vote YES in #indyref... FOR A DECENT LIVING WAGE

"A human catastrophe" is how its authors described the findings of a new study of poverty in Scotland by a clutch of anti-poverty projects. A devastating 870,000 Scottish people officially live below the breadline. 

They simply can't afford a decent life. For many they can't meet the mounting food bills, or the rocketing cost of heating, let alone eat AND heat their homes without worrying.

Destitution
As Jim Sillars said at the recent SSP public meeting in Ayr, "I grew up during the second world war. There was rationing, but nobody starved. Now people are destitute. Some who oppose independence claim to be proud Scots, I am not. How can anyone be proud when kids are in poverty?"
The fact that not far short of a million Scots live in such dire straits in the world's eighth-richest country is a searing condemnation of successive governments and the system of capitalism they subscribe to.
Skinflint benefits and the ruthless cuts to them by Westminster are one major source of poverty. Pitiful pensions - one of the lowest in Europe - is another. 

The working poor
But whilst it's old news for many of us, the most appalling indictment of the current system is the fact 436,000 of those in poverty are actually in jobs. The working poor now make up the biggest single group - 52 per cent of all those in poverty - whose standard of living don't match even the most miserly standards set by the government.
A new report shows 80,000 children in Scotland living in poverty despite at least one of their parents working. An absolute majority of the kids below the breadline - 52 per cent of them - have one or more parent working, and in two parent families that proportion rises to 72 per cent. Work is no longer a route out of poverty, as previous generations have been told it is.
A lethal cocktail of rock bottom hourly pay, widespread underemployment and part time jobs, not to mention zero hours contracts, add up to an ocean of poverty in Scotland's workplaces.

Workers' children are being robbed of their potential so the capitalist employers and bankers can engorge themselves. Bailouts for rich bankers, food banks for the poorest. Booming profits for the few, poverty pay for the many. Who said class was dead?

Praying for payday!
When I was a child my mother and father would occasionally advise 'don't wish your life away, son', as I yearned for some future date, like reaching my teens or 18. Now, more than a few moons later, I share the fate of far too many in work: praying for pay day for at least two weeks, 'wishing your life away'. What kind of society is that?!

SSP pioneers
Back in the mid-1990s the forerunner to the SSP - the Scottish Socialist Alliance - organised the one and only demo in Scotland demanding a national minimum wage. Fifteen years ago a Labour government introduced it. But from the outset it was shot through with more loopholes than the worst dodgy insurance policies of the oiliest salesman - and the hourly level set was pathetic from day one. On top of that, young workers were doubly exploited with lower minimum wages - age wage discrimination.
In recent times it's mostly got even worse. Because the national minimum wage - even the 'adult' rate that is - has failed to even keep up with official (totally understated) inflation, every worker on it has lost a total of £675 in the past five years. 

Current minimum wage legalizes poverty pay
Today, over one in five workers earn below the officially recognized 'living wage'. The current £6.31 an hour for workers aged 21 and upwards is set to pole-vault to an Olympian £6.50 in October!
The press hype about this "inflation-busting 3 per cent rise" doesn't impress the hundreds of thousands marooned in a sea of poverty. Even less cause for celebration is the 2 per cent 'rise' for younger workers, and the current £2.68 slave labour rate for Modern Apprentices being inched up to a jaw-dropping £2.73!
A decent living wage for all at 16, scrapping the lower youth rates, and with equal pay for women, must be a central plank of any anti-poverty strategy.
It is morally justified. It is easily affordable in one of the richest nations on the globe. It is even more eminently affordable if we scrapped Trident and fighter jets - putting wages before war.

And it makes perfect economic sense, because amongst other reasons, working people spend their extra earnings and thereby boost the economy and boost job creation for other workers - unlike the one per cent of obscenely rich on incomes over £150,000, who can afford to hoard their wealth, or squander it on luxury items that do nothing to boost employment.

£9 an hour at 16
And what would a decent level of guaranteed minimum be? Certainly not the insulting £6.50 graciously promised by the Westminster Coalition of millionaires for October. Not even the recently-uprated £7.65 Living Wage. 

Welcome though that would be as an immediate step, it is still far below what workers need to live, and more to the point it is entirely voluntary, dependent on the whims and fancies of the employers. If, for instance, its updating from £7.45 to £7.65 displeases any of the employers who have voluntarily signed up as accredited Living Wage employers, they are at full liberty to withdraw, with absolutely no legal consequences.

Two-thirds male median earnings

A good start for a decent living wage would be the demand popular in most trade unions 30 years ago; two-thirds male median earnings as the statutory national minimum. In today's figures that would mean over £9 an hour for every worker and trainee over 16. Not a princely sum, but a decent wage. It's not even asking for two-thirds the AVERAGE male wage, which would be much higher, given the obscene growth of astronomical levels of income for a small minority at the top. Maybe it should!
The fact it is calculated on the median male wage in this country - the middle wage of all the wages paid - not only makes it very modest, but also helps to close the gender gap, and guarantees its automatic uprating, to reduce the growing scissors opening up between the lowest and highest incomes in society. 

A real live chance to win a living wage
That's what the Scottish Socialist Party has argued for since our 1998 founding conference. But 15 years later, not only is it even more urgent that we wage a war on poverty pay, but we also have a unique historic opportunity to stride in that direction. A vote for self-government, a Yes vote in September, would vastly speed up the chances of getting such a decent income guaranteed.
Let us be clear, it will still take a fight to achieve it, even with independence. But it is far more a realistic prospect than if we remain imprisoned by Westminster capitalist rule, where three factions of Thatcherism compete over who is most devoted to boosting the profits of big business at the expense of workers' wages, and where Miliband's Labour is busy dismantling the influence of the trade unions in their party - hardly a harbinger of socialist measures from any potential Labour government at Westminster!

Beyond the SNP White Paper
The SNP White Paper is what it says - the vision of one party, the SNP. Other visions of Scotland's future are being fought for, including that of the SSP. But the White Paper does pledge a Fair Pay Commission, with trade union involvement. The SNP promise the minimum wage will rise "at least by the level of inflation". A modest step forward, but far too modest, and certainly not a route out of poverty - if the starting rate is the current minimum wage.
However, by establishing a forum on pay, this rams open the door to the unions and socialists to organise and vigorously demand a decent living statutory minimum wage for all at 16 - £9 an hour in today's figures, uprated accordingly whenever an independent Scotland tackles this issue. 

Vote YES to decent pay
That's why the SSP is campaigning to convince people to 'vote YES for a decent living wage for all at 16'. 

Kick the door open to this path by voting YES, but also by organising before and beyond the referendum to shape the future, to demand eradication of the criminal poverty blighting workers, their families, their children. 

With 630,000 members, the Scottish trade union movement has the potential power to achieve this goal, by championing a decent living wage and linking it with support for Scottish self-government, getting shut of the purveyors of poverty pay, decades of successive Westminster governments.

Seize the time! Banish the human catastrophe of poverty pay!

SHAPE SCOTLAND'S FUTURE FOR WORKERS' RIGHTS

The SNP government's White Paper on 'Scotland's Future' contains many welcome reforms, and certainly represents a massive step forward from the jail-house conditions working class people currently endure. But a Freedom Charter for workers it is not.

Many of the measures pledged by an aspiring SNP government in an independent Scotland would substantially boost the living standards of Scottish workers and their families. Abolition of the bedroom tax, calling a halt to the dreaded Universal Credit scheme, scrapping of Trident - such plans would halt attacks on the poorest, and potentially release a fortune for spending on jobs, public services and people's incomes that is currently squandered on devilish weapons of mass destruction.

The headline-grabbing promise of free childcare of 30 hours a week during term time for all 3- and 4-year-olds and vulnerable 2-year-olds is a powerfully welcome key to many, many women (and some men) being able to realistically choose to work - provided of course the jobs were created.

Promises of a Youth Guarantee of either education, training or employment as a constitutional right for all aged under 24 is in stark, glittering contrast to the wasted generation under Westminster rule, and is indeed something socialists have demanded for years - again, provided we fight to ensure it is based on provision of a living income or student grant and is not a device exploited by employers to displace unionized, older workers with cheap youth labour.

Renationalisation of Royal Mail has been welcomed not just by Communication Workers' Union members but workers in general, as a means to reverse profiteering and service cuts at the hands of the privateers.

WIN OVER WORKERS

With 630,000 workers organised in trade unions - and probably at least as many again willing to join but terrified of victimization, job losses and blacklisting if they openly joined a union - the White Paper was a golden opportunity to enlist the support of the working class majority population of Scotland. But for those hesitating, or even being dragooned into the No camp by the scurrilous Fear Factory that is Better Together and their offshoot United with Labour, a bold, striking vision of a markedly different future under independence is the necessary method of persuasion. 

Again, measured against what we suffer now under Westminster's rule by and for the millionaires, the SNP's prospectus is progress. But nothing like the advances the likes of the SSP or the broad-based Trade Unionists for Independence are striving for.

Labour's Social Contract provoked strikes‏

NO VOTE MEANS NO RIGHTS AT WORK

What do we face as a future if a No vote is cast next September? 

The UK already boasts the infamy of some of the lowest pay, longest working hours, shortest holiday entitlement and most savage anti-trade union laws in the western capitalist world. And things can only get worse! 

The Tory-LibDem boot-boys have slapped prohibitive fees on Employment Tribunal cases, pricing workers out of any measure of justice. They are hammering the right of union reps to function and represent members in the civil service. London's Tory Mayor Boris Johnston, an obnoxious reactionary disguised as a boisterous buffoon, has pioneered a drive towards banning the right to strike in the public sector, and for a 'review' of union balloting laws on industrial action whereby those members who abstain would be counted as voting against any proposed collective action. And as well as ushering in further cuts to the block grant to Scotland from Westminster, a No vote would embolden the Old Etonians to lay waste to what little workplace rights remain. 

So trade unionists don't even face a choice between the status quo and independence, but between a further clawing back of gains won by past generations of trade unionists and socialists in struggle - or a chance to improve our lot as workers by voting for the right to get whatever government the Scottish people elect!

Irish Social Partnership increased inequality

TIMID STEPS FORWARD

The White Paper rightly states that under Devolution, "the Scottish government is responsible for training the present and future workforce, equipping them with the skills and knowledge they need, but has no say in how they are treated once they are in a job." 

It makes the welcome pledge that an SNP government with the full powers that independence provides would "reverse recent changes introduced at Westminster which reduce key aspects of workers rights. For example, on independence we will restore a 90-day consultation period on redundancies affecting 100 or more employees." 

Likewise they will abolish the 'shares for rights' scheme recently initiated by the Coalition, bribing workers into surrendering fundamental redundancy and unfair dismissal rights, etc, for a few non-voting company shares.

Welcome promises, but very timid. Not a word about scrapping the bulging package of anti-union laws ushered in by Thatchers Tories in the 1980s, retained by Blair and Browns Labour regimes, brutally added to by the current Thatcherites - both Tory and LibDem!

No mention of the guaranteed right to be in a union, the right to strike without fear of victimization,  the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers.

No sign of Worker Director at First Scotrail RMT strike in 2010!

WORKING WITH THE UNIONS

In sharp contrast to the vilification of trade unions offered by the Better Together parties, 'Scotland's Future' sets as its priority "working directly with the trade unions, employers' associations, employers and voluntary sector to build a partnership approach to addressing labour market challenges". 

The Paper goes on to promise "particular focus on encouraging wider trade union participation and recognition of the positive role that can be played by collective bargaining in improving labour market conditions."

The central proposals on offer from the SNP are the formation of a National Convention on Employment and Labour Relations, involving employers and trade unions, and a subsidiary Fair Work Commission.
The latter "will deliver the mechanisms for uprating the national minimum wage", with the "guarantee that it will rise, at the very least, in line with inflation, to ensure work is a route out of poverty".

LIVING MINIMUM WAGE

Considering the UK minimum wage has lagged inflation for years, leaving workers at least £675 worse off than if it had tracked price rises for the past 5 years, this is better than the No campaign can offer hundreds of thousands of workers. 

But it is miserably timid, with no pledge nor proposal for a guaranteed living level of minimum wage, legally enforced.  

Matching inflation but starting with the current £6.19 an hour for those over 21 - and the White Paper is silent on the lower youth rate - would certainly not be 'a route out of poverty'. 

The SNP swear their allegiance to the Living Wage Campaign, and are right now funding a Poverty Alliance Accreditation Scheme - seeking to persuade employers to pay at least £7.45 an hour. 400,000 Scottish workers earn less than this. But again this is not a legally enforced government figure, merely an aim that they seek to cajole employers into paying, based on the core faith the SNP has in businesses big, medium and small.

SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP

These proposed structures are founded on a central philosophy of 'social partnership' between employers, trade unions and government. 

The SNP even raises the idea of worker directors - imitating the actions of 14 out of the 28 EU states where workers have some form or other of representation on company boards. They advocate "employee representation to bolster longterm decision-making and improve industrial relations". 

Given the way workers' trade unions have been cast out into an industrial Siberia the last 30 years, frozen out of important discussions, with dictatorial management all too common, this is a very seductive prospectus. But it is strewn with pitfalls and lethal traps. 

CLASH OF INTERESTS

Of course, elected union representatives having direct access to discussions on their employers' plans would be a massive advantage compared to, for instance, the capitalist dictatorship on display by INEOS boss Jim Ratcliffe at Grangemouth. Access to secret company accounts would help unions restrict the shenanigans of employers.

But the problems arise because the interests of workers and those of their capitalist private employers clash; in essence there's a conflict over who gets the bigger share of the wealth produced, whether in wages and conditions for the workforce, or profits and dividends for the big shareholders. 

WORKER DIRECTORS?

Social partnership amounts to the partnership of the rider and the horse - not two people with common interests, equals.

In many cases worker directors are gagged from speaking out on company secrets, or at the very least bound by the decisions the majority on the board. That seems to be the situation already in the NHS.
The SNP White Paper lauds First Group as a local example of their model for the future, mentioning the transport giant has had a worker director since it was set up in 1989. That begs the question: where was this 'workers' voice' when First Scotrail launched its savage assault on rail workers a few years ago - when in fact it was uncovered that the SNP government had secretly agreed to subsidise the company for any losses they incurred through strike action by the RMT union? Is that what social partnership entails?

TOKEN PARTICIPATION

In some retail companies, committees exist with handpicked workers on them, partly in an attempt to bypass the collective union and it's elected stewards, partly to pass down the message of top management to the shop floor, disguised as the 'decisions' of these workers on the carefully moulded committee. Despite all the window dressing, this is an attempt to undermine, not enhance, the collective bargaining of organised workers.

INDEPENDENT TRADE UNIONS

The proposed Convention is of course a welcome arena for the unions to independently advocate  measures that meet the needs of their members - ranging from advocating a formula for a living level of legally enforced national minimum wage for all over 16, to a charter of workplace rights. 

Scotland's trade unions should welcome the Convention, and use it to put forward the views of independent trade unions. But they need to thoroughly discuss the lessons of experience here and abroad when it comes to so-called social partnership and 'worker directors'.

SOCIAL CON-TRICK
Back in the 1974-79 Labour government, something very similar was implemented, named the Social Contract, initially popular with some of the lower paid who won wage rises in the first phase, but bitterly nicknamed the Social Con-trick in the following years - until it was smashed on the rocks of workers' strike action in 1978-9. 

The core problem was that the government could control (i.e. hold down!) wages, but they couldn't control prices in a capitalist economy, leading to rip-roaring inflation and a collapse in workers' real wages. 

Union leaders who were the architects of this earlier edition of 'social partnership' were discredited, workers confused, Labour defeated, and Thatcher elected by default!

IRISH SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP

More recently, workers in the South of Ireland have been hamstrung and made to pay the price of horrendous capitalist crisis because their national union leaders sold them a pup - successive National Agreements that allegedly ensured bosses and workers were 'all in it together', which drastically hampered their ability to fight back collectively and defend living standards.

WORKERS' CONTROL

Of course, in all probability an independent SOCIALIST Scotland would include properly elected workers' representatives on workplace committees, to control day-to-day operations, and a working class majority elected onto boards of publicly owned industries, services and cooperatives. But that is a far cry from what is on offer from this White Paper, which is rooted in the open continuation of privately owned capitalist enterprises, which in fact are promised cuts of up to 3 per cent in Corporation Tax.

THE ONLY WAY IS YES!

Trade unions and their members cannot afford to be neutral on the Referendum. We have far too much to lose if we don't help win a majority for independence. More wage cuts. Even worse assaults on services. Catastrophic removal of the remaining rights we have at work. And all of these regardless of what colour of rosette the capitalist Prime Minister in Westminster wears.

SEIZE THE MOMENT - SHAPE THE FUTURE

The SNP government's White Paper is one version of independence, but only one. It says itself, "Each of Scotland's political parties will bring forward policy proposals at the future election to an Independent Scottish parliament." 

Absolutely. And the duty of trade unions, as the biggest single collective body in Scotland, is to seize the unique opportunity offered by national self-government, and combine with socialists to carve out a future that goes far beyond the vision painted in this White Paper. 

Fight for public ownership of key sectors like energy, North Sea oil and gas, the banks and industrial giants - with new forms of democratic control and management by working class people that go way beyond a few token 'worker directors'. 

With socialist change we could build a genuine social partnership. 

This White Paper is a very substantial improvement on what we have in the capitalist UK; it is pale and timid compared to what socialists and the trade union movement need to campaign for on the road to a Scottish workers' republic.