COVID-19: Workers Dying for Sick Pay and Safety

 

Thousands dying from lack of safety action or income support 

Several new Reports confirm what we have contended for the past year: governments and employers are killing workers as they put big business profits ahead of workers’ health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TUC reports over 10,000 workers have died of the virus, arising from workplace infections, and countless more are suffering the long-term health problems of long-Covid.

Yet, the very same week, Public Health England identified 3,549 outbreaks of COVID-19 in workplaces since last July, with another 100 last week alone, despite the whole of the UK being in lockdown. Over 500 workers tested positive in the big Swansea DVLA centre recently, and unions in Scotland have just written to the Scottish government demanding urgent action to curb the spread of COVID-19 clusters in call centres.

Those figures will be a gross underestimate, as they only cover outbreaks in offices, factories, construction sites, etc. actually reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Not One Single Employer Sanctioned!

What are the HSE - and the government which funds and directs their operations - doing in response?

Not one single employer has been prosecuted for presiding over the supreme hazardous workplace conditions; failure to tackle the spread of COVID-19, with its lethal consequences.

Not one single workplace has even been issued a HSE Prohibition Notice, whereby inspectors have the power to stop workplace operations, where they judge continued industrial or commercial activity is “deemed to be injurious or damaging to health.”

Not one employer has even been fined for negligence, whereas individuals who breach lockdown regulations face penalties of up to £1,000.

One of the prime causes of employers escaping any significant sanctions from the HSE is that the latter decided to classify COVID-19 as only a “significant” threat, rather than place it in its highest risk category, of being “serious”.

In making this breath-taking decision, the HSE has been fully backed by governments.

Tory Minister Thinks COVID Deaths 'Non-Permanent'?!

In an astonishing declaration - even by the standards of the Tory government - Employment Minister Mims Davies tried to justify this inaction by the HSE when she told Parliament:     “the effects of Covid are non-permanent or reversible, non-progressive, and any disability is temporary for the working population as a whole.”

Those of us who have suffered the loss of friends or family members can angrily testify to this heartless Tory hack that death from COVID-19 is both permanent and irreversible.

HSE Pressured to Keep Workplaces Open

One experienced HSE inspector, who withheld his name for fear of retribution, told the press: “HSE internal instructions have said they would be very reluctant to support an inspector who did serve a prohibition notice.”

He went on to confirm government pressure is being brought to bear on them to keep workplaces open, failing to take account of risks to workers and their families.

“HSE are telling us ‘walk off site if you feel unsafe’, but you can’t do anything to stop work. We can leave crowded workplaces lacking social distancing if we feel ourselves threatened, but we can’t stop people from working.”

That simply confirms what we wrote last April about a complete lack of safety inspections on many construction sites, exacerbated by the advice to HSE inspectors to stay clear of risks to themselves, while meantime building workers put themselves on the line - including for non-essential work, such as building luxury apartments.

The underlying reason for this hooligan inaction by HSE bosses, in tandem with the government - taking no meaningful actions against workplaces being super-spreaders of the Coronavirus - is cuts.

The Tories tried to make much of investing £14million in HSE last June, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with previous cuts of £100million.

No wonder HSE can’t cope with the deluge of over 100,000 Covid-related complaints from workers and the public in the past year – 25,000 of them last month alone.

It Takes Collective Workers' Action

It took strike action, and the threat of walking off the job, to force governments – in the UK, Scotland and internationally – to extend the closures of many non-essential building sites and non-food retail, or for employers to provide even the bare necessities of hand cleansers, social distancing and other safety measures in workplaces across all sectors that remained open.

And amongst the unsung frontline heroes of this year of the plague are the thousands of shop stewards and union Health and Safety representatives who have confronted employers with demands for concrete safety measures, risk assessments and cessation of unsafe work. Often facing obstruction, hostility, even victimisation, as they seek to defend workers’ lives.

For Workers' Control

This volunteer army of workers’ representatives should be at the heart of improving workplace safety - with the full collaboration of an expanded HSE inspectorate. Not just during the pandemic, but for the ongoing future.

Workers’ control of health and safety - based on the day-to-day knowledge of these people rooted in the shop floor - is not only democratic, but a far safer mechanism than reliance on remote, well-paid senior managers, wielding pressure on behalf of the owners to maximize profit, even where that means cutting corners and risking lives.

Lost Wages Prevent Self-Isolation

Meantime, medical professionals have published new Reports underlining the fatal risks workers are being subjected to, especially amongst the lowest paid, due to the utter failure of governments to provide proper support to those who should be self-isolating.

Dr Muge Cevik is an expert in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St Andrews.

She and a group of other experts have just published a damning report in the British Medical Journal which demonstrates that less than 20% of people are able to adhere to isolation regulations - even though the overwhelming majority are willing and wanting to do so.

The report carries data showing the vast majority of people are willing to self-isolate when tested positive, but the actual ability to do so is 3 times lower amongst those on less than £20,000 a year, or with less than £100 in savings.

The article’s other underlying conclusion is hardly a new revelation to those of us who have fought throughout the past year for full, 100% average wages for every sick or self-isolating worker, to prevent them being dragged into work by the threat of financial ruin. Lost wages are the primary reason for not following full isolation guidelines.

Low Pay and Crowded Housing

In other statements, Dr Cevik has highlighted the majority of hospitalizations are from infections amongst key workers. 

She told CNN: “There are huge outbreaks in warehouses, meatpacking plants, care homes... and the only thing that combines these sectors are low-paid workers likely to live in crowded houses.”

Back in April 2020, I wrote that the government should provide not just full average wages but the option of safe, staffed and caring self-isolation facilities (quarantine) as part of the NHS, for example by usage of unoccupied hotel rooms.

In the recent BMJ article the medical professionals argue that governments “need to focus support on those in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing... and should include free and safe accommodation, alongside adequate income support, job protection and help with caring responsibilities.”

They cite examples of Test-and-Care schemes in San Francisco and New York where people testing positive are offered either free hotel accommodation or free delivery of food, medicine and transport (and even dog walking services) to help them quarantine at home.

Predictably, those measures have not only boosted adherence to self-isolation but greatly increased the uptake of testing itself, as workers on a pitiful income are more likely to avoid getting tests, even though they have symptoms, because they are terrified at the prospect of being forced to take time off work on barely any income.

Terrified to Take Time Off Sick

Examples of the latter are rampant. That was one of the factors in the cruel carnage in Scotland's privatised care homes last year, where workers on or just above the miserly minimum wage, with no worthwhile occupational sick benefit schemes, dragged themselves into work to avoid going under financially.

A union organiser for taxi drivers explained: “I know a driver who had to self-isolate four times in 2 months. How does that work? These are people currently only earning £35 to £50-a-day and are in most cases being charged to install protective screens in the cab. When you’re in a desperate situation you take risks.”

Or as a cleaner described, she has been forced to come in to work in an empty office, where the staff are all working from home, to clean it 4 days a week. Last month she caught COVID-19, probably on a bus.

She stayed at home a few days but then went back to work:

“I couldn’t afford to stay at home because I was getting hardly any income. I feel guilty that I went to work and might have infected more people but I had no other option.”

When is £500 Worth Nothing? - When It's Refused!

The Tory Minister in charge of Test and Trace, Dido Harding, told Parliament that 20,000 people a day are failing to stay at home after being instructed to. Of course, countless others have avoided taking tests, out of fear of losing their income.

In a grotesque and cynical PR stunt, the government conceded payment of £500 to those forced to self-isolate... but with enough strings attached to strangle it as any kind of support for low-paid workers that could help them stay off work and help break the chains of infection. In real life, nearly half of all those who’ve applied have been refused this modest sum, including 86% of all applicants in Liverpool.

Stop a Premature Stampede Back

The governments of Westminster and Holyrood are in danger of using the rays of hope felt by us all at the rollout of Vaccines to stampede people back to non-essential work, risking yet another eruption of disease and death, as was caused by the profit-driven lunacies of ‘Eat Out and Help Out’ last summer, and the commercialised craze over the Christmas period.

Shop-floor workers’ representatives, including Health and Safety reps, should be given the full backing of their national union leaderships to resist premature reopening, and to insist on enforcement of proper health and safety measures in those workplaces unavoidably functioning.

Full Average Wages - Workers' Health Before Bosses' Wealth

In tandem with that, socialists and trade unionists need to step up to demand that employers and governments pay full,100% average wages to every worker, whether on furlough, sick leave or in self-isolation.

Elimination of COVID-19 will require more than just vaccinations. It also needs localised Test, Trace Isolate and Care systems, free of charge.

And looking beyond immediate palliative measures, working-class people need a leadership prepared to tackle overcrowded housing, low pay, the sick joke of £95 Statutory Sick Pay – and the deeper root causes of increasingly frequent pandemics, themselves the products of a globalised capitalist system which trashes the planet and its people for profit.

 

 

2020 VISION OF CAPITALIST CLASS WAR: build workers’ struggle, solidarity and socialism

Storm clouds are gathering as we turn our backs on 2020 and face the struggles of the rest of the 2020s.

Several groups of workers are flexing their muscles, threatening to fight back against the multiple tributes being hacked out of their jobs, wages and everyday conditions by the obscenely rich elite, to pay for the crises of 2020.

As we reflect on the past year and prepare for the next, nobody should harbour any doubt that class war is raging in the boardrooms of big business.

Employers and governments work in tandem to unleash a massive redistribution of wealth to the rich from the rest of us, with claims this is unavoidable to balance the books after a year of unprecedented state expenditure. And they plan to use Brexit to rob us further.

In battling to defend every penny of workers’ pay, every job and public service, it is necessary to see the bigger picture, to build the widest possible solidarity action in reply.

The past year has given us ‘2020 vision’ of capitalism in all its ruthlessly exploitative nature.

The globalised hunt for ever-greater profit and new capitalist markets has invaded wilder parts of our planet, bringing humans into contact with lethal pathogens, unleashing global pandemics with increased frequency and ferocity - in particular COVID-19, the worst killer pandemic in a century.

Decades of austerity cuts - better described as planned poverty, in pursuit of even more grotesque wealth for a tiny minority - led to entirely avoidable human carnage, with shortages in the NHS and failure to provide protective equipment or safe conditions in care homes and countless other workplaces the most obvious examples.

As 2020 wore on, more and more people spotted the glaring contradiction between rhetoric and reality; between mantras of “We’re All In This Together” and the brutal expansion of inequality.

In just three months the planet's billionaires increased their wealth by 27%, whilst workers on furlough suffered 20% pay cuts, and a record 370,000 others a full 100% loss of earnings from August-October alone, as they were chucked on the scrapheap of unemployment.

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos increased his personal wealth by $87billion since January, equivalent to the entire, combined NHS budgets for the whole of the UK.

The government propaganda nonsense about treating the Coronavirus like a war prompts one picture they would rather hide from us; as with wars, the pandemic has led to further polarisation of wealth, including increased monopolization of ownership.

That is plain to see in the retail sector, the second biggest employer in the country after the NHS. Retail giants like JD Sports and Mike Ashley's Fraser Group battle over who picks up the spoils as Arcadia, Debenhams and countless small firms go to the wall. Big retail thrives, the High Street turns into a wasteland.

Handouts to Big Business

Government policies in response to the pandemic were shaped by the clash of two opposite class interests.

The furlough scheme was the result both of demands by the trade union movement and socialists to protect workers in their jobs, and the fear and loathing of collapsed profits by big business.

Still, it was primarily huge handouts for the capitalist rich and horrendous insecurity for workers. For example, supermarkets got state handouts of £1.9billion in business tax relief, which they converted into handouts of £1.3billion in dividend payments to shareholders and 230,000 redundancy notices this year to retail workers - whose efforts on the front line not only fed the people but fed the profits of the big four supermarkets and their likes.

It's Capitalism to Blame – not just COVID-19

In fighting to shape the future in the interests of the vast working-class majority of the population, we need to be crystal clear it was not the pandemic which created the crisis of job insecurity, pay cuts and threats to essential services, but the capitalist system itself. The pandemic simply exacerbated the crisis.

Pre-pandemic Britain witnessed an incredible 54% rise in the number of people suffering not just poverty, but destitution, between 2017 and 2019. The number of kids condemned to destitution in their formative years rose by 50% in the same two years.

The ultimate indictment of capitalism must be the fact that in the fifth-richest economy on Earth, UNICEF has been obliged to give a grant for breakfast boxes to feed hungry children in South London on Christmas Day; the first such emergency aid to the UK since UNICEF’s foundation in 1946.

Bosses Unleash Class War

As we step into 2021 it is no longer adequate to predict a ruthless crusade by employers and their hired politicians to claw back the costs of 2020 from workers’ pockets; it’s happening already! It requires at least equal determination to defend the class interests of the millions as is on display by the millionaires in their own self-interest.

Patterns are emerging of systematic pay cuts; ‘fire and rehire’ schemes; reductions in sick benefits, terms and conditions; reduced hours of available work, and a slaughter of jobs.

And as Karl Marx identified over 150 years ago, burgeoning unemployment - and indeed underemployment - are being used to bludgeon workers into accepting lesser pay and conditions, with the age-old, obnoxious declaration “You’re lucky to have a job!”

The Struggle Determines the Outcome

Workers in a range of sectors are limbering up for crucial defensive struggles: in BT, Scottish Gas, further education colleges, ScotRail, CalMac ferries, the NHS and wider public sector, etc.

They face the choice of fighting back or being crushed by pay cuts; jobs downgrading: the corporate thuggery of ‘fire and rehire'; decimation of jobs – and the immediate, ongoing threats to health and safety in the workplace, as employers prioritise profit over lives amidst new waves and strains of the killer COVID-19.

There is nothing predetermined in the outcomes of these struggles.

But some things are certain: the employers are out to use the twin viruses of COVID-19 and capitalist recession to beat down workers’ wages, conditions and jobs; to beat workers down onto their knees.

Unless we get up off our knees and fight back with maximum solidarity across sectoral and Union boundaries then working-class people will pay a terrible price at the hands of class enemies who sing hymns of national unity and “We’re All In This Together” as they seek to divide and conquer.

Defeat Divide-and-Rule Tactics

The Tories announced a public sector pay freeze with mock concern at the pay cuts in the private sector, with Rishi Sunak trying to appear sincere when he said: “This means we cannot possibly justify public sector pay rises.”

But they've taken their divide-and-rule trickery even further, trying to split different sections of public sector workers, promising pay rises to at least some NHS staff but not the millions of frontline workers in local government, civil service departments and others who also kept society functioning during COVID-19.

The Scottish government is a bit more cute about this, announcing a £500 award to health and care workers (which of course the Tories insist is taxable!). But that one-off payment still excludes hundreds of thousands of other key workers in Scotland, and should also not be allowed to distract from the entirely justified demands for a 15% pay increase for all NHS staff, which the Scottish government has given no indication of supporting or funding.

£12 Minimum Wage at 16

One of the weapons which SSP trade unionists are determined to popularise in combating the divisive tactics of employers and governments is the demand - first raised by the Scottish TUC during the spring lockdown - for an immediate £2-an-hour pay rise for every key worker, regardless of occupation.

This is an extremely modest but unifying demand in recognition both of the heroic efforts of workers in the NHS, care sector, retail, postal services, bin collections, utilities, council and civil services, and countless others - and of the fact those workers who society most relies upon are usually also the lowest paid.

However, as we explained back on 1st April, it’s not just ‘Time £2 Pay All Key Workers’ (to quote the STUC) but this needs to be underpinned by a legally enforced National Minimum Wage of at least £12-an-hour from the age of 16 upwards, if we are to avoid further divisions between different low-paid workers, and overcome the rampant poverty which also undermines job security - because workers cannot afford to buy the goods or services produced by other workers.

Workers’ Solidarity and Socialism – not ‘Social Partnership’ With the Enemy

Solidarity in action is a critical plank of what’s required in 2021.

Socialists and trade unionists need to challenge and defeat the false and dangerous philosophy which pervades the upper echelons of most trade unions; namely that of ‘Social Partnership’ between union leaders and company chief executives.

The ‘2020 vision’ of capitalism revealed to millions of people surely exposes the idea of common interests between the very rich and the rest of us, the employers and the working class, as a preposterous, dangerous nonsense.

It took courageous struggle - including strike action in many cases, and even a preparedness by union shop stewards to put their job on the line - to even win adequate sick pay or Personal Protective Equipment from employers who put privatised profit before people’s lives.

And the Tories have gone from hypocritical claps to slaps in the face for key workers, as they prepare to pick the pockets of the very people they proclaimed heroes when it suited the government to get them to work in the jaws of death.

Collective action, good old-fashioned working-class solidarity applied to the modern age, is what’s required, not cosying up to company bosses who would cut your throat as quick as they'd look at you in defence of their profit margins.

Workers Need Socialist Party – join the SSP

Going beyond that, one of the clearest lessons of the past year is that in order to end the rule of the rich in a society based on class division and class exploitation, workers need a conscious socialist party rooted in the workplaces and communities.

A workers’party with a socialist vision and ideology - turned into fighting socialist policies capable of mobilising masses of people because they are expressed in the language and needs of the working class.

The SSP enters 2021 determined to help build a socialist force in the unions, workplaces and communities that can link immediate battles over jobs, wages and rights at work with the need to take the likes of energy, construction, transport, all public services and banks into democratic public ownership. As the foundation for a Socialist Green Recovery Plan which could build 100,000 eco-friendly homes; establish an integrated, free public transport network; provide cheap green energy to all; construct universal basic services fit for the 21^st century; thereby also creating at least 150,000 well-paid, unionised jobs and apprenticeships, guaranteeing meaningful work and security to the next generation in a socialist Scotland.

Look back in anger at capitalist 2020, but look forward with determination to shape a socialist future in the 2020s.

Join the SSP (scottishsocialistparty.org)

 

 

 

 

 

IMAGINE HOW TO FIGHT THE SLAUGHTER OF JOBS & WAGES!

“We’re All In This Together” declares the signage in one famous supermarket.

Far from it! The household name displaying those posters, Marks and Spencer’s, have just announced another tranche of job losses, tossing 7,000 workers onto the growing scrapheap of mass unemployment. 

Workers are being made to pay a heavy price for the Coronavirus. 

The government and capitalist employers are making us pay with job losses, pay cuts, slashed conditions, intensified exploitation, the massacre of sick benefits and, yes, loss of lives. 

Years of failure to invest - and consciously planned poverty pay – contributes to the slaughter of the innocents during this pandemic.

Care Home Carnage 

Decades of austerity left the NHS prone to being overrun when COVID-19 hit these shores, so both the Tory government and the SNP Scottish government prioritised clearance of bed spaces in our hospitals over securing the safety of elderly patients thrown into residential care homes.

Freedom of Information investigations have revealed at least 1,200 elderly patients in Scotland were transferred from hospital wards into care homes without being tested for COVID-19. And that is a gross underestimate, because five of Scotland’s health boards, including the two largest, refused to answer.  

Worse still, the same investigations revealed many others thrown in amongst the most vulnerable elderly population at the height of a pandemic had been tested positive in the hospital.

As professor Allyson Pollock commented “This was like throwing a lighted match into a tinderbox.”

This austerity-rooted regime helped trigger the care home carnage that accounts for half of all COVID-19 deaths.

Workplace Infection and Death 

As we repeatedly warned and denounced in recent months, whilst the governments told us to stay at home they also told us to get to work. They were driven by their preoccupation with upholding the profit margins of the profiteering rich.

The Health and Safety Executive this week reported 600 people in Scotland have caught the virus in their place of work, nearly two-thirds of them in care homes.

As the STUC points out, that figure is only the tip of a vastly larger iceberg. Especially given the notoriety of sectors that employ many of the lowest paid for not reporting accidents at work let alone infection with the killer virus. 

Now a new virus is sweeping the country, demolishing jobs, wages and family livelihoods.

Whilst their capitalist competitors in Germany have extended the wage subsidy furlough scheme for a period of 2 years, to mitigate redundancies, the short-sighted get-rich-quick brigade in charge of capitalist Britain are cutting off the life support machine of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, triggering mass redundancies. 

Those of us who remember Maggie Thatcher’s Dark Ages in the 1980s are suffering deja-vu; TV news back then always ended with a massive list of redundancies and closures, in part designed to browbeat workers into thinking job losses were an unstoppable force of nature.

In recent weeks, thousands of job losses have been announced daily: Boots, John Lewis, M&S, Debenhams, hospitality, airlines and even the public sector.

Fire and Rehire 

This relentless slaughter of jobs is not always purely based on companies suffering the economic impact of the pandemic.

It’s often something previously planned, but now implemented with maniacal zeal by company bosses under cover of Coronavirus, in a race to the bottom, making workers pay the price for sustained profiteering.

British Airways’ “fire and rehire” tactic is the best known of these assaults on workers with the excuse of COVID-19. An extremely profitable company grabbed public funds to furlough staff, but still fired all 42,000 and then bullied and blackmailed 30,000 of them into accepting wage cuts of 50-60% - or else join the 12,000 chucked out the door. 

Centrica Cowboys 

Centrica is not far behind BA in these criminal methods.

As one of their workers explained to me, 

“At the moment we get six months full pay for sick absence. Centrica want to abolish that entirely unless we opt into a taxable private health scheme. If we do that, 13 weeks will be on full pay and the next 9 months on two-thirds of pay. Otherwise if we refuse to opt into private health we're meant to survive on nothing but £95 a week Statutory Sick Pay. And it's even worse for those of us with less than 2-years service; just 10 weeks full pay if we go into private health, the rest on £95 SSP.

For the industrial staff, Centrica plan to increase contracts from a 37 hour week to 40, with no uplift in pay. So they want 3 hours a week free labour. Office staff are expected to gift them half-an-hour a week free of wages, with worsened opening hours. 

And the overtime rate is to be slashed from time and a half to single time, with a cap of 25 hours a year.

Centrica call centres seem to be the new Victorian mills.”

Pockets of Resistance  

Thankfully, pockets of resistance by workers to the slaughter of their jobs and theft of their wages is beginning to erupt, but urgently requires coordination and leadership from the wider trade union movement.

GMB union members in Centrica have voted by a whopping 95% for strike action, in a 68% turnout.

British Airways workers - cabin crew, baggage and loading staff alike - are poised to vote on taking strike action. 

Healthcare workers have got together and staged a series of marvellous rallies demanding pay justice and pay equality, many of them pushing for a 15% pay rise, after being slapped in the face by the government when they were excluded from the all-too-miserly public sector pay rise - after having put their lives on the line, face-to-face with COVID-19. 

Many other workers are furious at attacks on conditions, including sick pay entitlements, which is particularly outrageous and dangerous when COVID-19 has hit chicken factories, meat plants, textile factories and other workplaces.

For example, one multi-billioned retail giant has gone from stopping wages to workers with COVID-19 to slashing company sick benefit entirely after 3 days’ absence per year. 

Precisely those workers with underlying health problems, and therefore most vulnerable to the ongoing Coronavirus, are the same people most likely to be disqualified from anything more than £95 Statutory Sick Pay, because ill health has forced them off work for periods. 

Stark Choices 

Workers face harsh, stark choices, thrown into high relief by the Coronavirus and its economic consequences.

The road being travelled not just by the Tories but also the Scottish government involves mass redundancies as the subsidies to big business dry up, and the massacre of pay and sick pay. Which not only further endangers lives by dragging people into work despite being infected, but also blows to smithereens the previous nonsense talked by governments and some economists about a rapid V-shaped recovery.

With household savings at an all-time low, household debts at an all-time high, and wages being crushed down even further as a share of national wealth - in order to enhance the share that goes in profit - the consumer-led boom, which capitalist Britain and Scotland has been far too reliant on, has now turned into its opposite.

Far from being “all in this together”, the Corona crisis has highlighted the gaping chasm between the classes in this system of running society. 

Britain’s 45 billionaires increased their personal wealth by 20% in the months of March and April alone.

In neat, grotesque contrast, the average NHS worker has suffered at 20% pay cut since 2010.

Two-thirds of all care home staff are thinking of leaving their low-paid, insecure and dangerous jobs, in a new survey by the GMB.

Fighting Socialist Alternatives 

So what’s the alternative to this tsunami of job losses, pay cuts and life-threatening attacks on sick pay?

Scotland’s trade union movement embraces nearly 650,000 workers - and could recruit as many more if they demonstrated an iron determination to fight for immediate improvements in working conditions and organised action that would remove the fear factor that dominates the minds of many workers.

At the height of the pandemic the STUC and its affiliated unions called for an immediate £2-an-hour wage increase for all key workers.

That should not wither on the vine and become just an empty rhetorical flourish.

Turned into serious campaigning and collective action, it could be one part of unified demands for better wages across the board, underpinned by an absolute minimum, legally enforced wage of £12-an-hour for all at 16.

Such improved wages will transform the lives of hundreds of thousands and radically improve workers’ spending power, which in turn would make jobs far more secure in sectors such as retail, hospitality, tourism and entertainment. 

Minimum 16-Hour Week 

At the 2019 STUC annual conference, I proposed my union USDAW’s policy motion for abolition of all zero hours contracts and other forms of insecure, casualised labour, to be replaced by a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it. 

That pioneering policy was passed at the STUC without a single vote against. It now needs to be turned into a major plank of the trade union movement's alternative to low wages, rampant job insecurity, and the vicious spiral of job losses they both contribute to.

We live in a society where capitalist ownership of the core economy leads to monstrous levels of work-related stress, as the profiteers strive for greater output by fewer workers on lesser wages.

An epidemic of mental ill health has already been stored up and is now added to by the lockdown - and indeed new forms of physical and mental illness created by working from home.

Capitalism is a system which by its very nature puts profit before people; the health of bosses’ wallets before the health and wellbeing of the working class who produce society's wealth. 

100% Wages for Sick Workers 

An increasingly critical issue for the massed ranks of the trade union movement to struggle for is sick pay equivalent to 100% average wages, instead of the pathetic £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay and the rapid obliteration of company sick benefit schemes currently being witnessed.

That one measure could have prevented countless COVID-19 deaths by removing the financial pressure to go to work despite carrying the virus, thereby infecting others.

The Tories have severed the lifeline of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme despite the fact the deadly disease is still here and still as lethal.

They've thrown the sop of £1,000 grant for every worker not made redundant.

Plenty of big businesses will pocket that publicly funded grant to the benefit of their profit-and-loss accounts.

Means Tests for the Rich! 

The trade union movement should demand means tests for businesses, instead of the humiliating means tests to which the poorest people are subjected.

Let’s examine the secret accounts of every business. Where a small enterprise, doing useful work in safe conditions, genuinely cannot afford a minimum wage of £12-an-hour and retention of all staff, they should be granted state funds or loans to save jobs and pay decent wages.

No such largesse can be justified for big businesses, whose profits are measured in £millions or £billions. 

If they announce job losses or closures and they are involved in socially useful production or services, the unions should mobilise action for measures like a 4-day week on 5 days’ pay - and the takeover of their assets and operations by the government or local authorities, in order to sustain jobs and their workers’ contribution to the economy for the benefit of society.

4-Day Week on 5 Days' Pay 

Even the capitalist government of Germany is contemplating a 4-day week, after the giant 2.3 million-strong IG Metall union called for a 30-hour week to save jobs. 

We face a crossroads. What kind of economy, what kind of work and what kind of society do we want for the 21st century?

Vast areas of human life require work to be done, yet the system we live under means the optimists around the Bank of England predict 2.5 million unemployed by Christmas, whilst the economic pessimists warn of about 4 million, including one in every three young people.

Such waste of talent, energy and skills, and the attendant misery and poverty of mass unemployment, is a searing condemnation of a capitalist economy founded on the profit motive.

School leavers should be guaranteed either an apprenticeship on at least a £12 minimum wage, free further education with a living student grant, or a decent, meaningful, unionized job.

Society is screaming out for adequate numbers of highly trained workers in areas as varied as the NHS; social care; mental health services; education; council services; environmental improvements; house building and retrofitting; vastly expanded public transport; production and distribution of clean green energy and all the equipment that goes with it. 

150,000 Green Jobs 

The potential for a vast green jobs plan was illustrated in the recent STUC report showing where 150,000 new, green jobs could be created in Scotland.

But instead of fulfilling the verbal flourishes of “Scotland becoming the Saudi Arabia of renewables”, as declared in the past by Alex Salmond, the SNP government has utterly failed to challenge the system whereby growth in wind farms and other green energy projects has almost entirely bypassed any job creation in Scotland itself.

Instead, they preside over the obscene absurdity of wind farm construction and decommissioning of North Sea oil and gas installations being carried out abroad, as far afield as cheap labour Bangladesh and Indonesia, while fabrication yards and other facilities a few miles inshore lie idle. For example the BiFab yards in Fife and Lewis. 

Rubbing salt into the wounds of a country facing mass unemployment, the new Viking onshore wind farm on Shetland, the biggest of its kind in the UK, is now to be built and operated by the Danish Vestas company.

At least 400 initial construction jobs are therefore in the hands of an overseas profiteer, rather than being part of a Scottish public sector energy corporation which could provide tens of thousands of well-paid jobs, and apprenticeships for young people, giving them purpose, dignity and a secure future.

Why should the Scottish government leave the fate of Scottish workers in the hands of Vestas, the same company which in 2009 declared mass redundancies at its factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, leading to a factory occupation by the workforce, which the SSP built solidarity for in Scotland, as those workers rightly demanded nationalisation to save jobs? And they were spurned in their demands by the same Labour government of Gordon Brown which previously spoke eloquently of creating 400,000 green jobs. 

Green Socialist Recovery Plan 

Instead of a new 2020 Dark Ages that could make Thatcher's atrocities look mild and more resemble the 1930s, the collective potential power of the trade union movement and socialists needs to be mobilised in pursuit of a Green Socialist Recovery Plan.

Based on public ownership of key sectors like construction, public transport, energy, major industrial enterprises and the banking system, Scotland could lead the way by immediately creating at least 150,000 new green, well-paid jobs with full collective union rights, and workers’ control over health and safety and other day-to-day decisions.

Imagine what such a planned socialist recovery programme could mean for the construction of 100,000 social sector houses, built to the highest environmental standards, with varieties of stock guaranteeing gardens or other outdoor spaces for all who want it.

Imagine how household energy bills, which have rocketed during the lockdown, could be slashed through retrofitting and insulating existing housing stock, and removing the profit margin in a publicly owned energy sector.

Imagine the scale of green re-industrialisation Scotland’s shipyards and factories (including under-threat Dennis buses) could enjoy in the production of vast new fleets of ferries, buses and trains for a vastly expanded and integrated public transport network - free at the point of use, thereby combating poverty, social isolation and pollution.

Imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers could be liberated from the health-threatening drudgery of 12-hour shifts and more, by employment of new staff in areas of greatest need on a maximum 4-day week. 

Imagine – and Organise 

Workers and their unions need to imagine this and much more, but turn these entirely realistic visions of our collective future into reality by fighting for it.

Truly the choice we face is that posed by Rosa Luxemburg a century ago: socialism or barbarism. 

TORY LOCKDOWN CHAOS: NO RETURN UNTIL IT'S SAFE!

A dangerous dance is being choreographed between big business, Boris Johnson’s government and the millionaire media.


Capitalists desperate to revive their production and sales for profit are relentlessly lobbying the government, who lend them a kindly ear.

Johnson plays on people’s frustrations, poverty and fears by pledging an ‘unlockdown’ plan from Monday 11th May.

The media goes into paroxysms of celebration for VE Day with headlines such as “Hurrah! Lockdown Freedom Beckons” (Daily Mail); “Four Steps to Freedom from Monday” (Daily Express).

Inciting a Stampede Back to Profit-making 

All this is designed to stampede workers in non-essential sectors back to work in a fashion that could endanger a malignant new surge in the pandemic and the slaughter of many more on top of the 30,000 already officially dead through COVID-19.



In the rush to revive profiteering on behalf of the class they represent, Johnson's government drafted guidelines on a return to work which only gave the trade unions 12 hours to comment.

And no wonder they were reluctant to consult when you look at the contents!

The documents speak of ‘asking employers to consider’ measures such as social distancing between workers and hand-washing that should ‘happen where possible’. 

Not one hint of anything being legally binding, of being statutory requirements on employers. 

Ending Safety Precautions in Work

In shocking contradiction of the two-metre rule we've all become so familiar with, the proposed conditions for a return to work even suggest that where it is not possible to keep workers 2m apart “Perhaps”, to quote Ben Wallace, Defence Secretary, “you could be closer than two metres but not for long”. 


They speak of reduced hot-desking, not its elimination.

There are no guarantees of protection for older or vulnerable or pregnant workers. In fact, it gets worse: the documents state that where working from home is not possible for these groups, “they should be put in the safest possible roles inside the workplace.”

They speak of a limit to the numbers in a vehicle - but put no figure on how many is a safe limit. 

A building site canteen during C-19: workers bullied into work 

PPE Not Even Mentioned!

In a shocking display of callous indifference towards the lives of working people, at the very time when the failure to provide PPE has helped Britain to become the worst country in Europe for deaths, the government documents do not even mention PPE. They merely state details will follow.

Indeed, government documents speak of guidance “to ensure staff can be made to feel sufficiently reassured safe working practises without the provision of PPE.” 


Several other issues immediately arise.

What steps will they put in place to make travel to work on public transport safer? None so far.

We shouldn't hold our breath on that one, because even prior to these leaked documents the combined rail-workers’ unions were at loggerheads with transport employers hell-bent on dragging workers back to greatly increased transport services on 18 May. That for, example, was the intention of London Underground bosses, one of the worst potential breeding grounds from mass infection.



Likewise, Johnson's government says nothing about what will happen to workers who are parents with childcare problems, or who are carers for people being shielded from the disease. Will they be allowed to remain on furlough under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme? Or will they be dragged back to work, to create bigger dividends for the giant shareholders, regardless of the impact on life and family? 

Worse Than Current Safety Laws

The TUC rightly responded by condemning the lack of consultation with unions and in a letter to the government stated:

“If the guidelines are not significantly strengthened, safe working will not be guaranteed and unions would have no hesitation in saying so publicly and to our members”. 

The TUC also point out these guidelines are weaker than existing Health and Safety legislation.

For instance, they make no reference to an obligation on employers to produce and publish a Risk Assessment, with input from union Health and Safety reps.



The essence of the government approach is to let the employers decide what is safe on issues such as social distancing, cleaning regimes and use of PPE.

Nothing is binding on employers; they are merely ‘asked to consider’ and to ‘look at what is possible’.

That is a charter for hair-raising neglect towards workers’ health and very lives, in the rush to restart the likes of building sites, manufacturing and non-food retail; with the aim of dragging thousands of customers desperate to shop after the lockdown into environments which could trigger a new peak of infection and death.



Why should working people trust a government or employers who have demonstrably failed to even produce hand gels on a timely basis in the earlier phase of the pandemic?

And who have patently failed to provide proper, appropriate PPE to workers thrown into the jaws of disease and potential death in care homes, hospitals and other frontline, emergency services? 

Rail-workers' unions battling bosses' premature revival of train services

Unions Won Concessions

It took union lobbying, relentless pressure by shop stewards, and in many cases strike action by workers, to enforce even minimal hygiene measures on many of the same employers who now want to reopen for business as usual.



Likewise it was the pressure of the trade union movement which helped to win the furlough system with 80% wages paid from the public purse, and in numerous cases enforced the reinstatement of workers who had been prematurely and callously made redundant by those employers. 

Trade union demands, and sometimes collective strike action, were required to achieve the closure of non-essential workplaces.

But throughout the so-called lockdown, the government has been deliberately ambiguous on what is essential and non-essential. For example, after plenty of lobbying by big businesses involved in such sectors, they announced that online delivery operations in non-food retail was not only acceptable but to be encouraged. In turn, the same employers hid behind the excuse, the weasel words, “we are following government guidelines” to bring workers into warehouses and delivery fleets despite the risks that inevitably puts those workers and their households at. 

Tories split on speed of ending lockdown - divided on profiteering tactics

Tory Blackmail

In recent weeks the government has deployed the weaponry of the mass media to blackmail workers currently on furlough, and to try to incite other workers against them, with tales of Armageddon at the cost of the Job Retention Scheme.

In fact, with 6.3 million workers on that scheme at a cost of £8billion so far, that's barely a drop in the bucket compared with the £330billion pledged in big business bailouts, in the form of government bank-loan guarantees and other schemes.

A classic case of bailing out the billionaires, but not the workers who made their £billions. 

Whilst the Tory Cabinet appear split on the speed of ending the lockdown, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has led the battle-cry for scaling down or even scrapping the Job Retention Scheme. They're considering options such as reducing it from 80% to 60% or even 50% of wages, or applying it to just part of a worker’s weekly hours. 

Dancing with Death

No worker wants to remain stuck at home indefinitely, particularly when it means pay cuts of 10%, 20% or - if these plans transpire - potentially 50%.

But at a time when the daily death toll is still heart-breaking, and when employers in care homes, hospitals and bus services are amongst those who cannot organise the protection of workers from the deadly virus, this carefully choreographed incitement to reopening of the economy is not only premature, but a dance with Death.



The unions, including the TUC and STUC, need to assist every union rep and every member in resisting a premature return to work to unsafe workplaces.

Workers’ health and lives comes before the profit needs of big business - who in any case are being given state handouts to subsidise their profits. 

Nobody should be obliged to return to work until a thorough Risk Assessment has been conducted and published, with the full involvement of union Health and Safety experts – prior to it opening, not afterwards.

Risk Assessments Before Any Re-opening - for workers' control of safety

Fighting for Safety Measures

Basic measures should include deep cleans of workplaces; stringent plans and regulations about increased cleaning routines; strict adherence to social distancing between workers; shields; face masks and visors; proper hygiene, cleaning and washing facilities.

They should all be legally binding rather than an optional extra, to be ‘considered where possible’ by employers.

Transport unions should be fully involved in comprehensive plans to make public transport safe.

Workers in vulnerable health categories or with childcare needs or care duties should be offered the continued protection of the Job Retention Scheme – on full pay, not 80%, 60% or 50%. 

Test, Trace, Isolate - First

In its broader context safety at work also requires mass testing, contact tracing, and proper isolation.

But how can we have any confidence that it's safe to return to non-essential work when the Tory government’s targeted 100,000 tests a day was achieved for one day on the basis of a fraud  - counting tests sent to people but never returned - only to be followed by four successive days drastically below that figure (69,000 on 6 May)?

Nor has the Scottish Government demonstrated that mass testing is in operation. In fact their 3,500 daily target only equates to one-third of the Tories’ 100,000, per capita. Thankfully, at least as we write this, they seem more susceptible than the boorish Boris to demands from the unions for retention of the lockdown until it’s safe to ease it.

Workers’ Control of Safety

This whole grotesque attempt to put the health of big business balance-sheets ahead of the health or even lives of workers highlights the urgent need to strengthen trade unions, and demand workers’ control over health and safety in the workplace, through elected union shop stewards and health and safety reps.

In the short term, if workplaces are not demonstrably safe in the eyes of the appropriate unions, national unions need to give a lead to the membership and refuse to return to work until they are safe.

On paper, the 1996 Employment Rights Act (Regulations 44 & 100) gives workers the right to refuse to work in an unsafe environment, without victimisation or loss of pay.

That statutory right cannot be implemented by isolated individual workers - but should be applied with determination through the collective organisation of the trade union movement.


Put workers' lives first and last. Put people before profit. No return to work until it’s safe. 

DEMAND £12 MINIMUM FOR 'THE MINIMUM WAGE HEROES'!

As even the BBC's Panorama was obliged to express it, "millions of minimum wage heroes are putting their lives on the line."  


After decades of being systematically robbed of their real-term wages, subjected to insults about being unskilled by employers and governments, vast armies of the lowest paid have now been belatedly recognised as 'key workers' in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. 


But don't get fooled again on 1st April; this government recognition is more about getting these key workers to continue working, to prop up 'the economy ', with the offer of school-based childcare, than it is any sudden Tory conversion to accepting their value to society.


The Tories' ongoing concern for profit over people, for the health of company balance sheets over the health of the workers who create that wealth, is underlined  by their continued refusal to guarantee a decent living wage for 'the minimum wage heroes'. 

THE CURSE OF POVERTY PAY 

Poverty pay has stalked the land for decades, enforced by a cocktail of anti-trade union laws, fear of mass unemployment and incitement to divisions within the working class. 

Over one in five workers - 22% of the workforce - are officially living in poverty. 

Five million workers earn below £9.30 an hour. 

In Scotland alone, 400,000 workers earn less than £9-an-hour. 

30% of all children - that's 4.2 million kids - live in poverty in the fifth-richest economy on earth. 

Over half - 52% - of all those in poverty are also in a job, working to remain below the breadline. 



The one thing that is on the rise is not wages - they've been in the longest, deepest decline and stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars 200 years ago; it's inequality. Government figures accept that inequality, as expressed in the GINI coefficient, was last year higher than in every single year from 1961 to 2006 - only outstripped by the year of the banking crisis, 2008-9. 



As the Resolution Foundation think tank put it, "We entered the COVID-19 crisis with, at best, stagnant living standards for households in low or median incomes."

POVERTY ENDANGERS LIVES 

This appalling state of affairs has had catastrophic effects in the current COVID-19 crisis. It's a fact that many workers are dragging themselves into work, in danger of infecting others as they are asymptomatic carriers, because the Tory government failed utterly to prepare well in advance for this widely predicted pandemic by mass testing. But it's equally true that others are doing so because they can't afford to go without wages. 


Household debt is at an all time high, and personal savings at an all time low. 

CARNAGE FOR HOSPITALITY WORKERS 

And of course such impoverished incomes for millions of families is not only literally life-threatening to many classified as key workers, but also wreaks devastation on the swathes of workers made redundant, or laid off on drastically reduced wages. 


For instance, the third-biggest workforce in the country are hospitality workers - many of whom were thrown on the scrapheap by unscrupulous employers prior to the belated government 80% wage subsidy. Some have fought and won reinstatement; the rest should be taken back on and paid 100% of their normal wages. 

Most workers in this huge sector are on the minimum wage. In fact, hospitality accounts for about a fifth (20%) of all minimum wage workers. 

Supermarket staff ensure food supplies, at great risk, but suffer poverty pay

NHS AND RETAIL STAFF CURSED BY LOW PAY 

The largest and second-largest workforces in Scotland and the UK are the NHS and retail, respectively. 

Vast armies of care workers, cleaners, porters, drivers, food production workers, farmworkers, supermarket staff and others who are critical to the provision of food and healthcare to the entire population are on, or marginally above, the government minimum wage. 


They can't afford to be in self-isolation without pay. They literally can't afford to be sick, which means more of them will get sick - especially as the provision of Personal Protective Equipment is a lottery. 



Even the offer of working from home - on full pay - is heavily dependent on what wage bracket you are in. Less than 3% of the poorest-paid tenth of workers can work from home; less than 10% of the lowest half of earners can do so; whereas 27% of the highest-paid tenth of earners can still work but isolate themselves from the risks of the workplace. 

Cleansing workers have had to stage sit-ins for safety

NEW GOVERNMENT MINIMUM WAGES 

Of course, anyone on low pay will welcome the increases to the statutory minimum wage that kicks in on 1st April. But the wages being legally guaranteed fail to compensate for decades of accumulated poverty, and utterly fail to match the rising cost of living. Especially not with inflation on life's daily essentials, such food, energy, shelter, childcare and public transport. 



The grotesquely misnamed National Living Wage, for employees aged 25 and over, rises by 51p to £8.72-an-hour. 

The pernicious age wage discrimination continues unabated: £8.20 for workers aged 21-24; £6.45 for those aged 18-20; £4.55 for workers under 18; and an even more derisory £4.15-an-hour for apprentices (those under 19 and any apprentice of any age in their first year). 



No wonder there's a noticeable absence of workers out in the streets doing the conga in celebration - with or without social distancing! 

These wages perpetuate the atrocity of poverty pay, rather than combat it. 

 

Alloa posties on strike for safety & keeping social distance on the pickets!

Thousands of care workers and hospital staff and bin collectors are putting their lives on the line, and this is their reward. Likewise with the posties, who have had to resort to strike action to even get basic hand sanitizers. 

Supermarket staff are facing daily health risks (and all too often abuse from frustrated customers) for wages a few pence above the minimum wage; most of them around £9 or £9.20-an-hour, with all sorts of premium payments for anti-social hours abolished, and paid breaks taken away in recent years.  

SSP have fought for a decent minimum wage on the streets for years

DEMAND FOR £10 LAGS BEHIND WORKERS' NEEDS 

Since September 2014, both the entire trade union movement through TUC Congress,  and the Scottish Socialist Party, have campaigned for a £10 minimum wage. The SSP has campaigned in the streets and our workplaces and unions for this to apply to all from the age of 16, with equal pay for women. 

This campaigning has undoubtedly pressured the government into a bigger percentage rise to the minimum wage than in previous years. 

But not only are the multiple new rates a recipe for continued poverty; even the call for a £10 minimum is woefully lagging behind workers' needs, nearly 6 years on from it first being raised. 

TWO-THIRDS MALE MEDIAN EARNINGS 

Since our foundation in 1998, the SSP has fought for a decent level of national minimum wage, legally enforced for all at 16, calculated on the formula of two-thirds male median earnings.  

That formula serves several purposes. It links the minimum wage to the earnings of others, countering the widening chasm between a very few grotesquely well-paid and a vast army of low-paid. 

It helps combat the scandalous gender pay gap, by being based on the higher median wage of male workers. 

It's incredibly modest, only asking for two-thirds of the middle wage of all men, rather than for instance demanding the full male median wage.  

It's also a radical challenge to the overall share of wealth that goes to profits rather than wages. 

WAGES MUST RISE WITH INFLATION 

Throughout the SSP's fight for a minimum wage of at least two-thirds the male median wage, we have also added "rising with earnings or inflation, whichever is the greater". 
That is critically important. 



Since the bankers' greed triggered the financial collapse of 2008/9, workers' wages have stagnated. Latest available figures show that wages in 2018/19 were lower than those of 2004/5! 


But prices haven't stagnated! Far from it. The official, doctored government figures show at least 14% inflation in the five years from 2014 to 2019. 
And distorted they are, because these figures include luxury items like yachts, with low inflation, whereas you only need do the weekly shopping to know real price rises on food has rocketed far beyond that average. As has the cost of public transport, childcare, gas, electricity and housing itself. 

SSP DEMANDS £12 MINIMUM NOW! 

Allowing for all sides of the policy already described, the SSP has launched the demand for an immediate £12-an-hour minimum wage for all at 16, without exception, legally enforced, as a step towards a decent living income. 

This alongside our pioneering campaign for abolition of all zero hours contracts and their replacement with the guarantee of a minimum 16-hour contract for all workers who want one. 

Calling for £12-an-hour minimum is still a very modest demand - but it would transform the lives of millions of workers. In the hospitals, in social care, retail, hospitality, cleansing workers, the posties... millions would be radically better off. 

IT'S EASILY AFFORDABLE 

And it's easily affordable. One of several things the C-19 crisis has proven is that since Theresa May contemptuously dismissed calls for public investment last year with the comment "There is no money tree", a whole orchard of them have sprung up! 


The state has the resources to subsidise 80% of wages for under-threat workers, and to offer £330billion in loans and grants to employers. 

And that's without even a hint of progressive taxation of the obscenely rich, which could overnight fund measures like a £12-an-hour minimum wage.  
For instance, the Blairite reptile Richard Branson is rattling the begging bowl under the government's nose for a £7.5billion bailout, when it's been calculated  - by Tory MP Richard Fuller, no less! - that he could pay every one of his 8,500 laid-off workers their full 8 weeks' wages just on the basis of securing 2% interest on his investments. 

WAGES AND PROFITS 

Share prices for the big supermarkets chains have rocketed, as people have piled in and bought an extra £1billion worth of food at the outbreak of COVID-19, with the prospect of mounting profits.


True, several of them have hired thousands of temporary staff to cope with demand, and some rewarded their dedicated staff with a bonus. But that should be converted into a permanent 'bonus' - a £12 minimum wage, guaranteed minimum 16-hour contract for all workers who want one, and contracts topped up to the actual, normal hours worked by people currently cursed by short hour contracts of 8, 10 or 12 hours a week. 

LET THE RICH SCREAM THEIR OPPOSITION!

Of course billionaire and millionaire company bosses will scream blue murder, painting visions of Armageddon if such a wage was demanded of them. Let them! 



They've had a profits bonanza for decades. The share of national wealth that goes back to wages is at its lowest since records began in the 1950s. 


Of course this is a challenge to the profit margins of big business - and the personal grotesque incomes of the Chief Executives, who infamously earn as much in 3 days as it takes the average worker a whole year to earn. 
That's part of its purpose; to radically redistribute wealth.


And if there's only one thing the C-19 crisis should teach us, it's the undeniable fact that society relies on the labour power, the skills and dedication, of the working class, not on the grotesquely rich minority who take the wealth whilst workers make the wealth. 



One startling, further fact to bear in mind as the bosses scream poverty in the face of such a demand: big businesses have £750billion stashed away in cash piles, in their bank accounts, totally unused; not invested in either improved wages nor modernisation of production. 

TRANSFORM MILLIONS OF WORKERS' LIVES 

Such a wage would not create a nation of millionaires! But for a 35-hour week, it would mean £420-a-week, modest even compared with government figures of the current 'typical' weekly full-time wage being £576, or £620 for men. 

However, full-time jobs have become as scarce as hen's teeth. At least a £12 minimum wage and guaranteed minimum 16-hour week would mean the battalions of part-time workers got at least £192 in their weekly wage, going some way to paying the rent and feeding families. 



It might mean millions of workers could put a few quid aside for an annual holiday, or for a rainy day. It might mean many who feel ill would not have to choose between their livelihood and their life in the current health crisis. 

NO GOING BACK AFTER COVID-19 CRISIS 

We are living through an unparalleled crisis, which highlights how society works. Amongst other things it should highlight the crime of poverty pay and its consequences, and build our resolve to end that atrocity, a hallmark of capitalism and its core motivation of profit.  

We must start the debate now for a decent minimum wage of £12-an-hour, immediately, rising with inflation or average earnings, whichever is the greater.  

Once this health crisis allows it, the SSP will be on the streets and arguing in our unions for this modest but far-reaching measure. 

There can be no going back to the outrageous poverty and inequality that have exacerbated the impact of the Coronavirus. 


[This blog is also being published by the Scottish Socialist Voice. You can SUBSCRIBE HERE to the regular Online E-Voice.... https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions/?utm]