The postal workers’ strike (2007)

From the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A postal worker reflects on the recent series of strikes.

The Royal Mail kept changing the goal posts. What originally started about a pay rise and impending redundancy plans, then involved the fight over pension entitlements and the right to retire at 60 years of age, became, for the Royal Mail mandarins, a campaign to end what they described as “Spanish practices”  – a racist epithet that is insulting to the many hundreds of Spanish who work in Royal Mail – and a demand for total flexibility at work.

What just was the “employers agenda”, to use a term from the last big postal dispute and eventual agreement of the mid-90s which was supposedly the “way forward” for the business? Was there a hidden motive behind the intransigence of  Leighton and Crozier that provoked the strike? It is not as if the CWU hasn’t a history of compromise or reached deals that often favour management over its own members interests to protect the industry’s viability. We have always got to try and look at the bigger picture, which only the bosses and government have the blueprint of, and see beyond the fragmentary glimpses of their real objectives through the fog of battle.

For the worker, it is the money they take home and the amount of work that they must do to earn it that is foremost in their mind, and – let’s not hide from the reality – it is to get the most for doing the least. However, for management, it is the entire opposite. They endeavour to extract the most work out of its workforce at the most minimum of cost. The inevitable class struggle, in other words.

This was the postal dispute, a conflict between worker and boss. And it was management who were the aggressor in the dispute, with:

• Executive action on their pension proposal cuts
• Executive action through the imposition of later starting times
• Executive action through the imposition of network changes
• Executive action through the ending of Sunday Collections
• Executive action against Engineers, the net effect of which will mean a reduction of 10% of posts.
• Executive action through the cessation of Employee Share of Savings Scheme (ESOS).

Postal workers. who had withdrawn their labour, offered to return to work for an increase in pay and more talks over working procedures, but the managers initially refused this offer. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Business told the workers to accept the management’s terms, while the High Court has  ruled one week’s planned strike unlawful.

The Union wanted the issue of pensions removed from the pay deal as it is a Group-wide issue, not just for the postal grades. Royal Mail wanted union support to roll out new technology programme. The CWU said they would agree on the basis that there is a share for workers of any savings made. On a later start, the union said they would accept the principle but that each office should be able to maintain earlier starts if arrival patterns justify it. Isn’t that flexibility? Certainly not the Luddite response against modernisation that Royal Mail’s PR message endeavour to convey to the general public. It was on this basis that a settlement was negotiated.

What about the question of whether Royal Mail and/or the government possess a secret plan? With a union keen to broker a deal, as they have always done before, but with a management that kept switching the issues it may not be too paranoid of postal workers to believe that such a plan exists. Nor are they the only ones.

“…the DTI, the department responsible for this huge national asset [Royal Mail] , has officials deployed full-time looking at alternative forms of ownership. Regular talks have been held with investment bankers, Royal Mail executives and Richard Gillingwater, head of the Shareholder Executive, which looks after the state’s business interests… officials from the DTI have also held deeply hush-hush meetings with Royal Mail executives that have reached the point of discussing the detail of potential changes in ownership, not just the theory…” (Mail on Sunday, 22 August 2004).

A partial flotation of Royal Mail would raise anything between £4 billion and £6 billion if a buyer could be found – a buyer who would like to inherit a low cost and compliant work force with a new more limited pension fund liability – a business with a defeated trade union and demoralised membership.

As socialists, we shed no tears that this state-owned company may become privatised. Only those like Lenin who believed socialism, as he put in State and Revolution, means to “To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service” after the example of Bismarck’s Germany, remain under the misconception that it matters.

Regardless of ownership, the necessity for postal workers to organise within their industry and resist the attacks of their employers will continue and to which socialists will offer their support and solidarity , whether it is against the likes of Leighton and Crozier, appointees of the State, or against some rival mail company take-over, or a possible future Private Equity buy-out baron. The class war will only cease when capitalism and the wages system ends.

ALJO

Cooking the Books: Are nurses exploited? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of the recent and ongoing strikes are in the so-called ‘public sector’, by those working for the government at national or local level or for semi-state bodies such as the health service or schools and universities. The work they do is not sold but is a service provided by the state. They are not producing for profit; how then can they be said to be exploited?

If you work for a private (or state) enterprise producing something concrete that is sold, it is fairly easy to see that you are being exploited in the sense of being legally deprived of a part of what you produce.

But what about those employed by the state to do work that is not sold?

The first thing to note is that such employees are in the same basic position as any other worker. The means of production being monopolised by a tiny section only of the population, everybody else is driven by economic necessity to find an employer to get money to buy what they need to live. Workers get a living by working for wages, irrespective of who that employer is.

Wages are a price, the price of something that is being bought and sold. The textbooks say that this is ‘labour’, or the work done for the employer. In fact, however, it is the employee’s capacity to work, what Marx’s translators called ‘labour-power’. What it describes is the capacity a human has to use their physical and mental energy to perform a particular type of work.

Some people who work do sell their ‘labour’ in the sense of the product of their work — the self-employed; what their clients are paying for is the price of their work. But this is not the case with employees. They are selling their capacity to work and their employer is paying the price of this, not that of their work. This price — wages — depends on what it costs to produce it: the cost of the food, clothes, housing, travel, entertainment and training needed to keep them fit to work at their particular trade or profession; in short, on what is called ‘the cost of living’. Wages reflect this cost and are not the same as the work done for an employer. In fact, the work done to produce what workers consume is less than the work they perform while working for an employer.

A part, therefore, of their ‘labour’ is not paid for. In the case of those producing something for sale this is profits, realised when the product is sold. In the case of those working for the state or semi-state bodies this unpaid labour means that the service is being provided cheaper than otherwise. The state or semi-state employer seeks to provide its particular service as cheaply as possible; in other words, to maximise the amount of unpaid labour extracted from their employees. After all, the money they spend comes from taxes that ultimately fall on the profits of capitalist businesses and doing this reduces that.

If employees were being paid for their work — what they do in the course of their time at work — there would be nothing left for the employer’s profit. In the case of state and semi-state employees they would have to be paid much more than they are, much more than they need to create their labour-power.

Workers in the ‘public sector’, like that of their fellow workers in the profit-seeking ‘private sector’, also perform unpaid labour for their employer even if it is not monetised as profit.

So, yes, nurses too are economically exploited as they perform unpaid as well as paid work for their employer.

Like with like (1979)

From the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Comparability Con Game

Buried deep in the jungle of remotest Whitehall there is a secret government factory which supplies ministers with meaningless catch phrases. This factory is always hard at work but is under the greatest pressure at times of what the ministers call National Crisis (which is itself a meaningless catch phrase). At such times, it has registered its most memorable achievements; like Export or Die, Free Collective Bargaining, the Social Contract. And now, its latest product—Comparability Study.

We are in danger of being driven into a frenzy by the repeated drumming into our consciousness of the word Comparability, because the Labour government are clearly hoping that it will help get them out of their sticky situation over wages. Here is one example:

  In the wake of criticism of the 9 per cent pay offer to nurses the Health Minister, Mr. Ronald Moyle, gave a guarantee in the Commons yesterday that the nurses' position in relation to other workers would be restored and maintained if they accepted the Government’s offer of a comparability study (The Guardian, 7/3/79).

The very next day the government announced the birth of something with the resounding title of the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability. Callaghan was in hopeful mood:

  These new arrangements . . . should help us in future years to avoid the dislocation and hardship that the public has suffered in recent weeks. (The Guardian, 8/3/19).

But of course the word Standing should not be taken too literally. Similar high hopes were expressed for bodies like the Relativities Board and the Prices and Incomes Board but they are dead and buried and there is no reason to suppose that the Commission on Comparability will have any longer life.

Teachers

Like most of the products of the Meaningless Phrase Factory, Comparability is not a new idea. In 1974 the government accepted a recommendation of the Houghton Committee, that teachers’ pay should not be allowed to fall behind that in “comparable” occupations. In 1958 the Civil Servants had made a similar agreement with the government, after the report of the Priestley Royal Commission. Both groups of workers have subsequently found that the government, enforcing a wage restraint policy, has broken the agreement—which is why civil servants of all people, are now on strike.

Comparability is supposed to ensure that workers in what is called the public sector—nurses, dustmen, local government employees—earn roughly the same as those in similar jobs in private industry. It sounds like an especially generous gesture by the government to help workers who. because they are in the “public” sector, have a limited bargaining power. There is really little reason for this strange idea; civil servants, dustmen and sewerage workers have already shown that they can cause quite a bit of disruption by striking and the bargaining power of nurses, although unused, is all too obvious.

It is not necessary to be a cynic, to realise that the government’s offer of a comparability study is anything but generous. The so-called monetarists, whose ideas on how to run capitalism become increasingly popular in a desperate response to the abject failure of interventionist theories, would argue that in any case it is unnecessary. In their view, wage negotiations should be left to run free and in that process comparability would be achieved by the process of workers moving from the lower paid jobs to the higher. This may be a callous simplification—an enforced change of employment can be a stressful experience for a worker—but it does illuminate some of the fallacies of the Comparability Game.

Dream

This game is played by two sides each with a different object. In some cases, a union may put a case for a rise on the grounds that its members earn less than those in similar jobs. On the other side governments can play the game as a delaying tactic—as the Labour government is doing now—by offering something less than the unions demand with a promise that an investigation into comparability will bring absolutely fair and balanced wages to everyone.

Now this must sound like a very reasonable and progressive idea to the City gent on the Clapham omnibus, who longs to see Britain a sunlit, strike-free land where all industrial disputes are settled by an infallible arbitration system and all wages balanced by a process of completely rational awards. The City gent does not nurture such fantasies alone:

  . . . you’ve got to get the balance roughly right. This again, is a function of government — to get the balance right between the groups in your society as well as between the individuals in your society.
  The Times had a marvellous leading article—I think it was in January last year—about a balanced society. It said what my colleagues and I had been saying for quite some time . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Observer, 25/2/79).

In this sort of dream society everyone earns a wage exactly suited to their job and accepts their place on the social and economic ladder. No dustmen envies the income of a solicitor and conscientiously carts away the latter’s rubbish because he knows that everyone does a Fair Days Work for a Fair Days Pay. He also knows that his dustman’s wages buy goods whose prices always represent exactly what they are worth, that the best solicitors get the highest fees and indeed the whole of capitalism moves smoothly on economic bearings lubricated by justice and good sense.

Reality

The reality is that there are no such things as fair pay or fair prices. Whatever the City gent might mean by justice and good sense—or Margaret Thatcher by balance in society—simply don’t come into the process by which wages and other prices are determined. By the same token Comparability is a nonsense. How is it possible to fix a “fair” wage for, say, the nurses who care for sufferers from terminal cancer? Or for the workers who operate sewage plants, remembering the consequences of a breakdown in sewage disposal? Can their wages be “balanced” or compared against those of members of the armed forces, whose work is wholly destructive? Is it "fair” that ambulance crews should receive a fraction of the income of stock-brokers and members of Lloyds?

Then what about a comparison with members of the ruling class, like the Duke of Westminster whose only significant achievement to date has been to be born into a family which acquired, a couple of hundred years ago, some stretches of swampy London water meadow which became Mayfair, Belgravia, Pimlico . . . If the Duke of Westminster received a “fair” wage, according to his usefulness to society, he would starve to death while his many stately homes would be occupied by dustmen and nurses.

But that, too, is a dream of a sort. The majority of people in capitalist society are compelled to work in order to live, whether as nurses or clerks or miners or whatever. When they work they are selling their mental and physical energies, their labour power, to an employer. Thus labour power is a commodity, like apples or cars or houses. In some way or other every commodity will struggle to be sold at the highest possible price; in the case of labour power this struggle is a deliberate affair of negotiation, threat, work to rule, strike, lock out and so on. There is no eternal morality in all of this; it is a matter of power and force.

In this struggle both sides will use any weapon or argument which comes to hand and Comparability is one of these. But like much trade union activity it has its dangers for the working class. Firstly, it is an argument which can be used in more than one direction; for example what happens if wages in the “comparable” industries fall below those of the workers who are claiming a rise on grounds of comparability? And, as we are seeing at present, it is something which can be used by employers as a delaying tactic, with the rewards doubtful.

Divisive

Secondly, it is divisive for workers to argue that one group should have wages related to another because this, rather than an attempt to achieve equality, is an argument against workers in one occupation getting more than those in another. For workers to compete against each other in the wages struggle, to try to use each other as rungs up the ladder of improvement, is not an exercise in working class unity.

And unity is an essential element in working class struggle. The ideal wage claim would be one in which the entire working class together demand everything that they produce. The capitalist class would find such unity irresistible; no meaningless catch phrase or delaying tactic could stand in its way. But of course a claim like that would mean a lot more; it would signal that capitalism itself was in its terminal stage, needing only to be nursed quietly to death.

Ivan

From America: Those good old “Good as Gold” dollars (1978)

Letter From America from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

One question agitating Americans today, as much as any other, is: what has gone wrong with the US dollar in world markets? How does one explain the acute illness of this proud currency, the money that was almost thought to be as good as gold? Because it has made front page news in America in recent times and seems to be getting no better fast, even people who never have much of it, are worried and somewhat crestfallen. There was always that vicarious thrill in knowing that “our” money was so universally venerated. What’s it all about?

The answer, in a word, is “pollution”. There are far too many US dollars held by financial and multinational institutions around the world. “No need to redeem them for gold”, was the assurance when the blizzard of US currency hit Europe in the 60s. “They’re as good as gold”. (Not that there was that much gold in the US Treasury but there was always America’s strong trading ability to bank on). And the quantity of US dollars in foreign hands, today, is out of all proportion to what is needed to consummate the trade that American capitalism can generate.

And thereby hangs another tale because, in theory, devaluation of a nation’s currency is supposed to bring increased trade for that nation’s exporters and this is not happening here. The adverse trade balance remains maddeningly huge and sharp debate concerning its causes is stirred among the “doctors” of economics. But whatever else may be involved, the fact is that this once top manufacturing nation is feeling the competition from an assortment of relatively vibrant economies in Europe and the Orient with more modern plant, equipment, and marketing “know-how”. Those “good-as-gold” US dollars in foreign hands have become so many not-so-hot IOUs and heavy holders are trying to get out from under by changing them into Japanese yen and Swiss francs rather than trading them for US goods.

The truth is that the US dollar has not been “as good as gold” for a long time. In fact, the Nixon Administration, in 1971, officially untied the dollar from gold and declared it as inconvertible to bullion everywhere, as it had been domestically since the first term of Franklin Roosevelt some forty-five years ago. So, while in those years following the Nixon action the dollar remained relatively strong and generally acceptable in Western Europe and Japan, propped up by hope, Nemesis was waiting in the wings.

To begin with, money is a commodity. It must be a commodity because it is used as a means of effecting the circulation of and setting a value upon commodities generally. And so, the quantity of paper bills and metal pieces that serve to represent money — gold — must bear a recognisable resemblance to the quantity of real money they represent. Otherwise they would be worth, on the average, the equivalent of the socially necessary labour time required to produce and reproduce them — damned little, indeed! So when paper currency and metal coins are churned out in America’s mints with little regard for actual money stores, eventually the bitter truth must sink into the heads of those who hold huge amounts of the stuff. Especially when it becomes apparent that US industry cannot compete so effectively on world markets.

(Not that this in an unalloyed evil for US capitalism. The Government, for example, wins a large quantity of those devalued dollars when it sells off portions of its gold bullion — the weaker the dollar the costlier the gold in terms of dollars. And since bond holders and other domestic creditors are guaranteed repayment in US dollars with no provision made for devaluation — it becomes a windfall for the capitalist class, as a whole. All big borrowers, in fact, have seldom had it so good although bankers, understandably, are responding by raising their interest rates and are discouraging long-term loans. And currency speculators, as patriotic as the next, no doubt, are making hay out of the difficulties of the American currency).

But what, if anything, does all this signify to US workers? Most of those who travel abroad will find it difficult to survive unless they visit the soft currency nations, where American money is still respected, and even then will find it difficult to live in the manner they have been accustomed to back home. But the over-production of currency in US mints also translates into continuing inflation in this country and while the rate is lower than in the competing nations it is high enough to bring more than the usual clamour by organised labour for substantial pay increases.

And there is at least one significant change about this otherwise predictable happening. A considerable and rising number of those in the forefront of “labour unrest” are public, or government, employees. In fact, the summer and early fall of 1978 seem to have brought a veritable tidal wave of strike action and threatened strike action by policemen, fire fighters, school teachers, transportation workers, postal workers, garbage collectors, and others in “public employ” forbidden by law to strike. Police and fire fighters, bus drivers and school teachers have in many instances gone to gaol for spurning court orders to return to work. And a number of postal workers, along with many of the fire fighters and policemen, have been summarily fired and forever blackballed from employment in those endeavours. (In the case of the postal workers, there is now an imposed settlement by a Government mediator on the cards and the possibility of more wildcatting by disgruntled employees in protest over the loss of ratification rights by the union membership).

What makes this current trend more interesting is that “public employees” are paid entirely out of tax revenue. The basic arguments of managements of such enterprises are: (1) we can’t find the money without a tax increase and nobody wants that, or (2) we must not make a settlement that is inflationary. A majority of those directly involved are doubtless unwilling to accept such reasoning, but since the majority of the working class believes it pays taxes and will have to foot the added bill, general support for such strikes is uncommon.

In truth, taxes come from surplus value, which is the property of the capitalist class. Certainly it adds to inflation when increases are paid by printing added currency. But there is no law that forbids the capitalists from taking less profit and assigning more of surplus value to those who operate their essential services — no law, that is, but the jungle law of capitalism ordaining that capitalists must strive for greater rather than lesser profit or be destroyed by competition.

Socialists find it worthy of note that public employees, even school teachers and police, now seem to identify more with their fellow workers than once was the case. And yet we hesitate to see the millenium resulting from it. Our pleasure is tempered sharply by the knowledge, gained through long years of experience, that union militancy does not lead, in itself, to understanding the class nature of capitalism and the need to abolish it. Police, militant or not, return to their jobs of protecting the masters’ property and clubbing other militant workers who threaten or defy the law. “We’re only doing our job!” they argue. Teachers resume their task of preparing future wage slaves for a general acceptance of class society and see nothing objectionable about that. And workers, generally, are content with the gains they make in their wages and conditions of work.

If only inflation would vanish! they reason today, either forgetting or not knowing of those long periods of deflation, when prices fell (including the price of their labour power), when hamburger was a quarter-or-less a pound but quarters were hard to come by, when the American dollar was a good as gold (at least outside the United States) and American industrial superiority was universally recognised. Were American workers better off in those times? If you don’t remember or never knew look it up or ask those who do.

Harry Morrison 

(WSPUS Boston)

Press Cuttings (1947)

From the October 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strikes in Nationalised Industries

"The Grimethorpe strike has raised, in an acute from, the question of discipline in a nationalised industry.
  Trade union theory has never surrendered the right to strike, after due notice given.
   It has been held to be the last sacred sanction of organised labour against injustice.
  But it is against private employers that this right has been so sturdily maintained.
  Is the situation the same when, as in the coal industry, the employer is the nation?
 And can the State run industry effectively if the right of the workers to defy its authority with impunity is to be recognised ?
  "No” would seem to be the answer to both these questions. And, unless agreement can be reached on this basis, nationalised industries run grave risks of coming to grief."

(Mr. Ernest Thurtle, Labour M.P., writing in Sunday Express, 14/9/47.)

Mr. Thurtle now wants the right to strike to be withdrawn from workers in nationalised industries. Long ago, before the Labour Party came to power, the Labour Daily Herald admitted that if the price of nationalisation is that the workers lose their only weapon, the strike, then, “under capitalism a nationalised industry would actually be worse off than those left in private hands." (13/9/22.)


New Russian Imperialism in Persia

Moscow radio last night disclosed that the draft Soviet-Persian oil agreement which the Persian Premier, Qavam es Salteneh, declined to submit to Parliament, contains a special article granting concessions to the proposed Soviet-Persian oil company, in addition to the agreement signed in 1946 for the company’s creation.
The new article provides “preferential rights for the Soviet Union regarding the purchase of oil products exported by the company” in which Russia is to hold 51 per cent, of stock, the broadcast said.
It also provides for the company to import duty free and without licence “equipment necessary for its work” of exploiting oilfields in North Persia.

(News Chronicle, 25/9/47)

Terms time for teachers (1986)

From the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

In February, I obtained an interview with John Bills, the West Midlands representative on the National Executive of the National Union of Teachers. By coincidence, it was exactly a year since the teachers' unions in England and Wales began their industrial action in support of their pay claim.

Like most TV viewers and readers of cheap newspapers. I have found it very difficult to be sure of the facts in the dispute. I know that a large number of parents are angry at having to fetch children away from school at odd hours. I know that there is increasing concern about the examination prospects of older pupils. I know that the police have been receiving complaints about the behaviour of youngsters on the streets when they would normally have been in school. But about the teachers' side of the case I have heard very little .

This is not very surprising. The present government's union-bashing policy has received careful but consistent support from the media. And most people, workers themselves in other jobs not under immediate threat, have watched — some have even applauded or collaborated as one section after another has been isolated, attacked and defeated. GCHQ workers, the miners, newspaper printers are just some of those whose downfall has been carefully engineered and publicised.

Now it appears that teachers' unity is breaking down in the face of relentless government pressure and bad publicity. The representatives of the National Association of Schoolmasters and the Union of Women Teachers are balloting their members with a recommendation to accept the terms offered by the local education authorities, their direct employers. Sir Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Education and Science has refused to support any agreement based on these terms with extra government money. The National Union of Teachers, the largest union, has refused to accept the terms.

The recession
John Bills is the Head Teacher of a junior school in Oldbury, near Birmingham. The school was cheaply built at the back of houses about twenty-five years ago. Now it is deteriorating badly. It needs a lot of money spending on it. but it won't get it. Pupil numbers have fallen over the years with the declining birthrate. Like other industries, education is going through a recession. Thousands of teachers have left the service, and real salaries have continued to fall with inflation in spite of annual pay negotiations. A joint working party set up by the unions and the employers in 1984 concluded that, in the ten years since the pay structure was last revised, teachers' real income had fallen by 34 per cent. The salary structure is very complicated. There are over 300 different pay levels for teachers in schools (quite apart from colleges, polytechnics and universities). It is designed to produce competitiveness and hierarchical divisions among people who will pass these values on to the rising generations. NUT policy has always resisted this trend, and its present campaign for a flat-rate increase of £23 a week has aimed at improving the conditions of the lowest paid teachers in particular.

A new teacher who has satisfactorily completed three years' full-time training is paid £5,442 (£104.65 a week). If he or she takes a degree, the general practice these days, this is raised to £5,883 by giving them two years seniority. With thirteen years seniority their salaries will have risen to £8,556 (£164.53 a week). Anything above this must be reached by gaining promotion.

Why not strike?
Teachers earning this sort of money are unable to afford a strike. Their trade unions have no strike funds like those of the older industrial unions with long histories of battles with their employers. It is only in recent years that teachers have been forced to recognise that they, too, belong to that huge class of people in society that has to sell its mental and physical energies to employers on the labour market in order to get a living.

In this respect they are weak when it comes to a struggle to resist reductions in their real wages. So they have wisely avoided an expensive all-out strike. But they have strengths too. A large proportion of the work that most of them do in practice is not acknowledged in their contracts. Officially they are not paid for running sports or clubs or school trips outside school hours They are not paid for running errands in their cars or taking children abroad on holidays or attending meetings on new examination structures or meeting parents or supervising pupils during their lunch break or taking other teachers' classes when they are absent. All this is expected of them traditionally as what has come to be called "good will". And it is this which they have withdrawn to a large extent over the past year, together with very brief, selective strikes, often of only a few hours. The disruptive effect has been considerable, but inevitably it has injured children and their parents rather than the employers or the teachers' ultimate paymaster, the state. It is. however, precisely this strength in teachers' hands which the government, in the person of Keith Joseph, is determined to take away from them.

Big deal
Joseph has insisted that everything included under the heading of "good will" should become compulsory before teachers are given any more money. And the money that he has been talking about in rather shifty global terms would amount to a pay increase of just over 2 per cent a year for the next four years, with no preference given to lower paid teachers. He has mentioned the figure of £1.25 billion, but central government would provide less than half of this. Local authorities would have to find the rest out of their existing budgets. In addition, Joseph has already begun to earmark some of it in advance. He has had second thoughts about compelling teachers to do dinner duty. He has instructed education authorities to set aside £50 million in the first year to pay part-time staff to do the job. Subsequent years will probably take more.

Little deal
It is not surprising that the teachers' unions were united in finding the government's proposals unattractive. In comparison, the terms offered by the local education authorities have begun to seem almost acceptable after nearly two years without any increase — at least that is how it looks to some teachers. And perhaps this has been part of the government's strategy. The employers have offered a 6.9 per cent increase. For those higher up in the salary and management hierarchy (heavily represented in the NAS/UWT) this could mean a substantial improvement. For the lowest paid teachers it would give only an extra £7 a week.

But the offer is not without strings. And the strings are very similar to those of Keith Joseph: to qualify for the 6.9 per cent, teachers must first call off all industrial action and "return to full normal duties". Then they must accept a ruling as to what constitute full normal duties, and these would become contractually obligatory. The ruling will be made by a three-man team set up by ACAS (the government's conciliation and arbitration service). In other words, unconditional surrender for a one-off pay increase.

So the government is now nearly half-way home. The teachers' unions have been split, and for the same reasons as other trade unions have been broken in the recent past: some sections thought they stood to gain, even though others lost. This can seem like hard-headed (if selfish) realism in hard times. It is not. In the teachers' case, the employers' offer was put on the table only because they were taking united action; and because that action was disruptive without weakening the teachers. If, as seems likely, NAS/UWT members vote to accept the employers' terms without the NUT members, then they will have sold both strengths: unity and freedom of action. The next time there is a confrontation with the employers, they will be without any bargaining power at all. That is short-sighted, not hard-headed. I learnt a lot when I went back to school that morning.

Ron Cook

The Lecturers’ Strike: More than the employers could chew (2018)

From the June 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pause in the lecturers’ strike

The [April] Socialist Standard reported on how the strike by university lecturers over pensions took the employers by surprise.  Of course they were not surprised that a strike should be occurring.  After all the lecturers had voted for it – in large numbers and by a large majority. What surprised them – and caught them out – was how long it lasted and how many of their employees actually struck, despite losing significant amounts of salary.

Anger and disruption

In the past, strikes have been one or two day affairs causing the universities little pain, hardly noticed by the students and, when it came to the strike days themselves, not very well supported by the staff. But this one was very different. The lecturers had been well informed by their union, the University and College Union (UCU) , about the issues, in particular the fact that, if the pensions changes proposed by the employers went through, they would lose a significant proportion of their pensions – in some cases possibly more than 50 percent. This struck a chord of anger and actually led to hundreds of university staff who hitherto hadn’t been union members joining to be able to express that anger by going on strike despite the loss of earnings this would mean. And the lecturers struck in their thousands in adverse weather conditions – rain and snow – and carried out picketing and protest demonstrations.

The university employers didn’t take long to become aware of the potential consequences of what was happening: students asking for their money back for lectures undelivered, serious legal consequences and costs if exams were not set or taken. In fact the whole system potentially falling apart. This is an over-dramatic scenario perhaps – and it’s actually hard to know quite what would have happened – but the view quickly hardened among the employers that it was best not to take any chances. They realised they had bitten off more than they could chew and effectively sued for peace – something unheard of in the history of industrial action in British universities.

Climbdown

The article in our [April] issue outlined how their first attempt at offering a deal was unceremoniously rejected by the striking lecturers who were already scenting serious worry on the part of the University bosses, i.e. the Vice-Chancellors. They clearly had the right scent, because the employers came back with a far better offer then before which took the main plank of their own platform, the removal of a final salary pensions, completely off the table. They agreed furthermore to an independent examination of the whole basis on which the pension scheme had been valued and declared as showing a large deficit. The union’s argument that the scheme’s valuation methodology had always been faulty and that, if valued correctly, it would be shown to have a surplus not a deficit, had been contemptuously brushed aside before. Now it was, or so it appears, being taken seriously and would be subjected to serious exploration. In the meantime the pension scheme would stay as it is and there was also a commitment ‘to provide a guaranteed pension broadly comparable with current arrangements’ – a massive climbdown by an initially imperious employer.

The Left and the ballot

The term ‘ broadly comparable’ was seized upon by some in the union as being open to interpretation and as suggesting that it could still mean significant detriment to members. This was in particular an argument of the ‘UCU Left’ group who are dominated by the SWP, which habitually seeks to use trade unions as a political weapon to further their aim of involving people ‘in struggle’. They mounted a strong campaign to prevent a ballot of members taking place on the employers’ offer and then, when they were outmanoeuvred on this by the union leadership and a ballot was declared, they set up a deafening cacophony to try to persuade members to vote ‘no’ in the ballot. The ballot of members was, they argued, somehow ‘anti-democratic’. They knew of course that the new offer, if put to a one-person one-vote ballot of members and not to some meeting consisting largely of their own supporters, was highly likely to result in an acceptance of the offer – particularly as it was clear that the employers were not only running scared but would now think twice before ‘re-interpreting’ any commitment given the potential for disruption the lecturers had shown they were capable of. And so it was that, when the outcome of the ballot was announced on 13 April, 64 percent of the lecturers voted in favour of the offer, a majority of almost 2 to 1, and the dispute – at least for the time being – was over and in a way that could hardly have been predicted by anyone when it started just a couple of months before. 

The lessons

What lessons can be drawn from this strike?

Firstly, though, in most strike situations, the employers have the whip hand because they know that workers who depend on their salaries week-to-week, month-to-month will be unlikely to stay out for long, a strike that is well supported and underpinned by a determination on the part of workers not to suffer a significant detriment being proposed can bring the employer to heel and make them realise that what they are proposing isn’t worth the candle. In this, as in any employment dispute – and indeed in efforts to establish the completely different kind of society we advocate – workers’ solidarity is an essential element.

Secondly, and following on from the need for solidarity, large-scale participation by workers is a necessary prerequisite of any successful trade union action. And in this respect it may well be that at least one element of the recent anti-trade union legislation brought in by the present government (minimum 50 percent participation in strike ballots by union members) will have the unforeseen consequences of trade unions pulling out all the stops to make sure more of their members participate in strike ballots and so making strikes more effective when called because they will be well supported. In the case of the lecturers’ strike, so strong was the feeling against what the employers were proposing that, in the space of just a few weeks, several thousand new members joined the union in order to take part in the industrial action.

Thirdly, the efforts of the Left to dominate trade unions and to glorify strikes for their own sake (i.e. as a ‘consciousness raiser’) and not just as a necessary defensive measure by workers are most effectively resisted when there is widespread participation by members in all aspects of union activity including ballots and any action which may arise therefrom. 

HM

Why I am Striking: A Diary of the Universities Strike (2018)

From the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Day 5: Lecturers are on strike again, with the first tranche scheduled to last fourteen days in all. Cue jokes about academics sat at home not thinking, or troops being sent in to give seminars on the use of Christian symbolism in late-period Anglo Saxon poetry.

I am not an academic, nor am I even in their pension scheme, the root of the conflict. I am a university worker, and I have been standing on the freezing cold picket line, asking staff and students not to cross it.

I understand that academics have achieved something very difficult. The Tories have introduced a new law to make it so that public sector workers proposing a strike have to achieve not only a majority of those voting, but a majority of those eligible to strike must vote as well. (Universities claim to be public sector for this purpose, but have managed to get themselves declared private sector for the purposes of procurement, because a majority of their money comes from fees now).

The result of this is that instead of the gentlemanly dance of previous university strikes – two days here and there – the difficulty of getting a strike called at all means it has to be decisively disruptive: these are the counter-productive aspects of the Tories trying to regulate strikes out of existence, the pressure valve is gone, and it will make strikes more bitter.

The root cause is an attempt to change the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pension from being a defined benefit scheme (where the academics will receive a guaranteed pension based on their career average salary), into a defined contribution scheme (where the benefit pays depending on the returns of the scheme’s investments, throwing all the liabilities of the Universities onto the vagaries of the bond and stock markets). The scheme has already changed from being final salary to being career average related (and employer and employee contributions have both been raised in recent years).

The cause of this is that under accounting rules, the scheme must be funded so that if all universities went bankrupt tomorrow, all the liabilities could be met. This creates a phantom deficit of billions of pounds, despite all universities not being bankrupt, and the scheme currently being able to manage its liabilities.

Make no mistake, universities are far removed from the rarefied world of a David Lodge novel: today they are vast Dickensian factories employing thousands of staff and servicing tens of thousands of students each. This is indicated in the scale of the strike, with a rough (low) estimate of 20,000 workers out. As Boris Johnson noted in his recent farcical speech on Brexit, Britain stands a long way up the value chain, not producing raw materials or components, but designs and innovation. Thousands of foreign, particularly Chinese, students come to the UK to study, bringing in much needed revenue.

When I discuss this matter, friends tell me that academics are lucky to still have defined benefit pensions, or that they themselves have had their pension downgraded. For me, this makes it all the more important to put a marker in the sand to stop this downgrading of all our deferred salaries.

I understand that what is at stake here is the ability to strike at all, and to have a conscious say in our workplaces: the academics are being attacked as workers, and they recognise their position as workers by calling this strike. They deserve support and solidarity, even at the cost of 14 days’ pay, because anything that makes employers think twice about downgrading terms and conditions of their employees is a benefit for all workers, everywhere.

Capitalism draws increasing numbers into the condition of wage slavery, many academics are on the equivalent of zero hours contracts, or have to continually search for funding for their own salaries. Of course, ending capitalism and abolishing the wages system is the necessary political act, but in the meanwhile the class struggle rumbles on, and we have to engage with the struggle to defend ourselves and pursue the best living standards we can manage within the labour market.

If we don’t strike, we all lose: and maybe, for all those students who smile wanly, shrug and say they have to go in to lectures, the library or to study, they can learn the lesson that they too will soon be waged workers, who will need solidarity to protect them in their workplaces.

Day 14: The strikes have succeeded so far in dragging the employers to the negotiating table, and throwing their ranks into disarray. The Vice Chancellors of several leading universities have come out in favour of returning to defined benefit. The talks, however, produced an offer which would have still seen lecturer’s pensions reduced by at least 19%, and threw in the added insult that lecturers should reschedule classes (which they have been deducted pay for not holding).

I was lucky enough to attend the rally outside UCU headquarters (down an alley in Camden Town), where hundreds of strikers turned up to lobby the committee and delegate meetings considering the offer. The usual toy-town revolutionaries are trying to paint this as a ‘revolt by the members’ against the leadership, where it was in fact the normal and proper functioning of democracy in a trade union. Indeed, my local branch have been running daily strike meetings to run the operation of the strike, and further, credit where it is due, a useful daily strike bulletin has been brought out by Socialist Worker.

There is a question of why the offer was accepted and put to the members given that it was so terrible (and promoted to and by the media as a resolution of the conflict, but some of that will be down to the way ACAS operates, as well as to the mandate given to the negotiators). It was heavily voted down by strikers on the picket lines, and voluble cries of ‘no capitulation’ on social media.

The scene is set then, for the strike to continue, and a further fourteen days in April and June have been approved (but not yet set). We’ve marched through the streets of London twice now (in relatively well-attended marches), and there is talk of the need to pressure government to agree to underwrite the pension scheme. Many academics are enjoying taking the details of the pension plan apart showing how the deficit is not real. A lecturer at Birkbeck has uncovered documents that show there has been a determination to end the defined benefit scheme since at least 2014 – the general idea is by curtailing the scheme’s liabilities, universities will be able to borrow more for building and expansion projects.

Students up and down the country have been occupying spaces on campus in solidarity, and ‘teach outs’ are commonplace across the country.

On a theoretical side, this strike is a demonstration of how commodity fetishism isn’t just a feature or process of capitalism, but a social strategy by the rich and powerful: they are trying to limit their responsibility to their employees through throwing it onto the market, rather than guaranteeing a level of income after we are superannuated.

Ptolemy S.

Letter From Europe: The Belgian public sector strike (1983)

The Letter From Europe Column from the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September civil servants and other public sector workers in Belgium carried out a nation-wide strike, lasting for over a week, against the government's proposals in its draft budget for 1984 to economise on its spending at the expense of their wages and pensions.

The strike started on Friday 9 September, after a section of the railwaymen heard the details of the government's proposals from their union officials. Against the advice of their officials, they immediately stopped work. The strike, still at this stage unofficial, quickly spread to the rest of the railway network. The unions then decided to follow the movement and declare the strike official from the following Monday. On the Monday some other public employees unofficially joined the striking railwaymen, leading to the unions calling an official general strike of all public sector workers as from Thursday 15 September.

The strength of this strike lay in its essentially spontaneous nature. It was not something that had been planned and called by the union bureaucracies, but arose from a general feeling that, in view of the cuts in living standards workers have suffered in recent years, enough was enough. The present government — a coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals that emerged from the general election held in November 1981 — had assumed, soon after entering office, “special powers" to deal with the economic situation, which meant that it could rule by decree rather than by act of parliament. These powers had been used to end the automatic indexing of wages and salaries to rises in the cost of living, to increase social insurance contributions and to reduce benefits. It was the fall in living standards resulting from these measures that made the public sector workers so determined to resist any further cuts.

Trade unions in Belgium organise workers on the basis of their political opinion. This, of course, is absurd and has led to workers being divided into three more or less rival union federations: the Christian Democrats (SC. 1.3 million members). The “Socialists” (FGTB. 1.13 million members) and the Liberals (CGLSB. 210,000 members). But on this occasion the strength of feeling among ordinary union members was such that the rival unions had to act together in a “common front". This, together with the fact that the strike took place in Flanders as well as in the traditionally more militant Wallonia, greatly strengthened the bargaining position of the strikers.

At first the government was somewhat bewildered by the strike, the Minister of Communications declaring: “I have absolutely no idea why there is this strike; there was no warning, no notice, no presentation of demands. It is a rather amazing action" (Le Soir, 14 September 1983). The government soon realised however that the strength of feeling of the ordinary strikers was deep-rooted and that, in proposing its attack on increments, bonuses and pensions of public employees — the section of the working class best able to resist downward pressures in a crisis because their work still needs to be done whatever the economic situation — they had perhaps gone too far. In the background too was the fear that the strike might spread to the private sector, resulting in a general strike as happened in 1960-1 (also sparked off by workers in the public sector reacting against a proposal to reduce their pensions). So instead of refusing to negotiate “under duress", as governments often do in those circumstances, the government agreed to start negotiations straight away as from the Friday, indicating that they were prepared to make concessions. The Civil Service Minister spoke of a “misunderstanding" as to the government's intentions.

An agreement was reached on 21 September. The government guaranteed that the increments, bonuses and pensions due to public sector workers would remain unchanged at least until the end of 1985; salaries would however be paid at the end instead of at the beginning of the month. The Christian Democrat and Liberal unions accepted straight away and the FGTB on Friday evening after consulting its members.

A number of lessons can be drawn from this strike. First, any strike against a government decision inevitably has political undertones. The unions managed to avoid this by concentrating on the decision as it affected the wages and conditions of their members rather than on challenging (other than verbally) the government's general policy of spending cuts. Having obtained a relatively satisfactory result on the bread-and-butter issue, they wisely called off the strike. Otherwise they would have provided the government with a stick to beat them — that the strike was politically aimed at a change of government which, in the Belgian context, would only have meant a change of coalition partners. The Belgian PS, in opposition since 1981 and forgetting its role in helping to impose austerity when it did share power, did, in fact, try to exploit the strike for its own party political ends. The leader of its French-speaking wing declared that “the government must go" and clearly hinted that his party was ready to enter the government again. Fortunately neither the trade union leaders, nor even less the strikers. took any notice of this. If they had. the result would have been disastrous. If the strike had become political in the sense of demanding a change of government, it would have broken ranks, the resulting division among the workers would have strengthened the government’s bargaining position. In any event, the participation or non-participation of the PS in the governing coalition is of the utmost indifference from a working class point of view since, whatever party or parties are in power, capitalism can only function against working class interests.

Second, like the majority of strikes, it was entirely defensive, a reaction against an action taken by the employer — in this case the government. In the event the government employer was forced to withdraw' the main proposals, but the workers still had to make some concessions, which meant that their conditions of employment had deteriorated even if by a great deal less than their employer had originally intended. In other words, the strike only slowed a downward movement. This, of course, is necessary and was worth fighting for, but shows up the limitations of trade union action. The workers are always on the receiving end under capitalism, however militant they are.

Adam Buick (Luxembourg)