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. 

WIELD ORGANISED WORKERS' POWER FOR A SOCIALIST RECOVERY PLAN

As Billy Bragg sang, "There is power in a union".

Or at least, enormous potential collective power, provided leadership is given on the right issues.

Tens of thousands of workers have awoken to that in recent times, with a significant upsurge in trade union membership.

Surge in Union Membership

During 2019, 90,000 workers joined a union; that's over 200,000 new recruits in two years.

The biggest increase has been amongst women workers, who now constitute 3.6 million in the UK, the highest figure since 1995.

In Scotland,15,500 joined a union last year.

Of course, to keep perspective, that still leaves only 23.5% of workers unionised, with even lower density in the private sector and amongst those aged under 35. Less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35, whereas 40% of them are aged over 50.

Likewise, we've had several successive years of very low strike figures, and therefore low profile for collective action and the advantages of trade unionism for younger generations to observe and absorb.

That is the result of a cocktail of factors.

The most repressive anti-union laws in the western world - introduced by the Tories, sustained by Labour governments. A regime of fear, wielded by senior management buoyed up by this battery of anti-worker legislation. And all too frequently, weak, compromising leadership from the top of the unions, far too accustomed to cosy relationships with employers and a lifestyle more akin to that of the company chief executives than to the average worker who pays their union subs.

The Times They are A-changin' 

There are moments in history when sharp changes occur.

There is a tendency throughout history for workers to seek solutions to their daily privations and problems through collective industrial struggle when no political solutions appear imminent, and vice versa.

To take random examples: the 1880s were marked by a monumental surge into the unions by the most downtrodden, lowpaid, so-called unskilled workers,  previously neglected by craft-based trade unions, when they increasingly saw no salvation from the dominant Tory or Liberal politicians.

In turn, that industrial wave helped fuel the birth of independent working class political representation, creating the newborn Labour Party.

In the 1970s, disappointment with the 1964-70 Labour government and savage onslaughts by the 1970-74 Ted Heath Tory regime triggered the biggest modern wave of strike actions, increased union membership, a rise in workplace militancy, and through this showdown between rival class forces led to 1975 being the year with both the highest union membership in Britain and the lowest levels of inequality across society.

That stark statistic in itself is a profound lesson for today's young working class. Indeed 'there is power in a union', and correctly wielded it can not only combat poverty, unsafe working conditions, and bullying by management, but also reduce inequality.

Coronavirus Crisis: a New Turning Point 

The coronavirus crisis is poised to be a new turning point in trade union and working class history.

The experience of millions in recent months has taught many profound lessons.

It's demonstrated the simple fact but there's such a thing as a working class, an idea previously sneered at by the commentariat, including some self-styled lefts and socialists.

It's shown in action that the people essential to society's functioning, to the very existence of human life, are workers of multiple and varied occupations, and certainly not the remote, grotesquely overpaid company chief executives and directors or financial speculators.

More pertinent still have been the lived experiences and visible displays of the role of trade unionists in fighting for measures to save lives in the teeth of the deadly virus, often in conflict with employers and indeed governments slow or unwilling to put people before profit.

It took relentless pushing and demanding by workplace shop stewards and the best national union officials to eventually win basics like hand sanitizers, cleaning equipment, protective screens and of course PPE for the millions of workers who have sustained life and society throughout the crisis.

Unsung Heroes on the Frontline of Trade Unionism

The unsung heroes of these times, whom the Tories would never applaud on a Thursday night, are thousands of workplace union representatives who have fought for the safety of fellow workers. Often under intense pressure from senior management, and sometimes under threat of victimisation for daring to demand measures like shutdown of non-essential workplaces, with 100% pay; protection of workers' holidays; and rigorous Risk Assessments with the full participation of union health and safety reps, to help prevent a second spike in COVID-19 deaths as the lockdown eases.

It is the determined action of these unsung heroes, and the lobbying by national unions, which forced the government into the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

Observing this collective effort, thousands of new workers have joined unions in the past three months.

That is the experience of most major unions.

Unison have reported 65,000 new recruits since January. The National Education Union (NEU), engaged in frontline battles in England over premature reopening of schools, has had over 20,000 recent recruits.

Previously scattered, unorganised and heavily exploited sectors, such as fast food and hospitality, have also begun to unionise, with some spectacular localised success stories in reversing employers' plans to make thousands redundant, gaining furlough with at least 80% pay instead.

A Dangerous Phase for Workers' Health 

Currently we are living through potentially the most dangerous phase of the whole crisis, where UK and Scottish governments are to varying degrees declaring against mass outdoor gatherings, but encourageing or insisting upon mass indoor gatherings - by reopening non-essential workplaces, to revive production and sales for flagging profits.

The newly enhanced profile of the trade union movement - not seen for at least a generation - needs to be organised at both national and workplace levels to insist on proper safety measures, alongside a fully-funded and staffed regime of mass testing, tracing and isolation.

This moment should be seized to push for workers' control of workplace health and safety, through elected union reps.

The Capitalist Virus of Mass Unemployment 

The other virus about to sweep the country, rooted in capitalist production methods just as much as the coronavirus, is mass redundancies and unemployment.

Millions of jobs are on life support through the taxpayer-funded Job Retention Scheme.

Around 8 million workers were at least temporarily kept in a job, albeit with 10% or 20% pay cuts in many cases, through this state subsidy of businesses.

As that scheme tapers off, the greed-driven employing class are frequently poised to slash thousands of jobs and family livelihoods.

Daily announcements by the likes of British Airways, Rolls Royce, retail and hospitality firms are a deafening wake-up call to the devastation facing the working class in the months ahead.

The unions need to rise to the challenge, not only by consciously involving members and wielding the collective 'power in a union', but also by advancing concrete fighting alternatives to this capitalist blitzkrieg.

We cannot tolerate a re-run of the devastation visited upon the working class in the wake of the 2008 bankers' crisis; a lost decade of savage pay cuts, job losses and punishment of workers for a crisis they never created.

For a 4-day Week on 5 Days' Pay 

The unions have the potential power to spearhead an alternative Socialist Recovery Plan.

That could start with the immediate demand to share out the available work through a shorter working week, but critically, without loss of earnings.

The demand, for instance, for a 4-day week on 5 days' pay would evoke massive sympathy amongst workers who have either been enduring regular 12-hour shifts during the pandemic, or gained a taste of other things in life outside the drudgery of long hours at work.

That one measure could create and save tens of thousands of Scottish jobs.

Socialist Green New Deal 

A Socialist Green New Deal built on the foundations of public ownership of key sectors such as construction, transport, energy and banking must become the clarion cry of the organised labour movement.

A recent STUC study shows the massive potential for job creation in such a scheme.

Analysis by Transition Economics - in part based on information from post-2008 investment schemes in other countries - gives precise figures of potential job creation in 23 different clean infrastructure projects in Scotland.

Overall, they demonstrate that £13billion investment in a two-year infrastructure recovery plan could create 150,000 jobs immediately.

Examples of the schemes they cite include expansion of the rail network (including for freight) with 13,700 new jobs.

Other clean, green investments include construction of cycle lanes and pedestrianisation (nearly 18,000 jobs); low income residential retrofit programme (34,000); residential retrofit programme (over 14,000 jobs); and upgrade of ports and shipyards for offshore wind supplies (almost 6000 jobs).

Wield the Power of Organised Workers 

Socialists and trade unionists need to agitate and seek to organise the collective power of the trade union movement to demand precisely such an emergency green re-industrialization plan. It will require the social, class power of the organised workers' movement to translate fine ideas on paper into living reality.

The catastrophic impact of deindustrialization over the past 40 years led to a lack of equipment for hospitals, an inability to rapidly produce such equipment, which in turn meant both the UK and Scottish governments initially resorted to the obscenity of 'herd immunity', and then an emphasis on stopping our hospitals being overrun. Leading to such tragedies as over 1,000 elderly patients in Scotland being emptied out of hospitals into care homes without being tested, and the carnage that followed.

Housing, Public Transport, Jobs 

The housing crisis has been highlighted during the pandemic, with the huge differential between the experience of those in cramped or substandard housing during the lockdown, and people even with a decent house and modest garden.

In addition to the plans detailed in the STUC study, an emergency social sector house-building plan - with a variety of types of homes for rent according to demand, including gardens for all who want one - would solve both a housing crisis and the desperate need for decent, well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

As people return to work, the problem of ensuring social distancing on public transport serves to underline the case for democratic public ownership of all public transport and massive investment in fleets of buses, trains and ferries. Both to accommodate safe travelling and prevent a return to the appalling pollution caused by massive reliance on cars, which the lockdown has given temporary respite from, and given millions a glimpse of how better life could be if freed of both pollution and poverty.

Invest in NHS and a National Care Service 

There are plenty of other immediate areas requiring huge state investment. Not investment of public money to boost the private profits of capitalist enterprises, but public sector investment accompanied by democratic public ownership and working class control. With massive job opportunities created.

Two of many such areas are the NHS and a public National Care Service, to cut out the profiteering that kills elderly people. To instead construct a care service free at the point of need, with decent wages, conditions, and training for a vastly expanded workforce that is guaranteed collective union bargaining rights.

Underpinning this socialist recovery plan is a vast redistribution of wealth from the remote, grotesquely privileged capitalist elite to the working class, who have been seen with renewed clarity to provide life's daily essentials and all that makes for a civilised existence.

Not only those rightly classified as 'essential workers' during the pandemic, but every worker, needs to be guaranteed a £12 minimum wage rising with inflation - rather than another lost decade of pay cuts and reduced spending power, which in itself further undermines job security.

Battle Commences for a New Future 

COVID-19 throws up a profound challenge on what kind of future we want.

Nothing is predetermined in history. The future will be decided by a clash between rival living forces.

On one side the capitalists, bankers, landlords and their hired politicians, who want to return to the old abnormal, the inhumane pursuit of profit at terrible cost to peoples' lives and the planet we live on.

On the other side, the growing forces of an organised working class, who need to feel a renewed self-confidence and demand a Socialist Recovery Plan that rejects the obscenity of production for profit, and builds on the values of human solidarity touchingly displayed in thousands of small incidents during the Covid crisis.

Join the battle!

1919-2019: CUT HOURS - NOT JOBS OR PAY!

A century ago, a mammoth crowd of 100,000 marched on Glasgow’s biggest ever May Day. An even more impressive 100,000 rallied in the substantially smaller city of Belfast.

At both mass rallies, motions were carried in solidarity with the Russian socialist revolution, still fresh and inspirational to workers on these islands - as the Bolshevik government fought off 21 invading imperialist armies, hell-bent on overthrowing their attempts to reconstruct society on socialist lines.

Revolt on the Clyde and the Lagan 

But the scale and power of these workers’ rallies was more than an outpouring of international solidarity. It was primarily fuelled by the momentous mass strikes and struggles just weeks before (in January/February 1919) when 100,000 on Clydeside and 60,000 in Belfast challenged the rule of the employers, government and their armed state, seizing temporary control of production, emergency services, to a degree transport. In Belfast, they formed their own, united Picket Peace Corps of 2,000 strikers, which established workers’ law and workers’ order for the two-week duration of a virtual general strike. A terrified ruling class feared socialist revolution, mobilising the media and police to try and bludgeon the strikers into submission. When that failed, they hesitantly resorted to use of troops to break the strikes.

What makes this glorious chapter of workers’ history so richly relevant in 2019 is the issue that Belfast and Glasgow workers fought on in 1919: they threw down the gauntlet with the clear-cut, unifying demand for a shorter working week, without loss of pay.

They dreaded mass unemployment, as hundreds of thousands of demobbed soldiers returned from the imperialist First World War. Equally, they revolted against the joyless drudgery of a 54-hour week, which lengthened further during war production. Matching the needs both of workers suffering the tyranny of endless work, and those facing the starvation of mass unemployment, Belfast workers downed tools, demanding a 44-hour week without loss of pay; on Clydeside it was the Forty Hour Strike.

The heroic exertions of these workers were undermined by national union treachery, ruthless deployment of military force by a terrified capitalist class, and tactical mistakes by the Strike Committees. However, they won a record-breaking seven hour cut to the working week in both cities – without loss of a penny’s pay. 

Order the pamphlet here: 

https://scottishsocialistparty.org/product/1919-revolt-on-the-clyde-and-the-lagan/

Shorter Working Week – Without Loss of Pay

The demand for a shorter working week – but, critically, without loss of earnings - is as urgent today as 100 years ago, if not more so!

It should be vigorously fought for by the socialist and the trade union movement, with thorough preparation in workplaces and union forums, out on the streets, in collective bargaining with the employers, and through political struggle. Which is why I’m proud that my own Usdaw union branch, Glasgow no.1, is proposing precisely this policy and course of action at the Usdaw national conference (ADM), with the aim of then taking it into the wider trade union movement – just as we have the parallel policy of a guaranteed 16-hour minimum working week.

Why? Just as in 1919, when workers took mass strike action to cut long hours of drudgery and simultaneously mop up mass unemployment, so too in 2019 we need policies to combat agonisingly long hours for millions, along with solutions to the dread of mass unemployment through automation - the ‘fourth industrial revolution'. 

Longest Hours in Europe

If capitalism was a person, it would be declared clinically insane. Whilst at least 3.8 million workers in the UK suffer insecure and short-hour contracts (with the attendant poverty pay and mental ill health), over 3.3 million work more than 48 hours a week. And 500,000 of them put in 60 hours or more!

It’s official; full-time workers in the UK work the longest hours in the whole of Europe. An average of 42.3 hours a week; 2 hours more than the EU average, and 4.5 hours more than Denmark’s 37.8 hours.  

Scotland’s last population Census recorded 39% of all workers - 984,000 – worked between 38-48 hours a week. Even more disturbing, 295,000 Scottish employees toiled for more than 49 hours... a century after our forebears fought and won a maximum 47-hour week!

Other sources show at least 54,000 people in Scotland chained to their work for over 60 hours a week.

But surely things are getting better? Well, very recent research for the British TUC found the number working over 48 hours has increased by 453,000 since 2010 – a 15% rise in ‘over-employed’ workers. And going back to the European averages for full-timers, Britain’s working week has only shortened by 18 minutes in the past decade. At that rate - assuming no reduction in hours worked in other countries - it would take the UK 63 years to catch up with the EU average!

The long hours culture that blights family life for millions isn’t even good for the economy. Danish workers have the shortest week in Europe but are 23% more productive than Britain’s. German workers have the shortest annual hours in Europe but are the most productive. 

Tiredness from overwork can kill

Burnout Britain

Exhaustion, stress and burnout are the increasingly common hallmarks of working life for workers – side-by-side with millions of others suffering poverty, anxiety and mental health problems as a result of mass under-employment and job insecurity. Numerous medical studies have linked overwork with heart disease, diabetes, stress, depression, and a five-fold increase in the risk of strokes.

Remember the tragic death last Christmas of 23-year-old junior doctor, Lauren Connelly, in a car crash after a 12-hour night shift? Even after that tragedy, Scottish Health boards still had rotas of over 90 hours a week – 104 hours in Glasgow. And we had the undercover journalist who filmed Amazon workers falling asleep literally standing up, during a 55-hour week, with relentless, impossible targets. Glimpses of the curse of long hours on workers’ wellbeing.

Add to that the grand theft of wages through unpaid overtime - the equivalent of working for absolutely no pay until 1^st March this year!

And the employers’ robbery of statutory paid holidays – which unpublished government (ONS) figures reveal steals £3billion a year off workers who are dragged in to work when they should be on paid leave.

Plus the growing proportion of our lives taken up commuting to work, as capitalist employers ‘rationalise’ and centralise their workplaces; rocketing housing costs drive many further away from their place of work; and chaotic, privatised public transport shoves motorists into lengthening traffic queues, polluting our planet - and lengthening the working day (unpaid), by an average of 24 working days last year!

The demand for a shorter working week is an urgent answer to those devouring their lives at work – living to work, with little time for anything else - and for job-creation for those impoverished by the chronic under-employment of zero and short hours contracts, or simply unemployed.

Make Automation a Blessing, not a Curse

It’s also at the heart of the answer to one of the biggest challenges of the 21^st century: the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ of automation, Artificial Intelligence and robotics. The scientists argue over the scale of impact on jobs, but all agree this threatens mass displacement of people in jobs as varied as retail, manufacturing, transport, fast food, logistics, office admin, carers, nurses, paralegals – even doctors, writers and composers!

New technology should be a blessing, a means of escaping endless hours of often unfulfilling work; a way for humans to be liberated into expanding their interests, skills, family and social life, participation in the democratic running of communities, workplaces and government. But under the rule of capitalism, the rule of profit, this new wave of technology is a dystopian nightmare, with the real and present threat of mass unemployment and impoverishment. For example, it is widely predicted that one million of the UK’s 3 million retail jobs could be obliterated within 10 years. 

Drive For 35!

An immediate, all-too-modest demand for a maximum working week of 35 hours – without loss of pay – would itself free up millions of new jobs, based on the obscenely long hours endured by several million UK workers (3.3 million on 48+ hours, for starters).

It would be good for workers’ health, physical and mental; reduce accidents at work, caused by fatigue; reduce sickness and absenteeism; and as several experiments here and abroad prove, it would boost productivity.

The CWU last year won a deal that will cut the working week for 120,000 Royal Mail workers from 39 to 35 by 2021, with the first hour reduction already implemented – without loss of pay. 

We need a generalised, immediate ‘Drive for 35’ across the unions.

We already have the technology to retain or boost output of goods and services whilst cutting the working week much more radically than that, for instance to a 4-day week, and a 6-hour day. That's in stark contrast with 1.4 million people working all seven days of the week right now, in Britain 2019! 

4 Days’ Work for 5 Days’ Pay

A 4-day week would not only enhance the quality of workers’ lives, and facilitate childcare (especially benefiting women, and encouraging more men to share caring and domestic responsibilities), but also reduce the damage to workers’ wallets and the environment, by slashing commuting times.

But reduced hours must be without reductions in earnings. With the odd, bizarre exception, workers aren’t chained to their jobs because they’re incurable workaholics. They work endless hours for two main reasons: to try and survive on the rotten hourly pay rates that have been systematically imposed to boost profits, and out of fear of losing their job, in a world of rampant job insecurity, leading to the modern phenomenon of ‘presenteeism’.

In 2018, the TUC found 81% of workers want to reduce working time; 45% of them want a 4-day week. But if it means an equivalent cut in wages, how can working people afford it?

Capitalist employers often use short-time working and layoffs – with equivalent cuts in pay – to offload a crisis in their business onto the shoulders of workers who have produced their profits for previous years. Or simply slash hours – and pay – to increase workload and turbocharge their profit margins – as the multi-billion Tesco's and ASDA are currently doing. That’s decidedly not what we mean by a shorter working week. 

The battle for an 8-hour day was at the heart of the international workers' movement & May Day since the 1880s

Gigantic leaps in technology make a 6-hour day eminently reasonable 

Cut Hours – Not Pay!

The socialist and trade union movement should make far more of an outcry for policies like 4 days’ work for 5 days’ pay, and a 6-hour day for 8 hours’ pay.

This would be a radical redistribution of wealth – from profit to wages. That’s precisely why most capitalist employers will resist, in the belief that such rational, humane change to the nature of work would take a slice off their profit margins.

Aside from the fact that’s debatable (given the potential for increased productivity), it’s not really the point. We can’t afford a system that condemns millions to working longer than the 47-hour week that was conceded in the teeth of mass workers’ revolts a century ago. We can’t afford to continue with a system that is wrecking the health of millions of workers and adding to pollution of the planet.

We need a society where an adequate, decent wage is earned in a far shorter working day, week and year, freeing up time for the pursuit of real democracy and human fulfilment. But it won’t be gifted to us by a benign class of capitalist vultures. The events of 1919 demonstrated the brutal lengths their class predecessors were prepared to go against the Forty Hour Strike.

We need to take our inspiration from the readiness to struggle displayed by masses of workers in Belfast and Glasgow a century ago.

We need to battle to cut hours, not jobs or pay, harnessing all the marvels of 21st century science for the benefit of people and planet, not profit for the plunderers.

These demands should become the battle-cries on and beyond May Day 2019, standing on the shoulders of the (extra)ordinary workers’ struggles of 1919.

FOR A GUARANTEED 16-HOUR MINIMUM WORKING WEEK

I am immensely proud that the Scottish Socialist Party conference passed another pioneering new policy which could transform the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Scottish workers. We agreed to campaign within the trade union movement for the idea of a guaranteed minimum working week of 16 hours, to tackle the criminal insecurity and poverty that blights vast armies of workers on zero-hours and short-hours contracts.

Crazy capitalist contradictions

As I pointed out in proposing this new addition to the SSP's comprehensive package of workplace and trade union policies, capitalism curses working class people with the crazy contradiction of mass unemployment, mass underemployment and masses of overworked people on long, unhealthy hours of work. 

For instance, 260,000 workers in Scotland last year toiled for more than 48 hours a week. That's nearly one in eight of all those in work. And 54,000 worked a mind-boggling 60 hours or more each week! That's a threat to health, adding to the mountain of stress and mental health problems already all too common, a threat to workplace health and safety, and undermines family and social life. 

And although we all know the one greedy bandit in our workplace who treats overtime as an incurable drug addiction, grabbing every hour on offer, the fundamental reason people put themselves through this prolonged drudgery isn't greed, it's dire necessity: rotten hourly rates of pay. In fact a survey showed that 57% of these long-hours workers wanted to cut their hours at work.

Cut Hours - not Pay or Jobs

So the longstanding SSP policy of a guaranteed living minimum wage set at two-thirds male median earnings - £10-an-hour now in 2016 - is crucial alongside our campaign for a shorter working week, but with no loss of earnings. For cutting hours, not pay or jobs; for an immediate maximum working week of 35 hours across the board, rapidly moving to a 4-day week, and soon far lesser hours of work - harnessing the potential of new technology to slash the hours taken to produce life's necessities and thereby give workers time to live, not just work.

Famine of Guaranteed Work

That's one side of the battle to be fought. But at the other end of the nightmare contradictions in capitalism stands a vast army of workers stressed out by a famine of guaranteed hours of work - those on zero hours contracts and 4, 8, or 12-hours a week contracts.

Not everyone wants a full time job - not even the 35-hour week maximum we advocate, let alone the current average 42.7 hours worked in this country. But hordes of part-time workers want more work than they can get under the present system of insecure, casualised labour. For example, surveys show 1.4 million part-timers want more hours of work but can't get them. 

Why? Because employers prefer workers to be at their beck and call, according to 'business needs', hiring them on very low contracted hours - zero, 4,8,12, etc - and then dragging them in for extra hours during peak periods, of course with no premium payments for overtime. This also makes it cheaper for the employers in terms of sick pay, National Insurance Contributions, and (at least until recent rulings) holiday pay. 

16 Hours Guarantee 

So the demand for a guaranteed minimum weekly contract of 16 hours would tackle some of these problems head on. As well as abolishing all zero hours contracts, it would eradicate the terrible insecurity and absolute poverty of only being guaranteed a handful of hours a week, with the stress and upheaval of trying to claim benefits some weeks, not the others when the employer needs extra hours worked. 

Opt-out - With Union Protection 

But what if someone wants less than 16 hours a week? The policy statement carried at SSP conference deals with that. 

We want the unions to crusade for government legislation that obliges all employers to offer nothing less than 16 hours a week. We want the unions to negotiate for that demand where they are already recognized, and use this and associated policies to help recruit new members to win union recognition in new areas. 

But we also agreed the rider that if a worker wants less than 16, they should be entitled to negotiate lesser hours with the help of their union, with guarantees against bullying into such an arrangement by management. In other words, the right to opt out of a guaranteed 16-hour minimum working week, strictly on the proviso they have union representation when doing so.

Pioneering Proposal 

This new proposal - which I first raised in my book Break the Chains - not only tries to eradicate the cruel poverty of pay and job insecurity that blights millions of workers in Scotland and the UK, but also seeks to give an element of workers' control to working life, a challenge to the dictatorship by senior management on behalf of the owners that is the norm in 21st century capitalism. It runs in tandem with the fight for powerful, free and campaigning trade unions. 

We will now proceed to organize to win support for this pioneering policy in our trade unions, as part of the SSP's ongoing struggle for a society founded on human need not capitalist greed, where the fabulous wealth and inventions available are used to liberate workers from poverty, insecurity and drudgery.