women’s their jobs were temporary staff or part time workers and unemployment was set to women are more likely than dramatically rise. men to work part time, Public sector cuts also particularly if they have impacted on voluntary sector children. According to the organisations, where the majority of workers as well as National Office for Statistics and the Fawcett Society, clients are women. Most local women account for 54% of the authorities cut voluntary 1.4 million workers on sector grants by 25% for the temporary contracts, making financial year about to end totalling some £75m. A survey them more vulnerable to unemployment. Ethnic of domestic and sexual violence services by Women’s minority women are more likely to be in temporary jobs Aid published in March 2011 so they are at an even greater found that 60% of refuge risk of becoming unemployed. services and 72% of outreach services had no funding agreed As Christmas approaches and the shops fill up with from 1st April 2011. unobtainable items the future In August 2011 women’s
Anita Wright
picture for women looks bleak. The latest quarterly survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development showed that employers are holding back on employment decisions and intend to create fewer jobs, destroying the myth that job losses in the public sector would be compensated by the private sector creating jobs. Even the Daily Telegraph is predicting that unemployment will rise further in the three months to the end of December 2011and the Bank of England has reduced its initial estimate of economic growth to 1% stating that the economy will stagnate until the middle of next year. All this makes it even more important for women to join the fightback and make their voice heard in the battle against these vicious attacks.
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Eighteen locally based Trades Union Councils from around Britain took up the invitation to attend a meeting called by The People’s Charter at the end of the year. The invitation, personally endorsed by Bob Crow, the chairman of the Trades Councils national body, the TUCJCC, and circulated by the TUC, asked them to come with ideas for putting “flesh on the bones” of the TUC’s advice that Trades Union Councils should work closely with the Charter on developing work locally against the ConDems “austerity” measure and for “The Alternative”. The Charter was overwhelmingly endorsed at TUC Congress 2009 and has 16 individually affiliated national Trade Unions. The meeting was a lively affair, kicked off with an introduction by Pat Sikorski, Assistant General Secretary of RMT, Bob Crow having had to attend two important RMT events and sending his apologies. Cont. on page2
Trades Council into action. Cont. from Front The discussion focused on the need to build a real movement a local “grass roots” level – recognising the central position of Trades Councils in this, bringing together unions from across the private and public sectors, and building bridges into the local communities. The meeting identified the rapid increase in job loss and unemployment in both private manufacturing industry and in public services as a major area demanding attention and action. Youth unemployment and “precarious working” were recognised as particular areas for such action. The meeting agreed various important steps to be taken, including a proposal that the TUCJCC should be approached to encourage all 176 Trades Councils in Britain to coordinate action on unemployment - “For jobs, skills, industry and public services”. It envisaged demonstrations, public events, conferences, occupations and other activities appropriate to local conditions, to take place in the early part of 2012, and in the run up to the Trades Councils annual conference in May. The meeting anticipated further national demonstrations and co-ordinated strike action, and agreed strongly that local action of the kind discussed would help build a sustained movement at local level. In the words of a delegate from Birmingham Trades Council, “We need a movement that involves people around the country in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and which is there day in, day out – sustained and active and refusing to go away. Such a movement would be unstoppable.”
Our History
a rump in parliament. What the Communist Party had been saying about the When a major recession hit Britain in the early 1920s, it Labour Party seemed to be being demonstrated in real was the Communists who life. raised the slogan `Stop the Communists played a big Retreat’. Their influence grew amongst shop stewards part in building resistance to the shameful treatment of and trade union activists through the establishment of the unemployed. They organised NUWM activity the National Unemployed around the Labour Workers' Movement Exchanges, fought benefit (NUWM) in 1921. Below left: A unique photo of cases on behalf of the jobless, fighting the dreaded Means the 1922 Birmingham contingent before it set off for Test on the way. The NUWM mobilised for London. Every single man the first march in 1922 and the great march of the South Wales miners in 1927. The Scottish unemployed march of 1928 was followed by the national Hunger Marches of 1929, 1930, 1932, 1934, and 1936. The 1932 Hunger March was followed by days of here was then a Communist. In 1931, the final betrayal by Ramsay McDonald as a Labour Prime Minister saw the creation of a coalition government and a savage attack on welfare benefits. In the General Election that followed, the Labour Party was reduced to by Graham Stevenson
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serious disturbance across London as police tried to stop marchers from demonstrating. The repressive apprtoach adopted by the authorities actually led to the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties, which is now called Liberty. Despite later focus, especially on the nonpolitical Jarrow March, the Labour Party and most trades unions ignored the problem of unemployment and could often be harsh towards the marchers. Unless you were allowed to keep in your union after loosing your job, which few were, unions did not cater for the unemployed. The NUWM suspended activity at the outbreak of World War II and was finally dissolved in 1946 when it looked as if an era of full employment had finally come about for good.
Working on the Edge – the rise and rise of McJobs not paid for, the actual wage is below the minimum wage.))) Weakening of labour laws: Unions have warned that the government is building a ‘bonfire’ for employment legislation. Len McLuskey accused the government of making workers in the UK, the cheapest and easiest in Europe to abuse and dismiss. There are proposals to do away with the 90 day consultation period over redundancies; TUPE regulations that exist to protect workers when their jobs are outsourced or transferred, could be diluted or abandoned; the minimum wage could be scrapped for younger workers; health and safety regulations are to be ‘eased’ Governments across Europe are changing the laws on collective rights. One clear development is that company level bargaining is being promoted at the expense of bargaining at national and industry level. This is all part of the privatisation agenda – as schools become academies, there is no longer an obligation for the employer to implement nationally agreed terms and conditions; if the NHS is broken up, different rates of pay will become the norm etc. The Lisbon Treaty - the Laval and Viking cases show how European firms can import or post workers from one country to another (mostly from Eastern Europe) for projects and pay them lower wages than those agreed nationally by the host country. The Mode 4 clause will take this ‘social dumping’ trend even further allowing firms from outside the UK to bring in their own workers and also supply workers to other UK based firms, thus undermining terms and conditions fought for and established by the unions in the UK. Some Success/ some strategies: The new Agency Workers Regulations came into force in October 2011 which amongst other benefits, give workers after 12 weeks, the same pay, holiday entitlement and
Employers would say that fluctuations were the reason for employing agency workers but Core employment implies essential, traditional industries it was evident that the real and services where workers are reasons were to do with the ‘outsourcing of risk’ i.e. easy to employed directly by either hire, easy to fire. The use of private companies or in the agency workers had increased public sector. Peripheral over the 5 years to 2006; that employment implies agency, temporary and seasonal work - increase is now accelerating. Worker or employee? ‘low paid, low benefit, low Unity Personnel Ltd, an agency prestige’ - the Wikipedia supplying temporary workers definition of a McJob – dating offered an assignment to 3 men back to 1986! for foundry work. The contract In the last 30 years in the explained that there might be UK, not only have basic ‘core’ and nationalised industries and periods when there was no work available and that between services been scrapped (or assignments there was no outsourced to geographical contract between the parties. peripheries!) resulting in Unity later was in dire financial unemployment, and the loss straits, there were problems and waste of skills, but the paying wages, the agency remaining industries and became insolvent. The workers services have been, and are applied to the National being re-organised so that Insurance Fund for wage employer/ employee arrears. A tribunal decided that relationships are increasingly and shockingly becoming as the the men were due the wages from the NI Fund. The old ‘peripheral’ arrangements Secretary of State appealed and once were – agency and temporary. The ensuing loss of the decision was overturned. Autoklenz advertised for union membership density has car valeteers. The valeters been an intended consequence signed contracts which in the ruling class’ favour. And of course, in the ‘bust’ characterised them as self employed. Autoklenz paid each of the capitalist cycle, the team of workers £9 for each car overall pressure of increasing numbers of unemployed at the they cleaned. From the sums due, deductions were made for periphery is used to threaten liability insurance and cleaning and undermine those ‘lucky materials. A self employed enough’ to be in employment. Tales from the ‘Periphery’ person would have expected to 5 years ago the TUC published make these arrangements for themselves, instead of which its findings from a project the company was making the entitled Working on the Edge. arrangements for them - at It found that far from agency what kind of non-competitive staff being engaged on a short term basis in support functions rigged price? Outsourced social care work only, agency workers were often performing key roles alongside – Care workers typically sign a ‘zero hours’ contract meaning directly employed staff. Pay there is no guaranteed number was usually lower, and terms of hours work. Pay is around and conditions inferior. the minimum wage level, but as care workers are only paid for the time they spend in service users’ homes, and travel time and travel costs between service users’ homes are
by Carrie Hedderwick
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working hours as permanent staff . The Labour Party has launched a review into Low Pay. In 2010 trade unions received funding from the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills to tackle ‘vulnerable employment.’ Unison is urging the Labour Party to propose solutions to the problems facing low paid workers in schools and hospitals resulting from the Private Finance Initiative . Unison is also pressing the Labour Party to abolish the 2 tier system that has arisen generally through the outsourcing of public services. Unite has launched a major campaign to highlight the practices of Thanet Earth, which supplies most supermarket chains and who hire and fire workers at will. Citizens UK is promoting the Living Wage – higher than the national minimum wage The People’s Charter has been adopted by the TUC and incorporated into Trades Councils’ programmes of work. The PC calls for ‘More and better jobs, full employment, reduced working hours, raised wages… All the individual campaigns around particular aspects of low pay, trade union rights, and reversing mistaken policies are vitally important but unless there is an overall vision of an alternative economic system, an alternative society (as put forward in the People’s Charter) then it is more of the same – the shifting around of the proverbial deckchairs on the doomed luxury liner. We will not accept a ’capitalists’ paradise of zero government and zero regulation’!
Tommy Morrison sets out a strategy of using the Scottish Parliament in the fight against cuts in services and "Scottish Communist argue that the Scottish Parliament has a potentially important role in mobilising resistance to the attacks on our class. On social policy the SNP have carried out a number of popular initiatives, however SNP controlled councils have merely administered the Tory cuts blaming Westminster. Cuts in jobs and services have taken place and they have allowed an onslaught on terms and conditions being imposed by management without trade union agreement. Joint campaign of resistance involving the trades unions and the community against the cuts have so far failed to build the necessary local mass movements. SNP economic policies are aligned to big business thereby accelerating control of our economy by externally controlled transnational corporations. Any alternative strategy needs to take on the politics of the EU. The SNP call for independence in Europe must be exposed for the nonsense it is – the EU will of course prohibit any government intervention to rebuild Scotland’s industrial base, to directly create employment, or to take back utilities into public ownership. A Scottish Parliament would not be allowed to intervene in the economy which would remain under the control of the external corporations. This so called independence would simply see Scotland remaining a satellite state of British finance capital. So while the SNP position on social policy is somewhat to the left of centre and social democratic in nature, its right wing economics is that espoused by the party’s council of economic advisors. How do we meet this challenge? At one level it is ideological. We need to take a campaign of explanation into the labour movement – there is no simple Scottish solution. We need to advance a class based alternative. For communists the test of any constitutional arrangement is how far it advances the interests of our class. A Scottish parliament needs to have powers of economic intervention that tackles the control of key resources and utilities by external monopolies which at present is to the detriment of the vast majority of people in Scotland including small and medium business where the tory core vote is to be found. But if our Scottish Parliament is to secure that capacity then defence of democracy at British level is essential. We need to win people to recognise the common interest of the working class across Britain and the leading role in this fight has to be taken up by the organised working class, the labour and trade union movement who need to win and champion the aspirations of our class. Such ideological work would challenge the neo liberal ideas of the SNP economic advisers and right wing Labour. Another essential task is organisational, that of building the base of our class organisations. Communists seek to build the existing organisations of the working class in the community such as tenants, anti cuts groups, and community councils. Not front organizations but organisations grounded in the community. In the workplace shop steward organisation is key. What brings them both together is trades union councils which take the politics of the labour movement into the community. For a trades council to be effective it needs to conduct consistent struggle on the ground – the leafleting, the street stalls, the public meetings, using the local media. Patient work, building alliances, taking up the issues of other sections of society under attack. Those reliant on benefits, the unemployed, the disabled, the long term sick, pensioners, students. The vicious attacks on Housing Benefit will hurt many. These groups are suffering yet in many cases are not well organised, and even with the exceptions such as some student groups, they don’t have the power and often the politics, to cause deep or long term concern to our ruling class that potentially the trade movement can create. Building alliances through persistent, careful work on the ground, trade union councils can become local champions of working class areas with the potential to build local mass movements, politicising workers in the process, with the real possibility of compelling local elected members to fight the cuts in a way that so far has not been possible. Today our main task is winning support amongst public service workers to take action against the attack on their pensions, jobs and services. We need to take the arguments beyond the public sector into private industry and the community at large showing that there is no crisis in the schemes. Rather the pension crisis is in the private sector due to low trade union density. Behind this ideological attack is the wish to transfer the cost of public sector pensions from employers to workers leaving these services attractive for privatisation. While due to the anti trade union laws the dispute has to be a trade dispute hence the pension scheme being only on the ballot paper, many workers realise this is a proxy vote for a political strike over not just the pension issue but the wage freeze, cuts to jobs and services, rising retirement age, and an overall attack on terms and conditions. While we campaign against the public sector cuts we need to project an alternative economic and political strategy into the labour movement and beyond. Our tool for this task is the People’s Charter with its six basic demands. The left won STUC support for the charter but we need to popularise the charter in the work place and the community. Building on progress made, taking our Marxist – Leninist theory into the movement, working to build broad alliances in struggle, Communists can play a part in creating the mass movement required to bring down this government before their full term is served."
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PRECARIOUS WORK –WHY REGULATED AGENCY WORK MATTERS TO US ALL by Joanne Stevenson The future of work in the 21st century is turning what was called ‘peripheral’ employment into the norm. Agency work has grown massively in recent years. Many young people and women and most migrant workers are forced to rely on agencies to provide them with work and, in many ways this is the biggest contributor to maintaining the massive gender gap in pay. Temporary staff forms a significant proportion of the labour force, perhaps as much as a fifth, whilst the management style that relies on insecurity in the workplace has rubbed off on enormous swathes of the rest of the employed. Agency work leads naturally into making much of the economy reliant on `precarious work’. Thus, part time employment, self-employment, fixed-term work, on-call work, home working, and telecommuting all depart from the standard of full-time, continuous work with one employer. Precarious work provides low wages, few benefits, a lack of collective
They can get rid of them when they like, without having to bother with unfair dismissal laws, or giving redundancy payments. Agency staff don’t usually get the rate for the job. Even employers who recognise trades unions use temporary, agency and casual staff to undermine decent employment standards and exploit vulnerable workers. Even some trade unions, as employers themselves, tend to use temporary staff rather more than seems appropriate at times. Most agency staff would rather have a permanent job. Not only do temps often earn less, they don’t have access to a pension scheme, often have fewer holidays and loose out on bonuses and even sick pay. The common perception of a temporary worker is an individual on a short-term placement, engaged in a support role to permanent employees. But many temps are carrying out key roles. An opportunity to challenge the growth of this phenomenon purely at the workplace has long gone. Mainly, trades unionists now have to fight to organise and
representation to give some control over working conditions, and little-to-no certainty over job security. As many as over a third of workers experience this form of employment and this is growing. PRECIOUS LITTLE RIGHTS The worst end of the agency labour market breaks the law with impunity, especially with vulnerable workers such as migrants. Some migrant workers live in over-crowded, substandard accommodation, are charged deductions from the minimum wage and even health and safety equipment, resulting in a form of bonded labour. But it’s the more widespread and lower grade exploitation of agency labour that has really undermined trades unionism. The recent growth of unemployment and Tory clamping down hard on the unemployed is all about forcing people into MacJobs. Try signing on, it’s next to impossible, and even then there’s no jobs to be had at the dole for six months until you’re sent to one of their `stakeholder partners’ – or agencies! Employers see temps as a way of getting staff on the cheap.
direct this agency workforce. The organising agenda that so many unions now say that they embrace needs to prioritise agency staff. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Unions need to not only campaign for rights of precarious workers, they need to reinvigorate their demands for fairer union rights laws. A good start would be for unions to campaign in communities on all issues that concern working people, whether this be keeping hospital wards open, better NHS dental facilities, or decent social housing. Young people, women and migrant workers who are largely non-unionised will respond to unions campaigning on the streets about their rights at work. Can we see calls for a reprise of the Peoples’ Marches for Jobs of the early 1980s, this time in the form of a March for Decent Work from all corners of Britain on the Labour Party conference? Precarious workers of all kinds have nothing to loose but their insecurity!
UNITE’s community membership launched Welfare Benefit
by the CP Industry, Services, Transport Advisory
check-ups If you’re a member of Unite and want to link up with other Unite members in the Communist Party, get in touch This initiative comes at a moment when Unite has finally merged the various strands of retired members associations that it inherited from Amicus and the vibrant RMA founded by Jack Jones that came from the T&G.. Clearly, many senior citizens – and the not so senior early retirement brigade, too – may find a home in CM branches. But the union’s existing (and future) retired members will not be obliged to join a new Community Branch, if they have an affinity with the UNITE branch they were in when working. This is a very exciting proposal and is expected to attract a lot of interest. There has been significant interest in this proposal. Unite will now roll out two pilot projects, one based on the already successful former Dockers' branches in Liverpool. Whilst the Mayor of Tower Hamlets has proposed a joint project that can focus on developing communities, following the summer riots. There is no date fixed for the launch but we hope we can do this by the end of the year, probably initially with two pilot projects. The Union is also actively developing proposals to set up a credit union.
After rule changes made at the union’s rules conference, Unite’s Executive has launched a new category of “Community Membership” for students, pensioners and unemployed at 50p per week. Anyone who might be classed as “economically inactive” will be able to join without any condition. This radical departure for a British union is still very much at the development stage but, already, it is evident that it could offer a chance for the unemployed to organise. This new membership will be allocated to Community Branches, which will be set up to match the local areas already established for Unite’s “Area Activists’ Committees”, whereby shop stewards and lay branch officers gather on a quarterly basis in what some unions might have once called a “district committee”. A range of benefits is being considered, most of which can be offered by external providers at little or no cost to the Union. These could include: Hardship grants Back to work packages Financial health-check Debt counselling Tax refund advice Retail benefits Personal accident cover
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The EU and the Drive to the Bottom also give the EU central powers Without such rights our to over-ride national parliaments to impose austerity parliament will remain budgets. powerless to adopt the type of progressive alternative policies What has been the called for in the People’s response? So far very little. Douglas Alexander has recently Charter.
requirements for the privatisation of all public In Britain the trade union and services under the terms of the labour movement has been very Single European Act and the Services directive. slow to respond to the threat posed by the EU to Second, there is the ban on employment, public services and collective bargaining. The state aid for industrial movement still has no effective companies under EU policy response – and the issue Competition law – which renders it illegal for the is now becoming increasingly government to rescue firms urgent. such as Bombardier or to take them into public ownership (which is why Northern Rock has had to be sold off Richard Branson for a song).
by John Foster
Fat Cat Alert!!!!!!! In 2007-8 the European Union’s Court of Justice (not to be confused with the non-EU Court of Human Rights) passed a series of anti-trade union judgements. These ban any industrial action which seeks to prevent a firm registered in another member state, and it could be British Airways registering a subsidiary form in France, employing workers on conditions that undercut existing negotiated terms. No action has been taken to reverse these judgments. Currently an EU-India Free Trade Agreement is on the point of being ratified which will open Indian industries and services, particularly banking, to British firms. At the same time Indian registered firms, which could be subsidiaries of British firms, will be able to transfer skilled workers to Britain on terms which make them effectively indentured labourers: with no rights to collective bargaining and working under Indian terms and conditions. These two developments are bad enough. But they are just part of a wider process that has been unfolding for years. First, there are the
stated that Labour should be ‘more critical’ of the EU and not allow the surrender of more powers. Yet he supports the Single Market and makes no criticism of the EU’s inbuilt bias against working people.
internsanonymous.co.uk IA was set up in March 2009 by two graduates – Alex Try and Rosy Rickett – who were both working as unpaid interns. In the past two years they have been contacted by hundreds of interns, and have tried to shine a light on the problems in the graduate job market. More and more young people are trying to gain experience or footholds in an industry by working without pay – Westminster and the media would collapse without them. Some have spent three months photo-copying, been slaves for Chief Executives or, conversely, walked in the corridors of power, and published articles in national newspapers. IA wants to hear from those who are, or have been, interns. Did you find your experiences useful or demoralising, were you exploited? Did an internship lead to a dream job or give you great experience? Or did you spend three months crying in the toilets of your organisation because your boss treated you like dirt? Send your ANONYMOUS blog posts about your experiences to internsanonymous@gmail.com
The TUC has policy to say it does not like recent EU legislation. But it has no campaign to reverse it. But it is Third, the terms of the now crystal clear that such a Stability and Growth Pact campaign is urgently necessary. which ban Keynesian style And there is a key political economic stimulus – effectively making unemployment, and the opportunity. In terms of resulting pressure on wages, the existing commitments across Europe, amendments to the EU EU’s economic regulator. For Treaty should demand the EU economic growth can referenda to secure agreement. only be driven by pushing up profits – not by pushing up Cameron’s Conservatives demand. are formally pledged to a And if you think that’s bad, it’s referendum. But Cameron will about to get much worse. Last oppose one. He wants to use the threat of a referenda to year the EU adopted a new negotiate concessions for the policy document entitled City of London that will Europe 2020 with the aim of maintain a voice for Anglo-US ‘improving EU financial interests at the heart competitiveness’. of the EU. No – it’s not calling for Cameron knows that well massive investment in over half of his backbenchers, production, training and who largely represent small and education. For the EU competitiveness means cutting medium business at local level, want a referendum, but he also every aspect of workers knows that that Clegg and the remuneration: particularly pension levels, retirement ages, Liberal Democrats, the London bankers’ best friends, will contractual rights to job oppose. security and all barriers to the creation of a fully ‘flexible’ If Labour supported, labour force. Order from your local newsagent Cameron’s dishonest Coalition would be wrecked. These are This year has seen the EU using the banking debt crisis to the real politics of 2012. Join the fight against enforce these terms on all cuts, for peace & That’s why it is urgent that debtor nations. Worse, it has socialism the trade union and labour seen the adoption of new laws Send your name address, movement adopts policy. It that will enforce them across needs to use this opportunity to postcode, phone number(s) and the Eurozone – and inevitable seize back our democratic rights email with your age if under 30 to: the rest of the EU as well. These are the terms of the ‘Euro – and above all to demand that #CP Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Rd, London CR0 1BD Plus’ Pact that now be policed we are no longer subject to the t:02086861659 terms of the Single European under amendments to the EU e:office@communist-party.org.uk Treaty. These amendments will Act and Competition Law. www.communist-party.org.uk
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