NEW GOVERNMENT: THE CLASS STRUGGLE CONTINUES!

 

My father was fond of telling the story of the labourer breaking stones on the road, given the news by a passing horseman that they'd chosen a new King of Ireland.

“Aye,” said the labourer, “but I'll still be breaking stones tomorrow.”

So it will be with the newly (re-)elected Scottish Government, with their enhanced mandate. The struggle of workers to survive continues the day after the election circus moves on.

But the advantage to workers fighting to protect their pay, conditions, jobs and workplace rights is that the newly elected administration cannot deny it was in large measure put in office by voters on the basis of not being Boris Johnson, not being the Tories, being anti-Tory and of pledging to tackle recovery from the Coronavirus crisis.

Whilst precious little was said about the savage economic consequences of the pandemic to the livelihoods of workers by the SNP or Greens, the new government now needs to be put on the spot, called out to take sides in the savage clash of interests between profiteering or axe-wielding employers and the workers they want to punish for the cost of Covid, whether that be in the private or public sector.

The class struggle continues; if anything intensified, as economic gurus wax lyrical about predicted ‘bounce back’ in the economy – but fail to explain upon whose backs the restoration of profits will rest.

Public sector disputes are where the Scottish Government has the most direct responsibility for and power over the outcome – given that transport, education, and local government are all devolved to Edinburgh, even without the full leverage available under independence. And they’ve been given a mandate by the Scottish people to demand the necessary funding from a Tory regime that hasn’t won the popular vote in Scotland since 1955!

 

ScotRail Strikers for Equality Face Management Scabs 

ScotRail staff continue to fight for pay equality and fair treatment for all different grades when it comes to enhanced payments for working on their rest days - which they received prior to the pandemic but which was since removed, for all grades bar the drivers.

Ticket Examiners have now joined battle alongside conductors/guards, with engineering staff currently being balloted for action. The latter are responsible for train maintenance, so even a work-to-rule - let alone strike action - would have a huge impact, as trains are booked in at set times for repair and maintenance.

Those trains which still have conductors/guards cannot move without one of these safety-critical staff on board.

That's why the tactic of Abellio ScotRail bosses has been to cancel all services on Sundays and then viciously twist and spin propaganda to try and blame the conductors - striking on their rest days! - for the lack of services to the travelling public.

However, this underhand method has largely backfired, with furious responses on social media to the naked propaganda pumped out by Abellio bosses.

Free Lunches for ScotRail Scabs!

The situation with Ticket Examiners is substantially different.

Under what is called the Strathclyde Manning Agreement, for example, which was signed years ago, there ‘should’ be two staff on a train.

Strictly speaking, drivers can run the train without a second member of staff on board, but in an act of solidarity they have refused to do so.

This has led to ScotRail planning to use ill-trained managers to substitute for ticket examiners; to scab on the striking staff, in a way they couldn’t possibly be ‘trained’ to do with the conductors.

Conductors/guards require extensive training, for instance on route knowledge and enhanced safety duties, whereas (lower-paid) ticket examiners do not require safety training.

They are primarily deployed to collect revenue for the company, checking and selling tickets. Abellio ScotRail bosses are quite prepared to play Russian roulette with public safety by drafting in scab managers – albeit on drastically reduced train services.

Those managers who allow themselves to be used to prevent fairness and equality of treatment should hang their heads in shame, particularly when it's become known they've been given free lunch boxes for their filthy services; a cut-price version of thirty pieces of silver!

Voice readers should bombard both Abellio bosses and Transport Scotland - an arm of the Scottish Government - with demands to meet with the RMT union and negotiate pay equality for rest day work.

As one RMT representative told me, “This strike has dragged on for so long that the concern of staff is not so much the money as fury at the contempt we've been treated with, where Abellio ScotRail are refusing to even meet with the union, hiding behind Transport Scotland as an excuse.”

The stance of the outgoing SNP government on this has been a disgrace, where they conceded Abellio have permission to negotiate, but insisted they cannot come to any agreement incurring additional costs.

That can only mean one thing: if these workers get restoration of enhanced payments for working and providing a service on their rest days, then they're going to have to accept other cuts to pay, terms and conditions, maybe even jobs.

The new government needs to be confronted with widespread, systematic demands from all trade unionists and the travelling public to drop this scandalous stance and show that their talk about focusing on a Covid recovery isn't just empty, deceitful election rhetoric. Because any genuine recovery has to include fair pay for workers and an end to the austerity passed on from Westminster via Holyrood during the previous three periods of SNP government.

Unite NHS and Council Workers' Battles 

Similar issues arise in the struggles for decent pay for the vast workforces in Scotland's NHS and local authorities.

During the past 13 years of SNP rule about £3billion cuts to local government funding, originating from Westminster, has been devolved by the Edinburgh government, alongside which NHS staff have suffered average pay cuts of 20 per cent.

At the time of writing this, the result of the ballot of NHS union members over the last-minute, pre-election 4 per cent pay offer by the Scottish Government is still unknown.

This offer in itself was a big retreat by the SNP administration compared with just weeks before the May elections, when they were still saying there would be no settlement until the summer of 2021, after they had refused to even meet with the health trade unions for negotiations over the previous year.

NHS Workers for Fair Pay

It was the relentless, courageous persistence of rank-and-file NHS workers - under the banner of the NHS Workers for Fair Pay campaign (Scotland) - which in particular forced this climb-down, combined with a desire to win votes by appearing distinct from the Tories, who had offered an even more contemptuous 1 per cent pay rise.

But as I said when speaking on behalf of the SSP at the rain-drenched NHS workers' Protest Rally on 3 May:

“If the best the Scottish Government can boast is that they are ‘better than Boris’, then how can we take them seriously in combating poverty pay and the ills of society which blight the working class?”

Anyone satisfied with being ‘better than Boris’ seriously lacks any ambition to end the situation where nurses and other NHS workers have had to resort to loan sharks and food banks to survive - particularly after the year of unmitigated hell they’ve faced, striving to keep people alive from Covid, working typically 12-15 hour shifts under the most dreadful stress, leading to an epidemic of mental illness and burn-out amongst NHS workers themselves?

They unreservedly deserve 15 per cent, and the real shame is that the different health workers’ unions didn't combined forces and vigorously campaign for the past year for such a restorative pay increase - and have since been divided on what they recommended to each of their memberships in the ballot on the 4 per cent offer.

The GMB and RCN both recommended rejection – primarily as a result of the fiery opposition of their shop stewards. Unite made no recommendation to accept/reject, with the absurd explanation that all their members are on different grades! And the Unison leadership went from a similar cop-out neutrality to actually recommending acceptance of the 4 per cent offer.

The latter position is even less honourable when compared with the situation in local government, where the Unison leadership recommended rejection of their pay offer and helped to achieve an 88% majority against what was offered by COSLA, the employers’ umbrella body - with 74 per cent voting in favour of industrial action.

Yet the difference between the two offers in concrete terms for most workers is minor: £800 over the year for council workers compared with £1,009 for most NHS grades.

As Mark Sands, Unison steward in Glasgow City Council said at the latest meeting of the Scottish Workers’ Solidarity Network, “We should unite workers in local government and the NHS in the fight for decent pay, and if that requires coordinated strikes, then so be it.”

The Difference is Striking!

To use a pun made popular during the recent FE college lecturers’ struggle, “the difference is striking!”

As we explained in depth in the recent Voice Extra, well-prepared, well- organised ballots for collective action - with teams of trade unionists formed in each workplace to get the vote out - in itself can force employers to the negotiating table where previously they refused to talk.

More to the point, when in turn actual strike action occurs, with full involvement of the membership, regular systematic communication - and an elected leadership from within the ranks of the workforce itself acting as the negotiating team - then strikes can win.

Such a victory is made even more likely if systematic solidarity is built, as happened during the FE college national strike action - with the Scottish Workers’ Solidarity Network playing a substantial part in that solidarity campaign.

The outcome of the lecturers’ strike is a victory not just for EIS-FELA members but every trade unionist facing an onslaught by the employers and government, as they seek to sacrifice workers’ terms and conditions - often including jobs and pay - to recoup the costs of the pandemic. Once again, making workers pay the price of a crisis not of our making.

The lessons of the FE sector victory should not just be studied but applied accordingly to the battles in the health service and local government.

The Valley of Fire and Rehire

However, despite winning a national agreement that forced college bosses to accept that somebody who prepares lectures, delivers lectures and assesses the learning of students is indeed a lecturer and should be on a lecturer's pay, terms and conditions, nevertheless the college where this fight all started - Forth Valley College - is still embroiled in battle.

There the principal, Ken Thompson and his board of management are digging their heels in, refusing to honour the deal reached at national level between the union and the employers’ association, Colleges Scotland.

In human terms that means 27 lecturers who were removed from their roles by means of ‘fire and rehire’ have still not been reinstated, even though that is the essence of the national agreement reached at the end of the national strike.

These college workers have been obliged to sustain strike action, and plan for it to continue right into June, because they cannot trust Thompson and his board to reinstate the FVC27.

They are not striking for the fun of it; as good professionals, they are worried sick at the  impact on their students, often riddled with guilt.

It's Ken Thompson and his board of management who should be guilt-ridden and ashamed of the way they are damaging education - not just short-term but longer-term - by replacing qualified lecturers with instructor/assessors on £10,000 a year less and near zero preparation and marking time. That’s a perfect recipe for disaster, both in terms of the educational standards offered to mostly working-class students, and to the mental health of those who've been fired as lecturers and rehired on these drastically worse conditions.

The Forth Valley bosses should realise the reputational damage they are doing to the college they have the privilege and inflated salaries to manage, now they are increasingly recognised as the pioneers of the obnoxious fire and rehire weapon, certainly in the public sector.

Readers should step up the pressure on these bosses, demanding they reverse fire and rehire and reinstate the FVC 27 to their rightful positions as lecturers, with the wages and conditions to go with that.

Email Ken.Thompson@forthvalley.ac.uk

Whose Side Are You On?

The industrial temperature is rising, even if the Spring weather isn't.

With BT workers balloting for strikes, alongside the struggles already mentioned, and workers and communities start to resist a horrendous rash of closures to libraries, community centres and sports facilities by councils and their offshoots, such as Glasgow Life, there is increasingly no room to wriggle or dodge the question “Whose side are you on?”

For the Scottish Socialist Party there's no hesitation; it's a matter of principle that we combine with workers to defend or improve their living standards, as the one productive class in society. Which means we actively back them to the hilt when that inevitably leads to conflict with money-grabbing capitalist profiteers or axe-wielding, overpaid bosses at the tops of undemocratically-run public sector outfits.

The same challenge “Whose side are you on?” needs to be thrown down as a gauntlet at the feet of the newly elected Scottish Government. They are the people with the power to immediately defend or enhance the living standards of over 500,000 Scottish public sector workers directly, and vast numbers of others indirectly. For instance, as major contractors with the likes of BT (or British Gas), the Scottish government and local councils could use enormous leverage even on these privately-owned capitalist profiteers to end their vicious assaults on their workers.

Waiting for Nicola??

Workers cannot afford to ‘wait for independence’. We need action now, from a government mandated by the Scottish people to ‘lead us to recovery’, as Nicola Sturgeon endlessly promised during the elections.

In turn, workers and their communities cannot just ‘wait for Nicola’ to take the necessary action, judging by the experience of the previous three SNP governments. We need collective, coordinated action by workers, with fighting, determined leaderships, to force the Scottish government to provide the wherewithal to tackle poverty pay, mass underemployment and unemployment, threadbare public services and the obscene inequality that curses this rich nation. Otherwise, the labourer of my father’s story will still be breaking stones regardless of who is on the throne,

 

WORKERS' VOICES ON FRONTLINE STRUGGLES 

Melanie Gale, nurse, GMB union rep

“I ran a Covid Ward last year, one of the first. We had to put a brave face on it, not knowing what was coming through, trying to keep staff positivity up with Covid patients arriving.

We had ten patients with Covid, very bad Covid, where they couldn't breathe, didn't know where they were, frightened, scared, terrified. And they had no relatives or no way to even phone them or FaceTime them.

We had to watch our patients die. We were the ones holding their hands, sitting with them, comforting them, doing our best.

We had five staff members to care for 30 patients; disgraceful, disgusting.

But you know what? We still went to work, we still cared for patients and we still gave them the best care we could. We had the crappy PPE, the crappy masks. We went to work, not seeing our family members to care for other people’s family members and still we didn't have enough staff.

Management and governments don't give a shit about any NHS workers.

Experienced NHS staff don't want to be there anymore, we're burnt out, tired.

I've wanted to be a nurse since I was 10. I'm so proud of being a nurse, so proud of our NHS, but what I'm not proud of are the bigwigs and governments offering us this crappy 4 per cent.  Well, you can stick your 4% up your kilt! We're not accepting it. We deserve 15% and we're going to fight and get it.”

 

Brenda Eadie, nurse, NHS Workers for Fair Pay campaign

“We need to build up the NHS and this is not about a pay rise, it's about pay restoration. We've lost £6,000 through pay cuts in 11 years and then they offer to give us back £1,000 of it. That won't stop us having to work 60-hour weeks to make up the pay deficit. It won't stop staff having to use food banks.

And London Economics have done a report that even if we got 10% of our wages back, 81% of the cost of that would go straight back into the economy, through taxes and National Insurance.

It would increase staffing levels. It would reduce sickness and the use of costly agency staff. It would recruit and keep staff. Right now, our NHS is dying; we're losing it if we don't do something about it now.

If we need to strike, we need to strike. If we don't, the NHS would be gone in a couple of short years. I for one can't afford private healthcare. People won't be able to afford monthly life-saving medications. More people will die. If we have to strike, we should strike now.”

Anne-Marie Harley, Branch Convener EIS-FELA Forth Valley College and Vice-President of EIS-FELA

"The fight against 'fire and rehire' at Forth Valley College (a public sector organisation) continues. 

The EIS-FELA Union remain in dispute with College management where 27 members had their lecturing roles removed and they were given new contracts to do the same job on poorer terms and conditions. 

Despite offers from the union to suspend the strike action if they would reinstate the 27 members or agree to a joint review, management have failed to change their position. Instead, they will only agree to move the dispute into the hands of the National Bargaining Joint Secretaries as per protocol, when they have completed an internal review in mid-May. 

This dispute has gone on for over a year and we find these further delays unacceptable. 

With the full support of EIS-FELA nationally and the main body of the EIS, we will continue to fight to maintain our profession and the quality of education for our students."

Also published in the Scottish Socialist Voice.  SUBSCRIBE to the fortnightly Online edition here: https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BRANSON THE BILLIONAIRE BEGGAR: nationalise, don't subsidise!

I don't think I'm unique in feeling increasingly irritated by attempts at guilt-tripping the low-paid and average-paid worker to cough up for all sorts of charity drives for the NHS. 

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying: the NHS is a cause that cannot be matched for its worthiness, especially in these times of horrendous, fearful crisis, when NHS staff (along with millions of other workers) are risking their own lives to save others. 

But since when did it become a charity? 
Is that what the Tory government have in mind for it after the current pandemic fades a bit? 
Sell even more of it off to private profiteers, cut taxes on the rich even further, slash funding even more than they've done for several decades already - and have incessant charity appeals, which those on modest incomes tend to pay far more towards proportionately than the rich do?

It's especially annoying when you look at what else is going on in this lockdown, with the wholesale bailout of big business by the same working-class and middle-class taxpayers who are being shamed by charity appeals.  

One of the most grotesque sights in the Covid-19 crisis is the queue of begging billionaires asking for bailouts from the public purse, in the form of government tax breaks and other grants.

Near the front of the queue is Sir Richard Branson. 


He's the 312th richest person in the world, and the 6th richest in (?) Britain, with a personal fortune of £4.2billion.

Branson lives on and owns the private 30-hectare Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Islands archipelago. 

Branson on his private Caribbean beach: is this his idea of social distancing?

But he recently reassured us he does so“to take advantage of the weather rather than the tax breaks”! 


Not entirely true. 


Last month Branson shifted his $1.1billion stake in Virgin Galactic Holdings - his business for space tourism for billionaires - from Delaware in the USA to the Virgin Islands. He did so on the very same day (16 March) as share prices on the USA Dow Jones Index collapsed at the worst rate for any single day on record. 


Over the past 22 years Branson has collected £306million in dividends from Virgin Trains, and by getting those dividends sent to him on his island, he's had it entirely tax free. 


From the safety of his island, Branson now has the audacity to demand £700million in a bailout from the Australian government and another £500million from the British government.

He's backed in these demands by the bosses of Airbus which makes Virgin planes and Rolls Royce which makes its jet engines.

Meantime, Branson laid off 8,000 Virgin Atlantic staff, telling them to either take extended unpaid leave or take voluntary redundancy. 

Branson's Necker Island house: that reminds me, I must do the hoovering!

This brass-necked billionaire beggar has paid no income tax whatsoever in Britain since moving to the tax-free British Virgin Islands 14 years ago. 


In the spirit of entrepreneurship, his portfolio also includes Virgin Care, who were awarded £2billion worth of NHS and local authority healthcare deals.

You've guessed it: Virgin Care have not paid a penny in Corporation Tax and is ultimately controlled by Virgin Group Holdings in British Virgin Islands, one of the world’s main tax havens. 


Health campaigner Dr John Lister earlier this year accused Virgin healthcare of “playing a parasitic role in the NHS, fragmenting services, poaching NHS-trained staff and undermining nearby NHS Trusts." 


Now the Blairite billionaire is shamelessly rattling his begging bowl, demanding public subsidy for his private profit.

Branson is but one grotesque example of the queue of similar big business beggars who expect the working class to endanger their lives at work or take a 10% to 20% pay cut - if they're lucky enough not to be made redundant.

Bird's eye view of Branson's house: I could do lockdown in that space! 

Instead of subsidising private profit for the parasitic rich, we should demand democratic public ownership of their assets. 


The airline industry should be nationalised – not subsidised - to integrate it into a modernised public transport system, which can plan free public transport, reduction on reliance on air travel. 
Alongside democratic public ownership of rail and bus services - including Virgin Trains. 

Measures to not only combat the growing climate crisis - which they vastly contribute to - but also create hundreds of thousands of skilled, well-paid, unionised jobs in a socialist Green New Deal.

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. 


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