Nipsa News April/May

NIPSA NEWS THE NEWSPAPER OF THE LEADING PUBLIC SERVICE TRADE UNION

Gerry ‘gets stick’ for 40 years of union service – See page 2

Western Health social workers in strike action

NIPSA members working in Primary Care and Older People at the Western Health and Social Care Trust took part in strike action, on Friday, May 16.

The strike follows months of talks with management over increased work levels and unmanageable caseloads.

NIPSA has been pressing PCOP management on the urgent need to introduce an agreed caseload management tool and to review the excessive caseloads that social workers and social work assistants continue to work under.

A union source told NIPSA News: “Despite attempts to resolve this, management have refused to give any commitments about the introduction of caseload weighting or to recognise the need for additional staff to deal with the caseload pressures.”

Further report and pictures - see page 4.

NIPSA to bring DVA Campaign to heart of government – See page 3

Union marks Workers’ Memorial Day – See page 4

APRIL/MAY 2014 Tel: 028 90661831 www.nipsa.org.uk

Hate crime in Northern Ireland on the rise – a special report – See page 6

May Day celebrations in Derry – more pictures covering this and the Belfast event on pages 8 and 9

NJC pay: Strike ballot planned NIPSA is to join all other National Joint Council (NJC) unions in balloting members working in local government, housing, education, further education, libraries and some voluntary sector organisations over the rejection of the NJC Employers’ Side pay offer of 1% on all pay points.

A slightly higher increase for those at the bottom on the pay scales was also tabled.

NJC Employers’ Side were only forced to offer the lowest paid a little over 1% because not to do so would have meant that they would be paying below the National Minimum Wage.

It has been decided that after three years of no increases in the rate of pay and a meagre 1% last year that NJC workers have had enough and that they wish to send a strong signal to the Employers’ Side that they want and expect a decent pay rise.

Deputy General Secretary Alison Millar told NIPSA News: “Members in local government, housing, education, libraries, FE sectors and some voluntary organisations are struggling to pay their household bills.

“While their pay has effectively stood still for four years, the cost of day to day expenditure on household expenses has risen by more than 17%.

This means that these workers have suffered a 16%-17% pay cut.

“In addition, we have seen cuts to jobs in many of these sectors. Our members are facing unprecedented changes in their work – with many reporting having to do more and more with no additional reward.”

Union officials have acknowledged that taking industrial action is not easy but underline that NIPSA members will be joining over a million workers across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in fighting for a just outcome and a real and meaningful increase in their pay.

NIPSA will be communicating with members in the sector directly over the next short period through circulars and by directly meeting with members to explain the reason for the ballot and why NIPSA are recommending a strong YES vote for strike action in the days ahead.

Stand strong and united for a decent pay increase.

Privatisation of residential care still on agenda – See page 10

Industrial action ballot over Council outsourcing ‘insult’

NIPSA is to ballot members working in leisure and recreation centres in Belfast over whether to take industrial action following Belfast City Council’s decision to forge ahead with plans to outsource leisure services in the city.

The union has been involved in a continuing dispute with Belfast City Council over the plan.

This was done despite counter proposals contained in an Association for Public Service Excellence report which, in NIPSA’s view, met all the requirements laid down by the Council in terms of savings and governance issues.

However, Council still decided to proceed with proposals to outsource leisure services.

General Secretary Brian Campfield told NIPSA News: “This represents a gross insult to all staff currently employed in leisure services in the Council. The senior leisure officers in the Council have clearly had for some considerable time, the objective of the outsourcing leisure services.

“It is obvious that no matter what proposals or concessions the trade unions agreed to, senior officials in the Council had their minds made up that outsourcing was the only option to be pursued.”

The union believes strongly that despite the outsourcing decision taken at the Council’s meeting in May, this can be reversed providing NIPSA continues to campaign vigorously to have it overturned.

According to NIPSA, the election of the new shadow Council on May 22 will provide an opportunity to intensify its campaign as the new Council cannot be bound by previous Council decision.

NIPSA is not prepared to concede that the matter of leisure services outsourcing is a done deal.

The union served notice on the Council on May 9 that it intends to initiate a statutory ballot for industrial action of NIPSA members employed in leisure and recreation centres including the Indoor Tennis Arena and Ozone Complex.

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Page 2 NIPSA NEWS

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News

There are no limits to the privatisation agenda Editorial

NOTHING is sacred to those who wish to open up public services to commercial exploitation by creating additional profit centres for private business.

In a report carried on the front page of the Guardian on Saturday, May 17, a group of social work academics denounced the plans by the UK Coalition Government to outsource children’s protection to private firms.

This could well add child protection to prisons, probationary services and health provision as activities that are open to private profiteering.

In condemning this plan, which would oper-

ate in Britain, Professor Eileen Munro said establishing a market in child protection would create perverse incentives for private companies to either take more children into care or leave too many languishing with dangerous families.

The 37 senior academics, who signed the letter, warned that child protection was too important to be left to the fickleness and failings of the market. They expressed considerable concern if private sector organisations, such as G4S, Serco and ATOS, were allowed to run child protection services.

The move towards privatisation of all public

NICCEA members balloted for industrial action

AS exam time approaches, those involved in the assessment and marking of papers have “had enough”, according to NIPSA, having been dealt a blow in their pockets by employers.

For many years staff had agreed to work additional hours and, in return, were given Time Off in Lieu (TOIL) at timeand-a-half.

However, NIPSA was advised earlier this year that the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) had decided to change this to plain time.

This move angered members and the employer has refused

to budge on the issue despite negotiations lasting a number of months.

NIPSA Official Kevin Kelly said: “Members have had enough. For years they have worked additional hours to ensure pupils’ exams were assessed, marked and results issued in a timely fashion and, in return, staff were given a slight enhancement for this.

He added: “NIPSA members have been forced into taking this stand against an intransigent employer.”

Members are currently being balloted for industrial action with the likelihood of industrial action starting in mid-June.

NIPSA NEWS

NIPSA Harkin House, 54 Wellington Park, Belfast BT9 6DP, Tel: 028 90661831 Fax 028 90665847 or email: alison.millar@nipsa.org.uk Editorial contact details: Bob Miller email: bob.miller@nipsa.org.uk Correspondence should be sent to the above address.

Unless otherwise stated, the views contained in NIPSA NEWS do not necessarily reflect the policy of trade union NIPSA.

services is evident in Northern Ireland. The award of the DSD soft services contract to G4S, the planned dismantling of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and the increasing outsourcing of leisure services to so-called charitable leisure trusts and private sector concerns all provide ample evidence of this trend.

Some politicians have argued that outsourcing services such as housing and leisure to voluntary non-profit organisations is not privatisation and represents a means of securing community involvement together with efficiencies.

The reality is that

these initiatives are the first steps in the State washing its hands of responsibility for vital public services which will lead us on a backwards journey to embrace Victorian practices whereby charitable organisations will once again bear the main responsibility for the welfare of the less well-off in our society.

Yes, the State may well continue – for a period at least – to provide finance for these services but the inevitable destination is the charitable approach to meeting the needs of individuals, families and communities.

Those who receive this charity will be stigmatised, the very concept

of the State having a responsibility for meeting the needs of people will be undermined and if child protection can be delivered by private companies, including large self-serving corporations such as Serco, ATOS and G4S, then every aspect of public provision as we know it is threatened.

This is the battlefield of the present and the future and the trade union movement must step up to the challenge and robustly oppose outsourcing of public services whether to private firms or to charitable-type bodies.

Retiring Gerry ‘gets stick’ for 40 years of service!

Brian Campfield, General Secretary

NIPSA Health and Safety stalwart Gerry McGrath has been praised for his “humour, quick-wittedness and gentle nature” over 40 years of service in the public sector.

The kind words came from Gerry’s line manager at a special presentation to mark his recent retirement.

Stating that it had been a pleasure to work with, his line manager added that “polite and courteous” Gerry was always a “stickler for doing things the right way”.

A former member of the NIPSA Civil Service Executive, Gerry – a dad of four and a grandfather of four – had worked in many departments over more than four decades.

His first job, in 1974, was with the Roads Service before moving on to stints at Historic Monuments and Buildings, Land Registry, Personnel Finance and Salaries, Water Charges Branch and the Rates Collection Agency.

In recent years, he worked in NIEA Corporate Communications before moving to DOE Communications.

Gerry had a special interest in Health and Safety stretching back to the mid-1980s.

Along with his TUS work, Gerry was a Chairperson at Local Whitley Level, chaired the DOE/DRD Departmental Committee as well as various Health and Safety committees.

For a number of years, he was elected to the NIPSA H&S Committee and in that role held

meetings with government ministers on Health and Safety issues.

The presentation heard that sports-mad Gerry had a long involvement with the Civil Service Sports Council and NICSSA and had been involved with the North/South Games which promoted good relations between the two Civil Services on the island.

Gerry – who played hurling for Down, including at Croke Park – had once commented that he had been “born with a hurling stick in hand”.

It was fitting then that one of leaving gifts presented to him on the day was a hurling stick.

AFTER several months of talks an agreement in principle has been adopted by Derry City Council.

As a result, NIPSA has launched a consultative ballot with its members over whether to accept or reject the agreement.

The new deal introduces GLPC job evalu-

ation, harmonisation of working hours as well as a number of other terms and conditions.

If accepted, it will be retrospectively implemented from April 1, 2010, with some staff receiving arrears of pay from that date.

NIPSA veteran Gerry McGrath (centre, blue tie) surrounded by friends and colleagues at his retirement presentation

Consultative ballot over Derry City Council deal

Bringing DVA Campaign to heart of government

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Page 3 NIPSA NEWS

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NIPSA is bringing the DVA Campaign to the heart of government by staging a special lobby of Stormont on Tuesday, June 3.

Assistant Secretary Ryan McKinney told NIPSA News: “It is critical that we maximise the turnout at this lobby. NIPSA will be encouraging all members from across Belfast to support the lobby but staff in the Coleraine area in particular are asked to attend and encourage others to do so.”

It is understood DVA management will be asked to help facilitate this.

Mr McKinney said: “At this stage it is clear that many staff are disheartened – justifiably so.

“However, I do believe it is crucial that we continue to keep the campaign in the spotlight and maintain the pressure on Executive Minis-

ters to deliver.”

The announcement of the lobby came as members of the DVA Campaign Steering Committee met with Head of the Civil Service Dr Malcolm McKibben on May 13.

DVA chief Paul Duffy and Corporate HR Director Colin Lewis were also at the meeting.

Dr McKibbin stressed that the Northern Ireland Executive had been given “political direction” on the issue and vowed to do everything that could be done to identify functions or projects which could be carried out by DVA staff.

Mr McKinney commented: “All Government Ministers have been contacted and each Permanent Secretary asked to give full co-operation. Meetings are continuing to take place with several departments in order to fully explore

every avenue and exhaust every possible option.”

The Steering Committee were also assured that as DVLA have committed to a level of funding until December 21, “it is not impossible that work can be found and funded”.

Mr McKinney pointed out that a number of issues around identifying current vacancies and posts currently filled by temporary staff were raised at the May 13 meeting.

“Corporate HR outlined the control measures which they have put in place in order that the needs of DVA staff are prioritised. The filling of any post in the relevant grades in the Northern Ireland Civil Service is now only possible with their approval.”

AIRPORT ROW IS TAKING OFF NIPSA and Unite branches at City of Derry Airport have unanimously voted to commence a ballot for industrial action over controversial restructuring proposals put forward by management.

Unions have called for halting of the plan – which they claim amounts to the continued managed decline of the airport.

NIPSA Organiser Alan Law said: “Representatives of both NIPSA and Unite attended a joint meeting of

members which unanimously backed a call for a ballot for industrial action.

“The action will oppose recently announced redundancies at the airport, the failure of management to consult trade unions on the proposals and what we feel is the ongoing managed decline of the airport.

“Our members are concerned that the City of Derry Airport will continue their existing management contract with RCAM (Regional & City Airports Management) Ltd. “Ratepayers currently pay the

management company £360,000 every year – the equivalent of £14 for every ratepayer in the city – but in the last four years of the contract, there has been no increase in flight numbers or volumes to sustain the airport.”

He added: “We are particularly concerned that the plans for restructuring will oust the current local airport director from the Management Board and leave the airport completely reliant on RCAM Ltd, who will become increasingly indispensable.”

DCAL Minister declines NIPSA meeting request

A NIPSA official has expressed shock after Department for Culture, Arts and Leisure Minister Carál Ní Chuilín declined a request to meet with unions representing staff at Library NI. The request to meet the Minister followed an indication that budgets at Libraries NI would come under pressure in the coming financial year, impacting both on members and the provision of library services to the general public.

Assistant Secretary for Libraries NI, Paddy Mackel told NIPSA News: “This refusal to meet with the unions came as a complete shock to myself and our members. A reply has now been issued to the Minister asking her to urgently reconsider the matter.

“There is an important issue at stake in terms of access to Government Ministers. Libraries NI is the largest ‘arms length body’ in DCAL and our members quite rightly expect to be able to have direct access to the Minister on occasion.”

He added: “I could possibly understand if Trade Union Side was seeking meetings on a constant basis. However, it has been some considerable time since Minister Ní Chuilín last met with NIPSA.”

Belfast Central Library

Libraries NI staff have had to deal with significant changes since it was set up in 2009, with restructuring in many areas, including a review of libraries in Belfast, then a review of rural libraries, followed very quickly by a fundamental review of opening hours following budget cuts announced in 2012.

Paddy Mackel said: “Given the degree of change and impact on members over the last few years, members are justifiably concerned that further cuts in the budget may be imposed next year.

“In the circumstances it is extremely appropriate for the Minister to meet with the unions to hear those concerns at first hand. We expect nothing less.”

Derry City Airport: Unions opposed to its continuing managed decline

Flexi scheme proposed for front line Libraries NI staff NIPSA has been seeking the introduction of a flexible working hours scheme for front-line staff in Libraries NI for a number of years.

When Libraries NI was set up in 2009, an anomaly was created which meant that members working in libraries in Belfast had access to a flexi scheme, while those working on the front line in libraries outside of the city had no scope to work in a more flexible way outside of their normal work pattern.

Assistant Secretary Paddy Mackel, who has responsibility for members in libraries, said: “NIPSA has spent some time encouraging management in Libraries NI that it is in their interest as an organisation, as well as in the interest of staff to introduce a flexible working hours scheme across all libraries.

“Trade Union Side acknowledged throughout the discussions that the review of opening hours created some difficulties due to the introduc-

tion of different working patterns to protect members’ contracted hours.

“However, TUS also indicated that family-friendly policies – including flexible working – were a sign of a progressive employer.”

After a protracted series of talks, a final draft scheme is now being considered by NIPSA’s Library Committee.

It is anticipated that once the draft has been finalised members will be consulted in the next few weeks before a final response is issued to Libraries NI. Paddy Mackel added: “NIPSA recognise that the draft scheme presented will be a fairly limited one, but it will – if agreed – enable staff across Libraries NI to avail of flexible working, if they wish.

“That would certainly be an advantage to most members working in libraries. This may not be the biggest gain ever made, but for many it will assist in improving that important work-life balance.”

Trust social workers strike over ‘crisis’ workloads

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A NIPSA official, who claims social workers and assistants in the Western Trust are having to manage a “crisis point” of dangerously high workloads, has formally complained to the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) and the Northern Ireland Social Care Council (NISCC).

Alan Law made the comments as health workers from Londonderry and Limavady took part in a one-day strike on Friday, May 16.

Workers from across the Primary Care and Older People’s Directorate took to the picket line outside the Waterside Health Centre in a bid to highlight what they see as excessive caseloads.

Mr Law told NIPSA News: “The crisis has reached this point because we’ve been trying to get management to acknowledge that there’s a problem and they are refusing to do anything about it.

“The staff here are professionally-qualified social workers. They’re all expected to register with the NISCC and follow their guidelines. And what their guidelines say is that you should only practise safely and manage

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caseloads, which they are able to do safely.”

He said he believed the situation had reached the stage “where it’s not safe, where it’s unsafe work – and we want the Trust to do something about it.”

Mr Law continued: “We’ve been asking the Trust to help develop a caseload weighting model and they’re refusing to do that without all the other Trusts in Northern Ireland going together on the same issue.

“Now, we feel that’s a very irresponsible way to go ahead because if the crisis has reached this point where people are taking industrial action, we believe it needs resolved now without waiting for some major issue to occur and an inquiry needing to take place.”

May 16 protests also took place across the Western Trust with pickets in Omagh and the South West Hospital.

Mr Law said: “The Trust’s position is they feel there’s nothing they can do... our view is that there are vacancies and posts, they’re the ones that need to start recruiting people to the posts.

“These two teams here and the team in Limavady have had no manager to supervise their work for nearly six months and they’re supposed to get monthly supervision to make sure that everything’s going according to plan.” He added: “To me, that’s even irresponsible.”

Asked if the current situation was dangerous, he replied: “Very dangerous. I today have made a formal complaint to the RQIA and also the NISCC asking them to investigate this chaos.”

May 16 strike will be followed up by workers refusing to cover vacancies and absences as well as working to rule if there is no resolution.

“We cannot continue with people working unsafely,” he added.

Source: Londondery Sentinel

PCOP strikers on picket line duty at (pictured top) Irvinestown Health Centre; (left) Coleshill Community Services Centre in Enniskillen and (bottom), the protest in Waterside, in Londonderry

Worker is mark www.nipsa.org.uk

Challenging TY With Transforming Your Care continuing to feature heavily in the news, Assistant Secretary KEVIN McCABE highlights a number of recent developments

AT THE end of March, Minister Poots attended his first NIPSA HSC Annual Delegate Conference and was tackled in no uncertain terms on the direction of travel his Department was taking over the TYC initiative.

Among other things, NIPSA highlighted how companies, such as 352, had received £45m out of the Belfast budget with the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly and pointed out that if this was replicated across the five Trusts, that figure would rise to £100m.

NIPSA roundly condemned the

fact that public money was being used to fund private sector firms in delivering health services when adequate funding was needed to provide public services that met community needs.

The union also queried where and how the private sector should be involved in delivering HSC services, reiterating that a previous Assembly question on this point should be debated seriously within the Assembly and the Northern Ireland Executive.

We highlighted that NIPSA would oppose further privatisation. The

s’ Memorial Day ked by NIPSA www.nipsa.org.uk

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ON April 28, NIPSA marked International Workers’ Memorial Day, remembering the many thousands of workers who are killed and injured at work year, by attending a special event at Stormont.

Assistant Secretary Geraldine Alexander told NIPSA News: “International Workers’ Memorial reminds us why we need to continue our fight for workers’ safety.

“Just over a year ago, more than 1,100 workers were killed in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh (see picture, left). Added to that there are reports of hundreds of Nepalese and Indian construction workers dying on building sites in Qatar since 2012.

“These figures are horrific. And the stories of 2,500 Rana Plaza garment workers still waiting for compensation are vivid.

“They are stories to make the blood boil as workers across the world are subject to unsafe, inhumane and exploitative treatment.

“It is statistics like these that we remember on Workers’ Memorial Day – and so we should.”

So what does that have to do with workers here in Northern Ireland?

According to NIPSA, quite a lot actually.

Ms Alexander continued: “Every time we hear ‘health and safety’ being mocked we should remember that this plays into the hands of those that want

Opposition to RVCS jobs threat

to weaken regulations and diminish the hard fought for rights of workers.”

In a recent TUC report, aptly titled ‘Toxic, Corrosive and Hazardous’, it was argued that Government health and safety policies were based on a probusiness, anti-regulation ideology that sees such protection as a ‘burden’.

NIPSA has expressed concern that this same mind-set could be emerging in Northern Ireland and point to proposed changes to RIDDOR (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations) as well as a general deregulation agenda.

Each year the HSENI publishes a tally of work-related deaths – in 2011/12 there were 17 fatal injuries while in 2012/13 there were eight.

Ms Alexander said: “While this latest figure is one of the lowest ever, one death is still one too many.” She also pointed out that the HSENI figures “do not represent reality” and did not include those who had died as a result of occupational cancers, lung and cardiovascular diseases as well as those killed on the roads while on work business.

Ms Alexander said: “On International Workers’ Memorial Day, NIPSA pledged to continue to fight for the living by ensuring our workplaces are safer and healthier. If we don’t continue to fight against this Government’s assault on basic workplace protections then more lives will be unnecessarily put at risk.”

NIPSA has been informed that a number of staff based in Roe Valley Community Services (RVCS) in Limavady are at risk of redundancy.

It follows a meeting between management and union officials in April.

NIPSA made clear its view that the Dowland Road-based social enterprise, which provides gardening and furniture refurbishment services to the public, was a “viable business”.

It is understood management disagree with this assessment and advised the union that DEL Minister Stephen Farry’s recent decision to end the Steps to Success programme would impact significantly on RVCS “making it impossible to sustain the employment of the five staff based there”.

NIPSA was also advised that a further 18 jobs based in the charity's office in Limavady may be at risk of redundancy.

YC’s privatisation agenda union wanted to see the quality and governance of public services maintained as a priority and underlined the high importance of job security.

NIPSA brought up the issue of the loss of home care services as well as the failure to monitor or safeguard vulnerable people.

The Minister, his Department and others were also condemned for the A&E crisis, which the union claimed, had resulted in a number of premature deaths. NIPSA also sought an immediate review of discharge procedures.

The Minister was left in no doubt that NIPSA viewed with great suspicion the ideological context of TYC with its promotion of an agenda of privatisation and outsourcing with no legislative base, no political accountability and no political scrutiny.

We concluded that NIPSA would be using its recent research publi-

cation which highlighted the creeping privatisation of the Health Service and would be lobbying other unions, community organisations as well as major stakeholders to demonstrate how TYC had been a strategic failure and that it represents nothing but cuts, privatisation, outsourcing and private sector capital to build new Health and Social Care centres.

While Minister Poots was left in no doubt of NIPSA’s position in relation to TYC, there were two other recent developments – one positive the other negative.

Firstly, on April 17, Minister Poots announced that all 18 NHS care homes in Northern Ireland that had been ear-marked for closure were to remain open while residents wanted to stay in them.

The Health Minister confirmed that the homes would stay open in a letter to the Stormont Health Committee, later published in the

media.

The closures had been announced last year as part of the TYC Health Review but it is unclear if the homes will be allowed to take new admissions which is one issue that unions will be seeking further clarity on.

However, on April 25, NIPSA was informed that the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours to be seen at Belfast Trust’s main A&E Department more than quadrupled between January and March. Official figures released by the Department of Health showed that the embattled RVH Casualty Unit had the worst decline in quarterly performance in relation to the key target.

At the same time it was announced that £75m for private hip and knee operations to tackle the NHS backlog were going to be provided by private clinics.

Top health officials admitted that

they were to pay private clinics £75m to tackle a backlog of knee and hip operations after admitting that the NHS can meet little more than two-thirds of current demand.

Although reliance on the more costly “independent sector” has increased over the past decade, the latest spend raises concerns about how senior managers commission and plan services in Northern Ireland.

Questions have also been asked about whether private clinics will provide “complete care” – including post-operative assessments – following complaints that past blunders had left patients high and dry.

In conclusion, TYC remains an evolving challenge. It is on these critical issues that NIPSA will be advancing its position to try and ensure that TYC is at the very least reviewed or a fundamental undertaking given to look at its future and strategic direction.

Hate crime: more than condemnation needed Page 6 NIPSA NEWS

RECENTLY it was announced that the Police Service of Northern Ireland would begin arresting those responsible for a spate of hate attacks in East Belfast, one of several areas across Belfast that seem to be experiencing a rise in hate attacks.

While this may help the community there feel safer, it is important to note that the police are only one aspect of the fight against hate crime, and a deeper understanding of the causes and impacts of this horrific crime are necessary in order to effectively combat it.

Over the last decade, Northern Ireland has become more diverse in terms of language, culture and religion. The recently-released 2011 census data reveals nearly 1.8 per cent Northern Ireland residents are from an ethnic minority background, more than double the proportion in 2011 (0.8 per cent).

However, these statistics do not reflect members of minority communities who would identify as white – for example Polish and Lithuanian communities – as there is no disaggregation under the ‘white’ category in the census. This means that the ethnic minority proportion of the population is likely to be even higher than 1.8 per cent.

At the same time, hate crime has been rising. Politicians, academics, statutory, voluntary and community sector organisations and the media, are all keen to look at the causes and impacts of hate crime, and to condemn it.

But most of the time there is a failure to look at the experiences of victims, and particularly the special needs of victims of racist hate crime.

Media coverage of hate crime, while nearly always seeking to speak to the victim, is often sensationalist, risks jeopardising the safety of victims by putting them in front of cameras, and does little to enhance the public’s deeper understanding of hate crime, or to combat it.

Reporting of hate crime is also imprecise, and the crime itself is often under-reported, so it is difficult to obtain trustworthy figures.

Couple this with the tone of most media coverage, and there is a real danger that media coverage of hate crime strays towards scaremongering, and contributing to the problem rather than combating it.

Whether the abuse is verbal, physical, financial or otherwise, the experience of hate crime leaves an indelible mark not just the individ-

News

www.nipsa.org.uk

By Elizabeth Nelson, NICEM

ual(s) who are the target, but on the community to which they belong.

Hate crime is often a process rather than an event, and it can escalate in frequency and seriousness. The attack that gets reported is often not the first incident. Taunts in the street or a broken window may go unreported, or if they are reported, are sometimes brushed off as being “just kids” or “not a big deal”.

There is often the added trauma of knowing that the perpetrator’s motivation is an impersonal group hatred, relating to some feature that the victims shares with others.

This factor is greatest where the hatred is directed against a visible feature such as skin colour or physical disability, or relating to core personal values or traits such as religion or being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

A crime that might normally have a minor impact becomes, with the hate element, an intimate and hurtful attack that can undermine the victim’s quality of life and self-esteem.

By its nature, hate crime is committed not merely against the immediate victim or their property, but against the entire community or group he or she belongs to. This raises feelings of insecurity within the group.

As a consequence, hate crime revives old, or serves to create new, bias, prejudice and negative stereotyping of others. It also creates cycles of mistrust and tension within society.

Evidence from the Belfast Migrant Centre’s Bilingual Hate Crime Advocacy Project shows that while reporting of hate crime has increased, it is still estimated that approximately 80 per cent of hate crime goes unreported.

Many victims fear retaliation if they report incidents. Many have also had negative experiences with the police, or have reported incidents that have been ignored. They refer to low prosecution rates when it comes to hate crime (the charge of aggravated hate crime has never been used in Northern Ireland) as reasons not to report to the police.

It is widely recognised, however, that hate crime is not the sole prerogative of the police, and requires both broader and deeper efforts from various sectors of society.

Racist attack on a home in Belfast

Efforts to tackle hate crime must be placed at all levels of society, from individuals to the community, from voluntary sector organisations to social partners.

Interagency working is absolutely crucial – otherwise work is done in isolation and the impacts won’t be shared.

Over the last 10 months, NICEM and its partners in East Belfast have been working together on the ground to tackle these difficult issues, but it cannot be assumed that one approach will fit all situations.

Among other things, attitudinal changes are necessary, and work on the ground, with victims and communities, is required to make these changes.

It is a long-term investment, requiring dedicated resources to direct engagement initiatives within local communities to find local solutions. The Bilingual Hate Crime Advocacy Program, for example, though incredibly successful in supporting communities and victims as well as facilitating the increase in the reporting of hate crime, is extremely under-resourced.

Grassroots work in general is relatively scarce, and needs to be further developed in partnership with victims, and invested in.

This also requires parallel policy responses and community-level responses. Policies like ‘Together: Building a United Community’ and the soon to be published ‘Racial Equality Strategy for Northern Ireland’, must be grounded in the needs and experiences of communities who work day-to-day with these issues, and with its perpetrators and its victims.

These issues are not new. In fact, there are disturbing similarities between the current situation and the

Picture: By Andy Luke

previous spikes in hate crime in the Village area of South Belfast in 2003-2004, and then again in 2009.

Then, as now, there were speculation that Belfast in particular and Northern Ireland in general were exceptionally bad areas regarding racist hate attacks.

However, the attacks in Belfast must be seen in the wider European context, and indeed in the context of an increasingly xenophobic atmosphere in the United Kingdom as a whole.

The Institute for Race Relations in London has been collating hate attacks across the UK for a number of years, and its evidence shows that Belfast is part of a wider trend of increasing attacks, impacted by a societal discourse that has become increasing anti-immigrant, xenophobic and openly racist.

Condemning hate crime is one thing – and it is important – but it is not enough. There must be solid commitment from all parties, along with resources and high-level strategy, to support the work already being done and connect it strategically.

Through the success of the Advocacy scheme, we know that targeted initiatives can make an impact. Without this, the difficult things like attitudinal shifts will not have the space to occur.

Communities must take the lead in identifying and implementing solutions for their areas, otherwise they will be seen as another faraway, imposed, tokenistic gesture that people will reject.

Elizabeth Nelson is Parliamentary and Campaigns Officer for the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities

www.nipsa.org.uk

Calling all ULRs: get set for Festival of Learning

ADULT Learners' Week will take place from June 14 to June 20 with this year’s theme being ‘Festival of Learning’ ULF Project Coordinator Roisin Graham told NIPSA News: “Adult Learners’ Week is a celebration of lifelong learning. We know that adults who continue to learn throughout their lives are healthier, happier and have greater self-confidence and selfesteem.

“In short, Adult Learners’ Week is the best time to show how adult learning improves and enhances social cohesion, economic vitality and social mobility.”

There are lots of ways that you can get involved in Adult Learners’ Week.

To find out more, contact Roisin by email at: roisin.graham@nipsa.org.uk You can also visit http://www.alw.org.uk/festivallearning for some ideas for Learning at Work days or http://www.wea-ni.com/ to find out what else is going on in Northern Ireland.

Privatisation still on residential care agenda despite PR gloss

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HEALTH Minister Edwin Poots has written to the chair of the Stormont Health Committee over a number of statutory (i.e. public sector) residential care homes for the elderly that had been threatened with closure.

This threat came last summer from the Trusts, over which Mr Poots, as minister, as overall control. The move was in fulfilment of his own Department’s ‘Transforming Your Care’ policy that had recommended making private sector care the default position.

In what has been seen as a reaction public opposition to the closures, Poots informed the Health Committee of his "intention” to move quickly “to reassure permanent residents within those homes”.

He added: “I am clear that existing residents will be allowed to remain in their home for as long as they wish and so long as their needs can continue to be met there."

In March, NIPSA’s research on Transforming Your Care predicted what might happen in relation to the homes.

In the context of the review into the closure decisions, we stated: “The public sector homes will ‘outlive’

the last residents in them, but not by much. In short, the rejection of this policy by the general public has had no longer-term effect on the overall privatised policy direction.”

The recent announcement confirms this analysis in that while Ministerial assurances are welcome for particular residents, their families and the staff who care for them, they offer no reassurance to the general public over the direction of travel for health policy in this area.

The reason for this is that without an explicit statement that admissions policy in relation to statutory provision for the elderly will change – i.e. that the new admissions that guarantee a future for the homes will happen – it is clear that the model of public sector closure and privatisation will continue.

This makes our opposition to privatisation in this and all other areas of our healthcare all the more essential as a core part of the general fight to save the NHS. Only pressure from below stalled the closure of the homes, only the same pressure will reverse the privatisation agenda.

I’m stressed, can I sue?

STRESS is a taboo word but it affects us all at some point in our lives whether from personal circumstances or in the work environment.

Stress cases in the area of employment fall into two distinct categories: (A) The stress at work case; and (B) Harassment cases.

Stress at work: Firstly, in relation to stress at work an employer is entitled to assume that an employee is robust and able to cope with the normal pressures of the job unless the employer becomes aware of some particular problem or vulnerability pertaining to that particular employee.

Stress at work cases have been considered by the Court of Appeal in the case of Hatton –v- Sutherland [EWCA Civ 76) which has determined that a breach of duty for a stress at work case to be viable, involves answering two simple questions in the affirmative: (1) That the employer knew or ought to have known of the risk, and (2) In light of the magnitude of the risk, which they should have had and did appreciate, they failed to take reasonable steps to avert it.

In summary, the question – and really the only question for a stress at work case – is whether the employer had the knowledge of the risk. To put it another way foreseeability of injury is the “threshold question” which must be answered in the affirmative for a stress at work case to be viable.

However, mere foreseeability

Chancery House, 88 Victoria Street, Belfast BT1 3GN Tel: 028 9032 9801 www.mtb-law.co.uk

does not determine liability and referencing Hatton again: “The size and scope of the employer’s operation, its resources and the demands it faces are relevant in deciding what is reasonable; these include the interests of other employees and the need to treat them fairly, for example in any redistribution of duties.”

Hatton went on to say: “An employer who offers a confidential advice service, with referral to appropriate counselling or treatment services, is unlikely to be found in breach of duty.”

Following on from the above it can be recognised, that the main issue for stress at work cases is foreseeability, foreseeability and foreseeability.

Harassment: The alternative cause of action of harassment (or bullying as it is more colloquially known) is prohibited under the Protection from Harassment (NI) Order 1997. This legislation prohibits an individual harassing

By John McShane

another which the individual knows, or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other. Harassment contrary to the Order is rendered both a criminal offence and a matter which exposes the perpetrator to civil liability. The House of Lords held in Majroski v Guys & St. Thomas’s NHS Trust 2007 (1 AC 224) that an employer will be vicariously liable for its employee committing bullying acts. It is, therefore, possible to fix liability upon an employer for the acts of a fellow employee.

To be able to “sue”, the conduct complained of must be capable of amounting to a crime and therefore must be sufficiently serious. In Hammond v INTC Network Services Ltd (2007) ALL ER (3) 19(Nov) HHJ Coulson sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, observed that “irritating, annoying and even upsetting conduct will not necessarily be a breach of the [Order].” The Order therefore prescribes a course of conduct which causes alarm or dis-

tress and a course of conduct involves acts on more than one occasion. It is very difficult, from my experience, to satisfy the necessary legal requirements.

The vast amount of harassment cases that I deal with, while they may be regarded as acts of bullying, fail to amount to harassment prescribed by the Order because, while the acts of bullying may have affected the individual from a psychiatric point of view, the acts of bullying are not serious enough to fall into the meaning of harassment as defined by the Protection from Harassment (NI) Order 1997.

Following on from the above it can be recognised, that the main issue for harassment cases to be viable is serious conduct.

Conclusion: If you believe the above circumstances are applicable to you then you should contact NIPSA to request a LS2 Form to allow an assessment of your case which is free under the Legal Assistance Scheme for personal injuries.

Equally this scheme covers all types of personal injury cases from road traffic injuries to medical negligence and is also open to family members of individuals with NIPSA membership.

The above article does not purport to be a comprehensive statement of the law which would take considerably more space than this article allows to explain but is my attempt to outline some of the main factors that are needed in order to “sue” for psychiatric injury caused by stress.

A STROLL DOWN T

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BELFAST MAY DAY RALLY NIPSA members take to the streets of Belfast in the annual workers’ Day parade Pictures: Kevin Cooper

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Smiles shine in Derry’s May Day get-together

ROYAL MA

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Corporate Watch blows the lid on the shady

Taxpayer won’t benefit from Royal Mail’s treasure trove of property

THE privatisation of the Royal Mail is widely considered to have cost the taxpayer £750m after shares in the company surged when trading in the company began on October 11.

The shares rose 50% in its first week making investors lucky enough to have been allocated shares tens of millions of pounds.

At the end of April the government was forced to disclose the identities of 16 priority investors who benefited from receiving the largest allocation of shares after the Bureau published the names of nine of the companies.

The list included Lazard Asset Management, part of Lazard & Co which was the government’s principal flotation adviser.

Members of the Public Accounts Committee last Wednesday digested the news of Lazard’s inclusion as a priority investor minutes before they grilled members of the Shareholder Executive, which manages Royal Mail on behalf of the government, Lazard & Co, together with UBS and Goldman Sachs who co-ordinated the placement of shares.

Property

It emerged at the hearing that government officials and banks advisers working on the controversial float failed to negotiate an agreement that would have allowed the taxpayer a share in higher than anticipated profits from the Royal Mail’s valuable property portfolio.

Earlier this month it emerged that analysts working for UBS, the bank which was Royal Mail’s corporate adviser until its privatisation, suggested Royal Mail’s property could be worth £600m more than its estate was valued in the company’s Initial Public Offering prospectus.

The UBS valuation was sent to

By Richard Moran

potential investors in the company two weeks before the prospectus was published on September 27.

“Did you not think it appropriate to put in place some way in which the taxpayers could get some benefit if these assets were worth way above the £230m?” asked Labour Public Accounts Committee member, Anne McGuire to senior civil servants and bank advisers who managed the float.

But Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary at the Department of Business Innovation & Skills (BIS) argued that inserting such a mechanism may have damaged the share price.

“If we had had to explain the complexity of a claw back clause to the large number of investors who were already struggling with the complexity of the sale, then it would have put them off,” he said.

Shocked

MPs appeared shocked that an independent property valuation commissioned by Royal Mail before its sale had not been shared with the government, their advisers or the National Audit Office.

“I’m struggling to understand why this information should have been kept from the National Audit Office,” said Richard Bacon, the Conservative MP and deputy chairman of the PAC. Alan Custis, a Managing Director at LAM confirmed that they had bought six million shares as a priority investor and sold them over the first days of trading at a £8m profit.

William Rucker, Lazard & Co chief executive, stated that LAM had been in talks with the Royal Mail before his company was hired as advisers and that they were different companies, separated by

Taxpayers taken for a ride in post office sell-off

Chinese walls. He told the committee: “When we became aware, having been hired, that LAM were on a list of investors the Royal Mail was talking to, we made it quite clear, that we should have no input whatsoever into any discussion about allocations to LAM.” Margaret Hodge, the PAC’s chairman, queried this relationship, asking: “Even if we were to accept that those Chinese walls rules were adhered to. Do you really think that it’s appropriate that in those circumstances, that another arm of your company picked up nearly half of the shares that went to clients with an interest there?”

Richard Bacon MP told the committee: “It seems to me that the most obvious criterion of independence is that you are disinterested.”

He then asked Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary of BIS: “Was your adviser acting completely independently? Or did it have an interest at a financial group level in the success of one of its subsidiaries?”

Low valuation

Rucker was asked to justify why Lazard & Co gave among the lowest of the valuations made to the government. He said: “Our valuation had some different assumptions to other people. We had some

more bearish assumptions about the threat of industrial relations and the consequences of that.”

They faced questions about whether the process they adopted allowed them to capitalise on the improved interest from investors in the weeks leading up to the sale.

Rucker defended Lazard’s role in the float: “We were as agile as we could have been given the situation.”

Donnelly, BIS permanent secretary, pointed to the threat of strike action and the fiscal uncertainty in the US as reasons behind continued caution on the share price.

In concluding the session, Hodge returned to the relationship between the two Lazard Group companies. She acknowledged that there was no proof of wrongdoing but concluded: “If I were the regulator I would be looking at this in greater detail than he has chosen to do.”

Richard Cormack, Goldman Sachs managing director, was asked how his team could represent the government, given the investment division of Goldman’s acted for many of the priority investors. He underlined the separation of the businesses: “Our loyalty is to our client which was the government. If we were not working for our IPO issuing clients and we were seen always to be acting in

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dealings done in the sale of a national asset

Lazard Asset Management was a Royal Mail priority investor and made £8m profit in one week

By Nick Mathiason and Tom Warren

LAZARD Asset Management (LAM), the investment arm of the government’s independent adviser on the controversial privatisation of Royal Mail, was one of the 16 priority investors who received preferential treatment in the allocation of shares in the business.

Shares in Royal Mail have risen by 57% since October when the firm was floated. The National Audit Office (NAO) concluded the taxpayer lost out by as much as £750m because the business was undervalued.

Lazard & Co, the corporate advisory part of the business, advised the government against raising the price of Royal Mail shares to investors and helped oversee the allocation of shares which was more than 23 times oversubscribed.

The asset management arm of Lazard’s received six millions shares worth £19.8m when trading began on October 11. LAM sold the shares within days securing an £8m profit.

Lazard & Co also received a £1.5m fee for advising on sale of Royal Mail.

Lazard’s chief executive, William Rucker denied any suggestion of a conflict of interest. He said the asset management arm of Lazard’s was in talks to receive Royal Mail shares well before Lazard’s was appointed as the government’s independent adviser and that “Chinese walls” between the corporate advisory and asset management divisions were rigorously maintained.

But the revelation that Lazard’s was one of the 16 priority investors has sparked concern among senior MPs. It will also heap further pressure on Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, and Michael Fallon, the business minister who have consistently defended the flotation as a success.

Reacting to LAM’s inclusion as a priority investor, Adrian Bailey, chair of the business select committee, said businesses linked to government advisers should not receive shares in privatisations. “The government’s advisers should be there to represent the interests of the government pure and simple,” he argued.

Lazard’s valuation of Royal Mail was lower than members of the banking syndicate working on the float, according to NAO figures published earlier this month.

Equity analyst notes from banks working on the float also gave Royal Mail much higher valuations than Lazard’s.

The NAO’s report earlier last month said of the seven banks advising the government on the

Investment arm of the government’s adviser in controversial float of Royal Mail was given priority status

float “at least five of them were allocated shares on behalf of their asset management arms for distribution to their clients”. The total received by syndicate banks was 13 million shares worth £42.9m – they are now worth £68.25m.

The NAO report stated that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skill’s contract with Lazard & Co specified that the information barrier between Lazard & Co and LAM must be complied with in order to prevent the LAM team obtaining confidential information. There is no suggestion that Lazard’s breached any conflict of interest codes or laws.

News of Lazard Asset Management’s inclusion in the select group of 16 institutions that initially dominated Royal Mail’s shareholder register comes as the government has been forced to disclose other Royal Mail cornerstone investors.

‘Speculation’

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), which publishes Corporate Watch, also named Blackrock, Capital Research, Fidelity, Government of Singapore, Kuwait Investment Office, Lansdowne Partners, Ozz Ziff, Standard Life and Threadneedle as likely priority investors.

These have been confirmed. In addition the government disclosed Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Henderson, JP Morgan, Soros, Schroders, Third Point as well as Lazard Asset Management were priority investors.

Business secretary, Vince Cable said: “I told the BIS Select Committee yesterday I wanted to be as helpful and transparent as possible. In that spirit I had already provided the names to the National Audit Office and I provided the list in confidence to the chairs of the BIS Select Committee and the Public Accounts Committee.

“I had been advised that the investors expected confidentiality around their share acquisitions, but there has been strong interest in who the investors are and speculation around the names, some of it inaccurate. I have decided the public has an interest in an accurate list being available.”

Visit TBIJ website at www.thebureauinvestigates.com for more in-depth coverage of this issue.

Royal Mail: did the government and bankers short-change Britain by £750m?

Unmasked: The city institutions given privileged status in the controversial Royal Mail flotation

CAPITAL IN CR

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BOOKS

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Radical economist Thomas Picketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has angered the right with its powerful argument about wealth, democracy and why capitalism will always create inequality. Not read it yet?

Here's what it means, writes Paul Mason

THAT capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Carrying it under your arm has, in certain latitudes of Manhattan, become the newest tool for making a social connection among young progressives. Meanwhile, he is been condemned as neo-Marxist by rightwing commentators. So why the fuss?

Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank/ministry/TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty.

Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

To understand why the mainstream finds this proposition so annoying, you have to understand that "distribution" – the polite name for inequality – was thought to be a closed subject.

Simon Kuznets, the Belarussian émigré who became a major figure in American economics, used the available data to show that, while societies become more unequal in the first stages of industrialisation, inequality subsides as they achieve maturity. This "Kuznets Curve" had been accepted by most parts of the economics profession until Piketty and his collaborators produced the evidence that it is false.

In fact, the curve goes in exactly the opposite direction: capitalism started out unequal, flattened inequality for much of the 20th century, but is now headed back towards Dickensian levels of inequality worldwide.

Piketty accepts that the fruits of economic maturity – skills, training and education of the workforce – do promote greater equality. But they can be offset by a more fundamental tendency towards inequality, which is unleashed

wherever demographics or low taxation or weak labour organisation allows it. Many of the book's 700 pages are spent marshalling the evidence that 21st-century capitalism is on a one-way journey towards inequality – unless we do something.

If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them. Piketty's call for a "confiscatory" global tax on inherited wealth makes other supposedly radical economists look positively house-trained. He calls for an 80% tax on incomes above $500,000 a year in the US, assuring his readers there would be neither a flight of top execs to Canada nor a slowdown in growth, since the outcome would simply be to suppress such incomes.

While bestriding the macro-economic agenda, the book's sideswipes against trendy micro-economics, often in footnotes, read like a sustained in-joke against the generation for whom all problems seemed solved, except the street price of cocaine in Georgetown.

The book has, in addition, mesmerised the economics profession because of the way Piketty creates his own world, theoretically. He defines the two basic categories, wealth and income, broadly and confidently but in a way nobody had really bothered to before. The book's terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. To challenge his argument you have to reject the premises of it, not the working out.

From page one he illustrates with visceral reminders of the unfair world we live in: he begins with the Marikana mining massacre and he never lets up. He marshals not just 18th-century interest rates as evidence but also the work of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac. He uses both authors to illustrate how, by the early 19th century, it was logical to disdain work in favour of marrying into wealth. That it has become so again busts the central myth of, and moral justification for, capitalism: that wealth is generated by effort, ingenuity, work, wise investment, risk taking etc.

For Piketty, the long, mid-20th century period of rising equality was a blip, produced by the exigencies of war, the power of organised labour, the need for high taxation, and by demographics and technical innovation.

Put crudely, if growth is high and the returns on capital can be suppressed, you can have a

City of London...an immensely powerful institu

more equal capitalism. But, says Piketty, a repeat of the Keynesian era is unlikely: labour is too weak, technological innovation too slow, the global power of capital too great. In addition, the legitimacy of this unequal system is high: because it has found ways to spread the wealth down to the managerial class in a way the early 19th century did not.

If he is right, the implications for capitalism are utterly negative: we face a low-growth capitalism, combined with high levels of inequality and low levels of social mobility. If you are not born into wealth to start with, life, for even for the best educated, will be like Jane Eyre without Mr Rochester.

Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not. Marx's critique of capitalism was not about distribution but production: for Marx it was not rising inequality but a breakdown in the profit mechanism that drove the system towards its end.

Where Marx saw social relationships – between labour and managers, factory owners and the landed aristocracy – Piketty sees only social categories: wealth and income. Marxist economics lives in a world where the inner tendencies of capitalism are belied by its surface experience. Piketty's world is of concrete historical data only. So the charges of soft Marxism are completely misplaced.

Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics. If the underlying cause of the 2008 bank catastrophe was falling incomes alongside rising financial wealth then, says Piketty, these were no accident: no product of lax regulation or simple greed. The crisis is the product of the system working normally, and we should expect more.

One of the most compelling chapters is

ISIS www.nipsa.org.uk

ution

Piketty's discussion of the near-universal rise of what he calls the "social state". The relentless growth in the proportion of national income consumed by the state, spent on universal services, pensions and benefits, he argues, is an irreversible feature of modern capitalism. He notes that redistribution has become a question of "rights to" things – healthcare and pensions – rather than simply a problem of taxation rates.

His solution is a specific, progressive tax on private wealth: an exceptional tax on capital, possibly combined with the overt use of inflation.

The policy logic for the left is clear. For much of the 20th century, redistribution was handled through taxes on income. In the 21st century, any party that wants to redistribute would have to confiscate wealth, not just income.

You would expect the Wall Street Journal to dissent, but the power of Piketty's work is that it also challenges the narrative of the centre-left under globalisation, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch's yacht coexisting with the food bank for ever.

Piketty's Capital, unlike Marx's Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards. He calls some of them "utopian" and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them.

Paul Mason is culture and digital editor of Channel 4 News. His book Postcapitalism will be published by Penguin in early 2015.

A world turned upside down

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ANDREW FISHER, author of a new book The Failed Experiment... and How to Build an Economy that Works, argues it's time to challenge our economic model THERE seemed to be a belief in my parents' generation that things inevitably got better: people got better off, working conditions became less brutal, each generation had more opportunities than the last, and technological advance made our lives easier.

I was born in 1979. That was the year when things changed.

People didn't know it at the time, but some long-running trends went into reverse. Unemployment across the whole of the UK had not risen above one million between 1945 and 1978. Since the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 it has never been below 1.5 million.

For years, since the 1920s on some measures, the UK had been becoming a more equal society. That changed, and inequality shot up in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rate of growing inequality only slowed, not reversed, by the New Labour years. Since the coalition was elected more than an extra million people live in poverty – and last year the number of families using food banks trebled.

The beliefs have been crushed that each generation would be better off than the last, and that technological advance would benefit us all. I don't believe this was a delusion of the baby-boomer generation, but there had become a delusion that such social advance was natural and inevitable.

In an economy captured by corporate interests, the immense technological advances in our lifetimes have been used to cut wages and lay off workers, rather than increase pay and reduce hours.

But at the same time, politicians handed over vast swathes of our economy to be exploited for profit. Growing up, the phrase 'fuel poverty' had not been coined but energy companies have been making a mint from jacking up

prices. Since privatisation, water bills and rail fares have also risen way above inflation.

And the tax system has been transferred. High taxes on big earners were cut, while the VAT consumer tax has doubled for us all. Corporation tax was 52% when I was born, next year it will be cut again to 20%. Taxes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes have hit the poorest hardest. What was a tax system that redressed inequality is now a tax system that reinforces inequality.

I don't blame you if you don't pay much attention to the economy. The hourly updates from BBC News 24 on the performance of the FTSE index, that GDP rose by 0.8% in the last quarter, the annual profit statement of a multinational corporation, and the besuited men who tell us these figures with great reverence – it all seems rather remote, a bit irrelevant to our everyday lives.

It is. But that isn't the economy – in fact both are pretty useless measures of the things that matter to us, our friends, family and our community. I expect that, like me, you are more concerned about whether there are enough jobs for you and yours than the prices of shares on the London stock exchange. Likewise if the pound in your pocket is

no longer meeting your monthly costs then George Osborne crowing over 0.8% growth feels rather like your neighbour telling you how sunny it is as the bailiffs evict you.

So our first job in building an economy that works for us has got to be to define what matters in the economy: improving average living standards; reducing poverty and inequality; providing work for all who need it; reducing tax avoidance and evasion; and ensuring our economy is stable and environmentally sustainable The reality is that economics is politics (OK, politics with a bit of maths). If you hand over responsibility for the economy to bankers, city traders, and big business, then you get an economy that, unsurprisingly, operates in the interests of bankers, city traders, and big business.

We need to democratise our economy so that we have an economy where people, not share dividends, matter most.

How do we do it? As trade unionists we should know the answer better than anyone: we have to organise, campaign and cause trouble until it's easier for those in power to give us what we want than to deny us.

Every democratic gain, every freedom from exploitation that has been won has been won through organised collective action. In the best traditions of our movement we should educate, agitate and organise!

n Andrew's book The Failed Experiment... and how to build an economy that works is published on May 20. RRP £9.95. It is available to members of NIPSA at a special discount price of £8.95. Purchase from www.radicalread.co.uk and claim your discount by typing CLUB into the promotion box.

South Africa tod another name Page 14 NIPSA NEWS

European and world affairs

On my wall in London is my favourite photograph from South Africa. Always thrilling to behold, it is Paul Weinberg’s image of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the infamous “hippos”, as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised, fists clenched, her thin body both beckoning and defiant of the enemy.

It was May Day 1985; the last great uprising against apartheid had begun. Twelve years later, with my thirty-year banning from South Africa lifted, there was a pinch-me moment as I flew into Jan Smuts and handed my passport to a black immigration officer. “Welcome to our country,” she said.

I quickly discovered that much of the spirit of resistance embodied in the courageous woman in Soweto had survived, together with a vibrant ubuntu that drew together African humanity, generosity and political ingenuity — for example, in the dignified resolve of those I watched form a human wall around the house of a widow threatened with disconnection of her electricity, and in people’s rejection of demeaning “RDP houses” they called “kennels”; and in the pulsating mass demonstrations of social movements that are among the most sophisticated and dynamic in the world.

On the twentieth anniversary of the first democratic vote on 27 April 1994, it is this resistance, this force for justice and real democratic progress, that should be celebrated, while its betrayal and squandering should be understood and acted upon.

On 11 February, 1990, Nelson Mandela stepped out on the balcony of Cape Town City Hall with the miners’ leader Cyril Ramaphosa supporting him. Free at last, he spoke to millions in South Africa and around the world. This was the moment, an historic split-second as rare and potent as any in the universal struggle for freedom. Moral power and the power for justice could triumph over anything, any orthodoxy, it seemed. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle,” said Mandela in a proud and angry speech, perhaps his best, or the last of his best.

The next day he appeared to correct himself.

Majority rule would not make blacks “dominant”.

The retreat quickened. There would be no public ownership of the mines, banks and rapacious monopoly industries, no economic democracy,

ANC victory marred by miners’ strike

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News

By John Pilger

as he had pledged with the words: “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Reassuring the white establishment and its foreign business allies — the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid — became the political agenda of the “new” South Africa.

Secret deals facilitated this. In 1985, apartheid had suffered two disasters: the Johannesburg stock market crashed and the regime defaulted on its mounting foreign debt. In September that year, a group led by Gavin Relly, chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation, met Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, and other liberation officials in Mfuwe, Zambia.

The Relly message was that a “transition” from apartheid to a black-governed electoral democracy was possible only if “order” and “stability” were guaranteed. These was liberal code for a capitalist state in which social and economic democracy would never be a priority. The aim was to split the ANC between the “moderates” they could “do business with” (Tambo, Mandela and Thabo Mbeki) and the majority who made up the United Democratic Front and were fighting in the streets.

The betrayal of the UDF and its most effective components, such as the National Civic Organisation, is today poignant, secret history.

In 1987 and 1990, ANC officials led by Mbeki met twenty prominent members of the Afrikaner elite at a stately home near Bath, in England.

Around the fireplace at Mells Park House, they drank vintage wine and malt whisky. They joked about eating “illegal” South African grapes, then subject to a worldwide boycott, “It’s a civilised world there,” recalled Mof Terreblanche, a stockbroker and pal of FW De Klerk. “If you have a drink with somebody … and have another drink, it brings understanding. Really, we became friends.”

So secret were these convivial meetings that none but a select few in the ANC knew about them. The prime movers were those who had profited from apartheid , such as the British mining giant Consolidated Goldfields, which picked up the tab at Mells Park House. The most important item around the fireplace was who

A BITTER labour dispute between miners and the South African government has cast a shadow over the country’s general election, 20 years on from the fall of apartheid.

As the African National Congress (ANC) gears up to celebrate the re-election of President Jacob Zuma, more

would control the economic system behind the facade of “democracy”.

At the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations in Pollsmoor Prison.

His principal contact was Neil Barnard, an apartheid true believer who headed the National Intelligence Service. Confidences were exchanged; reassurances were sought. Mandela phoned P.W. Botha on the his birthday; the Groot Krokodil invited him to tea and, as Mandela noted, even poured the tea for his prisoner.

“I came out feeling,” said Mandela, “that I had met a creative, warm head of state who treated me with all the respect and dignity I could expect.”

This was the man who, like Verwoerd and Vorster before him, had sent a whole African nation to a vicious gulag that was hidden from the rest of the world. Most of the victims were denied justice and restitution for this epic crime of apartheid. Almost all the verkramptes — extremists like the “creative, warm” Botha — escaped justice.

How ironic that it was Botha in the 1980s — well ahead of the ANC a decade later — who dismantled the scaffolding of racial apartheid and, crucially, promoted a rich black class that would play the role of which Frantz Fanon had warned — as a “transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”.

In the 1980s, magazines like Ebony, Tribute and Enterprise celebrated the “aspirations” of a black bourgeoisie whose two-garage Soweto homes were included on tours for foreigners the regime sought to impress. “This is our black middle class,” the guides would say; but there was no middle: merely a buffer class being prepared, as Fanon wrote, for “its historic mission”.

This is unchanged today.

The Botha regime even offered black businessmen generous loans from the Industrial Development Corporation. This allowed them to set up companies outside the “bantustans”. In this way, a black company such as New Africa Investments could buy part of Metropolitan Life.

Within a decade, Cyril Ramaphosa was deputy chairman of what was effectively a creation of apartheid. He is today one of the richest men in the world.

The transition was, in a sense, seamless. “You

than 80,000 miners continued their three-month strike over pay and labour conditions.

The strike - one of the longest in South Africa’s recent history comes less than two years after the massacre at Marikana platinum mine where 34 workers were killed following a violent confrontation between security

forces and striking miners in 2012.

Happiness Mathenjwa, a 40year-old miner at Marikana and employee of Lonmin, the world’s third biggest platinum producer, lives in a makeshift hut close to the site where many of his colleagues were killed 18 months ago.

ay: Apartheid by www.nipsa.org.uk

Massacre at Marikana platinum mine where 34 workers were killed

News

can put any label on it you like,” President Mandela told me at Groote Schur. “You can call it Thatcherite, but for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.”

“That’s the opposite of what you said before the first elections, in 1994,” I said.

“There is a process,” was his uncertain reply, “and every process incorporates change.”

Mandela was merely reflecting the ANC’s mantra — which seemed to take on the obsessions of a supercult. There were all those ANC pilgrimages to the World Bank and the IMF in Washington, all those “presentations” at Davos, all those ingratiations at the G-8, all those foreign advisers and consultants coming and going, all those pseudo-academic reports with their “neo-liberal” jargon and acronyms. To borrow from the comic writer Larry David, “a babbling brook of bullshit” engulfed the first ANC governments, especially its finance ministries.

Putting aside for a moment the well-documented self-enrichment of ANC notables and suckering of arms deals, the Africa analyst Peter Robbins had an interesting view on this. “I think the ANC leadership [was] ashamed that most of their people live in the third world,” he wrote.

“They don’t like to think of themselves as being mostly an African-style economy. So economic apartheid has replaced legal apartheid with the Mathenjwa says miners like him live in extreme poverty and their working conditions have not improved since the massacre, despite receiving widespread international condemnation: Mathenjwa, who is married with five children, earned 5000 rand (US$475) a month before the strike but has not been paid

Page 15 NIPSA NEWS

European and world affairs

same consequences for the same people, yet it is greeted as one of the greatest achievements in world history.”

Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission brushed this reality, ever so briefly, when business corporations were called to the confessional. These “institutional” hearings were among the most important, yet were all but dismissed. Representing the most voracious, ruthless, profitable and lethal industry in the world, the South African Chamber of Mines summed up a century of exploitation in six and a half derisory pages. There was no apology for the swathes of South Africa turned into the equivalent of Chernobyl. There was no pledge of compensation for the countless men and their families stricken with occupational diseases such as silicosis and mesothelioma. Many could not afford an oxygen tank; many families could not afford a funeral.

In an accent from the era of pith helmets, Julian Ogilvie-Thompson, the former chairman of Anglo-American, told the TRC: “Surely, no one wants to penalise success.” Listening to him were ex miners who could barely breathe.

Liberation governments can point to real and enduring achievements since 1994. But the most basic freedom, to survive and to survive decently, has been withheld from the majority of

since the industrial action began on January 23.

The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) is calling for a basic wage offer of R12,500 (approximately US$1150) and has opposed an offer of a 10 per cent salary increase extended last month by producers Anglo American Plat-

South Africans, who are aware that had the ANC invested in them and in their “informal economy”, it could have actually transformed the lives of millions. Land could have been purchased and reclaimed for small-scale farming by the dispossessed, run in the co-operative spirit of African agriculture. Millions of houses could have been built, better health and education would have been possible. A small-scale credit system could have opened the way for affordable goods and services for the majority.

None of this would have required the import of equipment or raw materials, and the investment would have created millions of jobs. As they grew more prosperous, communities would have developed their own industries and an independent national economy.

A pipe dream? The violent inequality that now stalks South Africa is no dream. It was Mandela, after all, who said, “If the ANC does not deliver the goods, the people must do what they have done to the apartheid regime.”

John Pilger is the author of Freedom Next Time. His 1998 film, Apartheid Did Not Die, is on his website This article originally appeared in the Sunday Times, Johannesburg.

inum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin.

In a statement the union said: "Our members…resoundingly rejected the current employer offer and reiterated their original demand of R12,500 in four years."

However, the producers have sought to bypass the union by

making their offer directly to the miners via phone message, and threatening to sack them if they don’t accept it.

The mining companies say the strikes have cost them around R14.5 billion (US$ 1.4 billion) in revenue and the union’s demands have not been supported by the ruling ANC party.

More payroll failures highlighted News

Page 16 NIPSA NEWS

NIPSA has voiced concern over the continued waste of public money after more problems emerged over the shared services project within HSC. According to the union, Assembly Ministers have approved expensive computer systems that simply do not work as well as backing the wholesale reconfiguration of services.

Assistant Secretary Kevin McCabe claimed this was happening despite evidence that this was not in the best interests of public services.

He told NIPSA News: “NIPSA condemns in particular the impact on thousands of ordinary workers of the continuing inability of the Human Resources Payroll and Travel Subsistence system (HRPTS) being implemented across the Health Service to pay people accurately and in a timely way.

“Management Side accepted that there had been a significant issue with HRPTS payroll in April and believed that approximately 7,000 staff were affected by this issue.”

Mr McCabe pointed out that the prob-

lem had affected employees with multiple employment contracts and on different pay cycles within Trusts. He said this had created increased National Insurance contributions being deducted from salaries.

“The average over-deduction is £100.

This system ‘bug’ emerged at the start of the new tax year and BSO are working urgently with the supplier to resolve the issue.

“The cause of the problem has already been identified and the fix is being designed for immediate implementation.”

It is understood the BSO has claimed it is unrelated to other issues recently experienced by some employers.

Employers are to communicate with their staff on the issue and are working to ensure employees have the balance in payment paid into their accounts.

Mr McCabe said: “Trade Union Side are seeking assurances that there are parallel alternatives put in place to make these payments. They are also seeking written confirmation from employers on this point.

“This is further evidence of the whole

shared services initiative not working and NIPSA is appalled by the unnecessary stress caused to thousands of hardpressed working families by this continuing saga of underpayments, overpayments, non-payments and extra payments triggered by this flawed system.”

Mr McCabe flagged up what he called “the appalling irony” that the same HSC staff the Minister “is so fond of lauding when he poses for photo ops” can no longer count on being paid correctly “or even receive pay slips to tell them of the errors caused in their pay in a timely manner”.

He added: “NIPSA is committed to sustaining a campaign which will highlight the impact and waste behind the HRPTS system and bring it into the wider public domain.

“NIPSA further believes that it is time that this matter was brought to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee and consideration is being given to all of these options.”

NIPSA funding call to Minister on Exploris

NIPSA have called on Environment Minister Mark H. Durkan to save the Exploris aquarium in advance of Ards Borough Council meeting on May 28 to decide its future.

Some 18 staff at the Portaferry-based facility are members of NIPSA and May 28 marks a key date in the campaign to save their jobs. Despite a number of reprieves – which NIPSA and other groups have lobbied hard for – the Northern Ireland Executive and Minister Durkan have not come up with the hard cash needed to save Exploris.

Ards Borough Council did

commit £200,000 in their 2014 budget for Exploris. However, this is not enough and an additional £120,000 is needed to keep the facility open.

While Minister Durkan has said that he is committed to this amount to fund the Seal Sanctuary, NIPSA has been advised by Ards Borough Council that no letter or commitment has come from the Minister.

Deputy General Secretary Alison Millar told NIPSA News: “It is disappointing that yet again politics is being played with a significant attraction and the only aquarium in Northern Ireland.

“It is obvious from the support which our members working in Exploris and the wider community have received that the public wish Exploris to stay open.

“Unfortunately, Tourism Minister Arlene Foster announced in the Assembly in response to an MLA question that the requested capital money of £900,000 was not forthcoming.

“If the Environment Minister does not commit financially to £120,000 per annum for the next five years – which is a drop in the ocean out of the DOE budget – then I fear the Council will take the decision

on Wednesday, May 28 to close Exploris.

“NIPSA have written to the Minister and have sought to meet to press him to use his influence and resources to save this important regional facility.

“If other Ministers refuse to commit the finances, then NIPSA calls on Minister Durkan to rescue this facility – save Exploris, save the jobs of 18 NIPSA members and save Portaferry as a community as without Exploris many of the small family businesses in the town will struggle to survive and may even close.”

Campaign against Welfare Reform

ON May 7, the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU in discussing its campaign against welfare ‘reform’ agreed to convene a special meeting of shop stewards, union representatives, activists and trades councils on the issue.

The meeting will be held at the UNISON offices at Galway House, York Street, Belfast on Saturday June 7. It will begin at 10.30am and finish by 1pm., ICTU Assistant General Secretary Peter Bunting told NIPSA News: “We are also inviting community activists we have worked with on the campaign against welfare ’reform’ to attend and participate in this discussion.

“As you will know, once the elections on May 22 are over, the Stormont administration will be forced to finalise its legislation imposing Welfare Reform on Northern Ire-

land’s most vulnerable citizens.

“We are now seeing the impact of this legislation in England, Wales and Scotland, and how it is nothing but a programme of punishing the poor for the financial crimes of the wealthiest, affecting the working poor as much as the unemployed.”

He added: “NIC-ICTU believes that the Welfare Reform Bill can be stopped at Stormont and that those we have chosen to elect can protect the most vulnerable in our society and extend our vision of social solidarity.

“The meeting is designed to inform activists and engage them in a strategy of opposition to welfare ‘reform’.

“I look forward to your assistance in ensuring a positive outcome to this decision of the Northern Ireland Committee.”

www.nipsa.org.uk

Draconian pension changes at Hospice opposed

NIPSA members working for the Northern Ireland Hospice have expressed alarm after receiving a proposal which effectively removes them from the NILGOSC pension scheme and putting them into a Defined Contributions scheme.

The shock and anger felt by members was compounded because the proposals stated that while most staff would be removed from the NILGOSC pension scheme, a small number of senior managers would remain in the scheme.

It is understood one reason for this difference is to prevent the Northern Ireland Hospice being penalised as a result of exiting the scheme as the organisation needs to keep this as a total reward package for senior staff.

NIPSA met with the Northern Ireland Hospice Board on May 8 and made a robust presentation on a number of errors and misrepresentations contained in the consultation document. NIPSA also outlined a number of other options the union claimed needed to be examined.

In addressing the board, Deputy General Secretary Alison Millar described the proposals as totally unacceptable and argued that no current member of the scheme should be forced to leave the scheme.

Ms Millar told NIPSA News: “NIPSA made it abundantly clear that all members wanted to resolve this matter internally and protect the reputation of the hospice and the families who use the services.

“However, members are refusing to be made the sacrificial lambs for the case of expediency.”

She added: “It was also made clear that members had contractual rights which could not be set aside and, if necessary, NIPSA would seek to enforce those rights if required.”