DEMAND DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP: end the corporate thuggery of ‘fire and rehire’
As Scottish/British gas engineers stage another round of strikes against savage cuts to their jobs, terms and conditions, and invasion of their family time by bosses demanding more work and longer hours for less money, the Scottish Socialist Party extends them the hand of solidarity.
We know which side we are on in this showdown between workers who have risked their own lives throughout the pandemic, volunteering to carry out repairs in houses where they knew people had Covid-19 – and a gang of profiteers, led my £800,000-a-year CEO, Chris O’Shea.
Owners of Scottish Gas, Centrica, is run by a club of millionaires. They want to browbeat workers into working from 5 to 8 hours UNPAID EXTRA WORK each week.
Between four of them, the Centrica Board members have earned £37million since 2015, by sitting on the boards of other companies outside the gas industry.
Stephen Hester made £18million since 2015 as CEO of insurance giant RSA, and stands to gain a further £16million from sales of RSA shares.
Heidi Mottram took over £4million in salary and benefits as CEO of Northumbrian Water.
Kevin O’Byrne got £2.23million in 2019 as finance chief of Sainsbury’s, on top of £1.45million the previous year.
Chair of Centrica, Scott Wheway, is on £410,000. He gets another £200,000 as chair of AXA UK and - up until last year - was paid £240,000 for sitting on the board of Santander UK.
Privatisation is a licence to print money and hand it to a tiny bunch of remote millionaire directors. Boardroom dictators who then act like gold-plated, mafioso thugs, holding a gun to the heads of workers whose annual wages they wouldn’t get out of bed for a week for.
The unelected board of Centrica should be fired and the whole industry taken into democratic public ownership, with elected Boards of Management, including direct workers’ representatives, on a skilled wage, not these mind-boggling incomes.
The case for public ownership and democratic working-class control could not be more glaring.
Victory to the gas engineers! Reverse the tide of ‘fire and rehire’ corporate thuggery. Fire the board! For democratic public ownership.
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The rich are vaccinated against Covid-19 by their wealth
The UK and Scottish governments are stumbling
back and forth from lockdown to premature reopening to 'mockdown', under pressure from the
business lobby - with current advice to stay at home, whilst giving loopholes
for non-essential retail giants, hospitality firms and construction companies
to drag workers into work, regardless of the mounting health threat from
gathering in large numbers.
Historically low wages, battered down for
decades in a systematic theft of wealth from the workers who produce it, have
led to historically low household savings and high household debt.
Combined with the derisory £95-a-week
Statutory Sick Pay, this is a recipe for disaster, endangering the lives of
many workers and vulnerable family members because they cannot afford to
self-isolate - as part of a plan to not just reduce, but eliminate COVID-19,
with mass testing, tracing and isolation alongside vaccination.
Yet the wealth is there if we distributed it
to ensure full average wages for all sick or self-isolating workers, or those placed
on furlough through temporary shutdowns.
NHS Crisis
A well-funded, fully-equipped NHS, with the
necessary staffing levels and decent pay, is at the heart of what's required in
the pandemic emergency.
Some Scottish hospitals are even more in
danger of being swamped than they were last Spring, cancelling appointments and
procedures for some non-Covid conditions.
Decades of governments deliberately refusing
to invest in the NHS, despite dire warnings from scientists and health experts,
has led to this life-threatening situation.
In Scotland, 6,000 hospital beds – 25% of the
total - disappeared in the past 13 years of SNP governments failing to resist
and defeat Westminster governments’ butchery.
Nurses Skip Meals
The average health worker has suffered a 20%
pay cut in the past 10 years, with catastrophic impact on morale at a time when
hospital workers are already drastically overstretched.
A new survey by Nurses United and Nursing
Notes confirmed a shocking state of affairs in Scotland's hospitals.
A startling 97% of nurses surveyed feel
undervalued by the government; 90% of them have suffered mental health problems
during the pandemic.
One in every three nurses has skipped meals
to feed their family or pay bills; 58% of them have used credit cards for daily
essential spending.
Alongside gruelling 12-hour shifts - caused
primarily by understaffing - this has led to one in every four nurses telling
the survey they plan to leave their job in the next year. The two most common
primary reasons they give for this catastrophic potential exodus of skills,
experience and dedication are low pay (18%) and poor work/life balance (15%).
The Virus of Poverty
Poverty kills people.
Poverty pay is a killer, more especially
amidst the pandemic.
COVID-19 is not the great leveller. A tiny
minority of the population have been vaccinated by wealth. Their wealth affords
them spacious, well-heated homes, drastically greater access to working from
home than the lower-paid millions, and far better conditions for remote
home-learning by their children.
The struggle to eliminate the Coronavirus has
to include an urgent struggle against poverty pay, basement level benefits, and
a sick pay scheme that at best is a sick joke.
Health staff and millions of other people
officially designated as ‘key workers’ have gone from the Tories offering them
two-faced clapping, to slapping them in the face.
A public sector pay freeze - with a good dose
of divide and rule between different types of Public Sector worker thrown in -
is certainly not the cure to conditions which create countless avoidable
deaths.
NHS staff fully deserve the 15% pay rise many
of them are demanding, to part-compensate for the 20% pay cut in the last
decade.
Organise for £12 Minimum Now!
The STUC should muster serious plans to
mobilise workers in pursuit of the demand they raised last March: for an
immediate £2-an-hour pay increase for every key worker, regardless of which job
or sector they work in.
That would be a unifying demand to rally
thousands of workers behind. As would the struggle to underpin it with a £12-an-hour, legally-enforced minimum wage for all workers from the age of 16,
with equal pay for women.
Plenty of big businesses could easily afford
such a modest pay scale, considering the skyrocketing profits during the
pandemic - and eye-watering incomes for directors.
Anyone would welcome the Christmas bonus of
one week's wages awarded to B&M Bargains workers at Christmas. But how
pathetic a sop that is to low pay, considering B&M’s chief executive
grabbed a bonus of £300million!
Those of us who have persistently fought for
6 years to force the USDAW retail union national leadership into serious action
to win a £10 minimum wage will welcome that being achieved this week for
Morrison's supermarket staff.
But Morrison’s can well afford this,
particularly as 25% of the pay rise will be funded by removal of annual
bonuses, and more so given the enormous surge in profits that the workforce has
put their lives at risk to generate. And Morrison's chief executive, David
Potts, should be renamed David Potts of Gold! His income last year was
£4.2million.
Collective action by the potentially powerful
trade union movement on these fighting demands could help prevent further,
unnecessary deaths, created by that lethal combination: poverty and COVID-19.
A serious fight needs to be organised to put
people and pay before profit; workers’ health before bosses’ wealth.
This article is also published in the fortnightly Scottish Socialist Voice.
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According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation, High Pay Centre and others, the typical chief executive of the biggest 100 companies in the UK will have grabbed the typical annual wage of a full-time worker by 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday 6th of January 2021.
Put another way, it will have taken just 34 hours for the top dogs in the FTSE 100 companies to earn the equivalent of an entire year's wage for the typical UK worker.
But we should spare a kindly thought for these poor buggers, because last year they only had to put in 33 hours work for full year's pay!
The median (or middle income) of a full-time worker was £30,353 as of June 2019 – the High Pay Centre's last available figures - but the median Chief Executives’ income is 120 times that much.
If we switch to the median wage for all workers, full-time and part-time, Company bosses earn 145 times as much.
And taking the average (mean) income of CEOs - which was £4.7million back in June 2019 - then the average worker would have to toil for 154 years to match these parasites’ annual income.
CASES OF CAPITALIST GREED
There are many, many obscene examples of individual greed and privilege amidst the suffering and insecurity faced by millions of workers, particularly during the pandemic.
The highest paid chief executive is Tim Steiner of Ocado on £58.73million. It would take the average full-time worker 8 years to earn as much as he got in one, single day!
As hospitality workers - already low paid - face carnage to their jobs, Whitbread’s CEO, Alison Brittain, got a pay package of £5.59million.
As millions of us yearn for an effective vaccine against the killer COVID-19, AstraZeneca are poised to make gargantuan profits. Even before this new, bountiful source of wealth for Big Pharma, Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca raked in £14.33 million, which is 200 times as much as the average worker.
To rub salt in the wound, only 40 of the FTSE 100 companies bother to pay the mis-named Living Wage of £9.30-an-hour to their workers.
And some super-profitable giants, including TESCO, have been recently named and shamed for not even paying the pathetic government minimum wage!
FOR A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME
This grotesque new batch of statistics underlines the arguments that I and the Scottish Socialist Party have put forward in favour of a Legal Maximum Income, initially set at a 10:1 differential with the legal minimum wage.
That’s been the policy of the SSP for most of our existence since 1998.
And at the 2018 annual conference of my own union, USDAW, I successfully argued the case for this policy against the opposition of the central National officials, winning a clear conference majority for a legally-enforced Maximum Income, initially set at 10 times the legal minimum wage.
[Watch the short video BELOW]
Personally, I’ve always thought a 10:1 differential between the maximum income and the minimum wage far too generous.
But the modesty of this demand is its great merit; who in Hell could oppose such a modest measure against the systemic and growing inequality in capitalist Scotland and capitalist Britain?
Instead of the 145:1, 120:1, and 200:1 figures explained above, 10:1 would be a revolutionary advance, as a major source of revenue for better wages and vastly improved public services.
As we demand a legally enforced £12-an-hour minimum wage for all at 16, who on Earth could conjure up a case against a ceiling of £120-an-hour as the maximum income allowed?
And I believe it is important to describe this policy as a maximum income rather than just a maximum wage. Why? Because, for example, chief executives' fixed salaries typically only account for 20% of their total annual income, whereas long-term and short-term incentive schemes account for 75% of their ill-gotten incomes.
WE DEMAND THE BAKERY, NOT JUST A BIGGER SLICE OF THE CAKE!
Indeed, this point is a reminder that whilst socialists and trade unionists should take up the demand for a Legal Maximum Income with ferocious enthusiasm, we will only ever entirely eliminate wealth inequality by challenging the private ownership of the means of producing that wealth; the private accumulation of profits, perks and privileges for the few.
Capitalism by its very nature is a system where the millions make the wealth and the millionaires take the wealth.
Democratic public ownership of all the big companies which dominate the means of production, distribution and exchange is the foundation for an egalitarian society where the vast majority of the population - the working class – gain back the fruits of their labour in the form of wages and the social wage, such as universal provision of services like health, education, housing and transport.
On Fat Cat Wednesday, renew and redouble your determination to combat the obscene poverty and inequality which scars the face of Scotland by demanding immediate measures like a £12 minimum wage and a maximum income initially set at 10 times that.
Join that fight alongside the struggle for the collective ownership of the natural, industrial and financial wealth that could eliminate poverty overnight, if taken out of the hands of the capitalists, bankers and landowners who rob the rest of us, through the organised exploitation that is capitalism.
