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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NATIONALISE TO SAVE SPRINGBURN RAILWAY DEPOT!

Workers at the historic railway depot in Springburn, Glasgow, are battling against its closure, with the loss of nearly 200 highly skilled jobs and 160 years of railway history.

The RMT and Unite unions have launched the Rally Roon the Caley campaign,  and marched to the Scottish parliament when the issue was being debated last week. Public support is widespread, but time is short to save this depot, which carries out service, maintenance, repairs, overhaul and upgrades for the entire Scotrail fleet.

The unions have rightly condemned this as an act of industrial vandalism. In a society suffering a desperate shortage of skilled jobs and apprenticeships, with a rail service that provokes public  uproar for its inefficiency, it's outrageous that the profiteers are allowed to threaten a railway depot that has been a feature of life for 160 years. It's another instalment in the horror story of rail privatisation, and the fragmentation that goes with it.

Springburn was historically the world hub of the railway industry. Up until 1995, the Caley was part of nationalised British Rail, a major part of BREL (British Rail Engineering Ltd). Last August, Knorr-Bremse Rail Services sold it to Gemini Rail Services. Five months later, on 17 January, Gemini declared a 45-day consultation period for its closure, apparently with plans to centralise their operations in the south of England.

This is a classic example of vital services and infrastructure, and people's livelihoods, being sacrificed on the altar of profit, as one gang of profiteers passes it on to another. It's also a classic case for public ownership, for the Scottish government to go beyond worthy words of condemnation and sympathy.

In response to claims by Gemini that the St Rollox depot is unsuitable and unprofitable, the unions have demanded on-site electrification and a link to the Glasgow/Edinburgh line. They have highlighted that the cost of this modernisation would be less than £1million, whilst the Scottish government has been allocated £4.8billion for railway infrastructure by Westminster. 

The Scottish government should step in, take the depot into public ownership – as they did with Prestwick airport – and integrate it with a publicly owned Scottish railway service, rather than let an array of capitalist vultures rip up a service for profit, particularly given the urgency of expanding public transport as one concrete measure against environmental pollution and climate chaos.

Time is running out. The unions should consider all options, including a workers’ and community occupation of the depot to prevent asset stripping, whilst escalating the pressure on the Scottish government to ‘stand up for Scotland’, as they pledged to do in past election campaigns.

BUILD ACTION TO END POVERTY PAY & INSECURITY

The British TUC meets in Manchester for its annual congress, 150 years after its founding meeting in the Mechanics Institute of the same city. Much has changed in life since 1868; but much has remained the same, with the fundamentals of class division and capitalist exploitation.

The TUC is potentially a very powerful force for change, but only if it had a leadership determined to challenge the employers and governments in pursuit of the many progressive polices agreed by its annual congress - by mobilizing the 6.3 million workers  organised in the 48 trade unions affiliated to the TUC.  

Reforms and Betrayals 

The trade union movement has been instrumental in winning many vital reforms in living conditions for millions of workers and their families: an end to systematic child labour; improved health and safety; paid holidays; weekends off for some workers; equal pay and minimum wage legislation, etc. 

But every reform won has required mighty struggles. Struggles against the resistance of capitalist employers and their hired governments, but also within the unions, against conservative right wingers and overpaid bureaucrats who've quivered and capitulated at the thought of going into battle with the employers. 

Many momentous events in history have proved the baleful role of the right wing compromisers, and the urgent need for fighting socialist leaderships in the unions, accountable to the members, engaged in mobilising those same members in action for change. 

The TUC's betrayal of the 1926 General Strike; their desertion of the heroic miners' struggle of 1984/5; their exclusion of the RMT from talks with Southern Rail bosses last year in the midst of a ferocious RMT members' strike against Driver Only trains; their failure to lift a finger in pursuit of "a £10 minimum wage for all workers" for the four years since it was passed - unanimously - at the 2014 TUC congress... these are just some harsh reminders of the need to transform the potentially mighty trade union movement into an instrument for change, with a democratic, fighting, socialist leadership at every level. 

Great Jobs Agenda 

A major theme of the 2018 TUC congress is their 'Great Jobs Agenda'. Conference documents carry devastating evidence of the millions suffering jobs that are anything but 'great'. 

Alongside many other policy Motions for investment in skills, sustainable 'green' manufacturing, and public services, one from my own union - Usdaw - calls for a pioneering new policy to replace the rampant job insecurity of zero-hours, short-hours and fixed-term contracts. 

Usdaw's Motion is based on the brand new policy I successfully moved at the union's annual conference in April, on behalf of Glasgow no.1 branch, calling for a ban on all zero-hours contracts, to be replaced by a legally guaranteed minimum 16-hour contract for every worker who wants one, in tandem with an immediate £10-an-hour minimum wage. 

Poverty Pay and Under-Employment 

We're subjected to the hollow Tory and big business boasts of record levels of employment. In reality, low pay, insecure jobs and mass underemployment have side-lined mass unemployment as the biggest sources of punishing poverty for millions in this rich land. 

Wages have been crushed whilst prices rocket; by 2025 the average worker will have lost out on £18,500 in real earnings. (TUC Research). 

Ten years after the financial mayhem triggered by the bankers' greed, real wages are today worth £24-a-week less than in 2008. All the forecasts agree wages won't be restored to 2008 levels - which weren't exactly luxury living! - until after 2025; the longest period of wage decline since the Napoleonic Wars, 200 years ago. 

The government's own DWP admit there are 300,000 more in poverty now than a year ago - and 55% of those are in working families. 

Child Poverty Rising 

The sins of the capitalist profiteers have been visited upon the children! 

Over 3.1 million kids with working parents are below the breadline, here and now in 2018, compared with 2.1 million in the year 2000. And an astonishing two-thirds of all the children living in poverty have one or two parents working. 

Public sector cuts and crucifixion of in-work benefits have been major causes of this catastrophe. But underlying it all is the merciless robbery of wages by the capitalist employers over recent decades, aided by successive Tory AND Labour governments, with anti-union laws their weapon of choice in boosting profits at the expense of wages and public services. 

Nearly one in every eight workers (11.9%) is in some form of insecure job: on zero-hours contracts, agency, casual, seasonal, bogus self-employed, and pitifully short-hours contracts. For instance, all the giant supermarkets offer a minimum weekly contract of a mere 8 hours. 

A full one million part-time workers want a full-time job but can't get one, as employers escalate use of micro-jobs to put workers at their beck and call, dragged in at short notice to do extra hours to match 'business needs', then cast back onto miserably small contract hours when the bosses want to cut their wage bill. No wonder stress is hitting the roof in workplaces; millions have no control over their daily working lives, and just as little control over their income. 

For a 16-Hour Minimum Working Week 

That's a taste of the reasons it's critically important the Usdaw policy Motion - for a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for all workers who want it - is passed at TUC congress. And not just agreed and then stashed away in a filing cabinet (or its digital equivalent!), but made the active property of every union member in workplaces across the country, with an action plan to fight for it immediately.

This one measure, twinned with an immediate £10 minimum wage for all workers, rising with inflation, would begin to transform the lives of millions - children included. Alongside demands for investment in skills and learning (currently, scandalously, at only half the level of the EU average!); a million 'green' jobs; vast expansion of public sector housing and transport... such a package of radical measures, seriously fought for by the trade union movement, could bring about genuinely 'great jobs'. 

As could a struggle for use of digitalization and robotics to slash the working week without a penny loss of pay - as opposed to the dystopian nightmare of new technology condemning millions of workers to unemployment and destitution. It's a question of who owns and controls the new technologies, as with the wider economy. 

How Can We Win? 

Many workers have already asked me 'How can we get the TUC to act on good policies, like a £10 minimum wage and guaranteed minimum 16-hour week?'

There was nothing pre-ordained about committing the TUC to a £10 minimum wage nor Usdaw to the new policy of a 16-hour minimum working week; they had to be organised and argued for, through union structures, from branch level upwards. That's a start. 

Assuming the TUC, representing 6.3 million trade union members, adopts this policy, trade union activists and socialists have a massive role to play in getting action to implement such life-improving reforms. 

We will need to argue for and organise meetings of union members in branches and workplaces to discuss and popularise the arguments for £10-an-hour and a guaranteed 16-hour week as immediate minimum employment standards - to make union polices the property of thousands of workers. 

That's the best way to light bonfires beneath the backsides of the TUC and national union leaderships, demanding action and resources of them. 

Leaflets and literature arguing these policies should be demanded of the TUC and national unions, to spread the word, involve members on the streets as well as in workplaces, through days of campaign activities. 

An aware union membership is indispensable when union negotiators put these demands to employers - as they should and must, if policies are to mean anything. 

Strike, if Necessary 

Ultimately, unions need to prepare their membership for the possibility of needing to use industrial action to win such reforms. 

It's to their eternal credit that the Bakers' union (BFAWU) have already recruited, organized, balloted and led McDonald's workers out on strike 'for £10 and a union', and are now doing the same with Wetherspoons staff. These are also sectors rotten-ripe for the demand for a 16-hour minimum for all workers who want it. 

Other unions need to implement TUC policies with the same determination. 

Pound the Politicians 

We also have other pressure points that should be pounded with these demands by the unions, in particular local government and the devolved Scottish government. 

In the policy passed unanimously at Usdaw conference, those points are specified, calling for lobbying all these levels of government, demanding they introduce the £10 and 16 hour minimums for all their directly and indirectly employed staff... which amounts to a massive 500,000 workers in Scotland! 

Socialists and trade unionists need to bombard councillors and MSPs - regardless of their party label - with demands that in the forthcoming budget-making process for 2019/20, they set both a £10 minimum wage and guaranteed 16-hour week into No Cuts budgets, and then mobilize workforces and communities in struggle for the funding off Holyrood and Westminster to implement these reforms. 

Many who've joined the SNP and Scottish Labour proclaim themselves socialists. Now is the time for them to make demands on their own councillors and MSPs to stop implementing Tory austerity and start standing up for the working class with concrete, radical reforms like £10 and 16 hours minimum. 

The STUC should take the bold step of organising protest demos demanding this of MSPs and councillors. 

Socialists Fight On! 

The potential power of unified trade union action has all-too-rarely been applied. The crushing poverty and insecurity of millions of workers and their families cries out for such action. 

The SSP will continue to vigorously campaign on these policies, both within our own workplaces and unions, on the streets and in colleges. We appeal to others to join us in that crusade. The combined forces of the trade unions and socialist policies are a force that could change the lives of masses of people. Join that struggle! 

FOR A SOCIALIST CHARTER OF WORKERS' RIGHTS

Victories for the working class, our unions, our rights at work, are nearly as rare as people of conscience in the Tory Cabinet! 

So it's all the more justified that we celebrate the recent abolition of Employment Tribunal fees, as ruled unanimously by the seven Supreme Court judges. They deprived the Tories and LibDems of a fourth birthday party for the pernicious measure they jointly imposed in July 2013. 

Under mounting pressure from the trade union movement, and growing public fury, the upper-class judges abolished forthwith the fees of £1,200 payable before workers could even get a Tribunal hearing on cases of unfair dismissal, discrimination, or equal pay.

And the £1,600 payable to seek an Employment Appeals Tribunal hearing; to challenge any of the 50% of ET cases that go against workers, or the incredible 78% of all ET cases on discrimination - potentially the most important, involving the biggest compensation - which rule on the side of employers. 

This decision was the result of three years of legal challenges by UNISON, and widespread public support, as expressed in the response to Jeremy Corbyn's promise to  scrap the fees - ending years of criminal negligence by Labour, who merely promised to reduce the fees. 

Build on Employment Tribunals Victory 

This outcome underlines the potential power for progressive change possessed by the organised trade union movement. It answers the doubters and sceptics, who surrender under the battle-cry, "There's nothing we can do".

Now we need to push for far more sweeping changes, actually mobilizing the solidarity in action of workers and their unions, demanding a full-blown Charter of Workers' Rights.   

Not by waiting for some Messiah, but by motivating and mobilizing the millions of workers and their communities; utilizing the unified power of our class against the capitalist class and their political mouthpieces. 

And not just demanding it as a futile propaganda exercise towards the stone-faced Westminster puppets of capitalist rule; we might as well appeal to the stone statue of Churchill as await the Westminster road to workers' rights.

We need to target the far more accessible and susceptible Scottish government, and the 32 Scottish local authorities, with such demands. 

Unite for a Charter of Workers' Rights 

The SSP is more than eager to unite in action with supporters of other parties and none; trade unionists, young people, community groups; anyone willing to demand a Charter of Workers' Rights that could begin to transform the lives of the millions - unashamedly at the expense of the millionaires - both at work, at home and in our communities. 

By no means an exhaustive package, this could include the following:

Full rights at work from day one. 

Not 'equal rights', as demanded by Jeremy Corbyn's For the Many, Not the Few manifesto - which would include equal exclusion from the right to an Employment Tribunal hearing on unfair dismissal for the first 2 years in a job. 
Full rights, from day one, whether part-time, full-time, temporary, agency, etc.

The right to organise, strike and take solidarity action with fellow workers - and on so-called political issues, like privatisation or cuts - without fear of victimisation. 

This would require repeal of all the anti-union, anti-worker laws, introduced by Thatcher's Tories, retained by 13 years of Labour government, made even more repressive by the Tories and their LibDem coalition partners. Not just the welcome, but extremely limited pledge by Corbyn to repeal the 2016 (anti-) Trade Union Act, but all 30-years' worth of repressive laws. 

A guaranteed, well-paid, secure job for all on leaving school or college. 

Scotland's teenage model, Govan shipyard worker's son Connor Newall, told Radio Scotland that if he wasn't blessed with a career with cameras shooting at him he'd be in the army being shot at in wars. That captures the criminal lack of decent jobs, contrary to the vast array of work that needs doing to build a decent society. 

We should demand action - not pious platitudes - from the Scottish government and local councils to create hundreds of thousands of decent jobs, for instance by building social sector houses for rent; expanding education and public transport; investing in an NHS fit for the 21st century; ensuring free, quality social care services; developing a vast new, publicly-owned green energy industry.

A legally-enforced living minimum wage set at two-thirds male median earnings - for all over 16, with equal pay for women. 
Wages have been systematically driven down, to boost profits, and to cut public spending. Wages have stagnated and declined at the worst rate since the Napoleonic Wars. 

We should demand this guaranteed living minimum wage, legally enforced, which would mean over £10-an-hour here and now. Not three years hence in 2020, as promised by Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto; and not just for those over 18, as it says - but for all over 16, as consistently fought for by the SSP for the past 20 years. 

And if Labour or SNP MSPs and councillors are serious about a living wage, demand they here and now declare a voluntary £10 Living Wage for all workers they directly employ, plus issue public contracts only to firms implementing £10 minimum - pending their return in-house. 

Demand back the funding off Westminster and Holyrood to pay a minimum of £10-an-hour to the half-a-million workers employed by central and local government. 

A guaranteed 16-hour contract; ban all zero hours contracts. 
The SSP has pioneered this policy, to cater for those who prefer part-time work, but to banish the curse of casual, insecure contracts. Legally oblige all employers to guarantee a minimum 16 hours-a-week, unless a worker requests lesser hours, accompanied by their union rep. 

Demand the Scottish government and local authorities set the pace by introducing this 16-hour guarantee for their 500,000 workers. 

A guaranteed warm, weather-tight, affordable home for all, built to the highest environmental standards in Europe.
End the scandal of 157,000 families in Scotland languishing on the waiting list. Build 100,000 new social sector homes for rent over the 4-year parliament. Create tens of thousands of well-paid construction jobs and apprenticeships. Combat fuel poverty and pollution by building and renovating to the best standards of insulation and green housing technology in Europe. 

Guarantee a living state pension, with voluntary retirement at 55 for men and women. 

Reverse the creeping abolition of the state pension - the worst as a share of average wages in Europe! Give workers a genuine lifestyle choice between working and retiring on a living pension - based on the national minimum wage - immediately at 60, rapidly moving to 55. This would give concrete content to the "review of pensions" in Corbyn's manifesto. 

Guarantee free public transport for all, through immediate, democratic public ownership.

End the crimes of train fares rising twice the rate of wage increases since 2010; reverse the spread of safety-threatening Driver Only Operations; chaos and cuts on the privatised buses; mounting pollution and spreading social isolation. 

The SSP campaigns for immediate public ownership of our railways - not the gradual, piecemeal, potentially chaotic return to the public sector "as [separate] franchises expire", as Jeremy Corbyn's For the Many manifesto pledges. And for investment in an integrated, fare-free public transport network.

A modern solution to pollution and poverty. 

Demand More, Far More

The significant victory on Employment Tribunal fees should embolden workers to demand more, far more. 

The appeal of Jeremy Corbyn's radical-sounding social and economic policies should encourage us to demand more, far more, than his very modest manifesto policies actually advocate. 

The potential power of organised unions - held back for decades by vicious laws, use of the weapon of fear by employers, and cowardly trade union leaderships - should now be unleashed to reverse the tide of attacks on our rights and livelihoods. 

Join the SSP in demanding a concerted, broad campaign - rooted in the unions and community campaigns - for a far-reaching Charter of Workers' Rights. 

Help to make Scotland a place that puts people before profit; the 5.3 million people before the ten billionaires who own the same £30billion as the entire annual Scottish government budget. 

DEMAND SCOTTISH PUBLIC INQUIRY INTO 1984/5 MINERS' STRIKE REPRESSION

I appeal to you to lend your support to the campaign for a Scottish Public Inquiry into the actions of the police during the 1984/5 miners' strike - and indeed into the dictatorial, repressive methods of Margaret Thatcher's Tory government.
Thatcher unleashed civil war on the miners, their families, communities and trade union. It was part of the broader crusade to shackle the unions and chain workers in poverty-stricken, insecure jobs with minimal rights - and to replace investment in manufacturing with the fast buck casino economy of the bankers and spivs.

TORIES SEEK TO KEEP THE TRUTH BURIED
Now, contrary to promises made in the wake of the Hillsborough jury's verdicts in May 2016, and indeed in September, the Westminster Tories have refused to hold a public inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, of June 1984, when the government colluded with police chiefs to lay a trap, knock seven colours out of defenseless strikers, and then falsify what happened with the help of BBC bosses.

I've launched an online petition demanding the Scottish government initiate a full, Scottish Public Inquiry. To uncover the truth about the especially heavy-handed police repression in Scotland; to clear the names of the near-500 Scottish miners arrested, prosecuted, fined, and in many cases sacked and blacklisted.
So far the SNP Scottish government has refused to set up an Inquiry. With your help we can change their minds!

SIGN NOW - AND SPREAD THE WORD! 
So please spend 5 minutes in the cause of truth and justice.

Sign the online Petition. Here's the link:

https://www.change.org/p/scottish-first-minister-nicola-sturgeon-demand-a-scottish-public-inquiry-into-policing-of-miners-strike-1984-5?recruiter=46351436&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink

And then share it with everyone else you can think of - by email, text, Facebook, Twitter - urging them to do likewise.

BACKGROUND READING
Finally, if you want to read more background on the events and issues that have led me to launch the Petition, please have a read of the article I wrote a few days ago, here:

https://www.scottishsocialistparty.org/demand-scottish-inquiry-policing-miners-strike/

Don't let governments leave the facts about state repression in pursuit of short-term profiteering remain buried in mountains of lies.
Past generations deserve truth and justice. Future generations require the knowledge and lessons to stop such class oppression endlessly repeating itself.

SCOTRAIL STRIKERS WIN FOR PUBLIC SAFETY!

The courageous determination of ScotRail guards, who sacrificed 13 days' pay by striking for public safety, has won a clear victory in a deal which will now be considered by the national executives of both the RMT and ASLEF unions, with negotiators recommending acceptance. 

After prolonged talks with ScotRail Abellio bosses - latterly involving combined negotiating teams from both unions - the employers have massively retreated from their original plans to extend Driver Only Operated (DOO) trains across the Central Belt and beyond. 
The deal reached retains the fundamental role of the safety-critical guards. It comes nowhere near the bosses' and government's original plans to dump core safety procedures - door operations and train dispatches - on the driver. It is a substantial victory for strike action by RMT members. 

ABELLIO BOSSES' ORIGINAL PLANS 
The Abellio bosses, driven by the franchise issued to them by the SNP government in October 2014, had hoped to get rid of the safety critical guards/conductors - and replace them with lower-paid, lesser-trained Ticket Examiners, who in at least 20% of cases are absent from DOO trains due to chronic staffing shortages. 
It was a case of cutting costs in the medium term, and to hell with the safety consequences. 

Contrary to any slick spin from Abellio bosses over the next 24 hours, we need to recall how they bullied staff; tried to bypass the union by use of social media and letters to guards' homes; refused to even meet the unions for weeks on end, let alone enter meaningful negotiations; conscripted management scabs to run trains at public risk; deployed fearful agency staff to hand out their propaganda; used a compliant capitalist media to belittle the role of guards and silence the workers' case from being heard and understood by the travelling public; threatened to use Westminster Tory anti-union laws against the RMT, to bludgeon their members into submission; and enjoyed the encouragement of the SNP government, whose Nicola Sturgeon also belittled the skilled guards' role, and the cause of the strikers, by echoing Abellio's contemptuous remarks about it being "all about who presses a button". 

THEY UNDERESTIMATED THE GUARDS! 
The Abellio bosses - and indeed the Scottish government who spurned the chance to take our railways back into public ownership, and instead actively encouraged the Dutch state-owned franchise-holders to implement DOO - severely underestimated the passion for safety and principled courage of RMT members.
Strike action has forced through a deal that is overwhelmingly a success story for the solidarity of workers taking action. 
It will guarantee a guard on every one of the new electrified trains (EMUs) planned for next year. 
That guarantee will apply for the remainder of the Abellio franchise - and indeed beyond, with a pledge that it will be transferred over to any future franchise, through TUPE. 
Furthermore - and critically - none of these trains will be allowed to move without a guard on board, which prevents the government or ScotRail bosses using weasel words about 'a second crew member being scheduled' - but then not actually on board, as happens with at least one in five DOO trains right now, where the train moves whilst being literally driver only, without a Ticket Examiner on duty. 

DOOR OPERATIONS & TRAIN DISPATCH 
The one area of concession by the unions is on operation of the train doors, but even on that the Abellio bosses have failed to fully get their way. They had intended that the driver would not only face the onerous task of driving, but would also be responsible for opening and shutting the doors, thereby making drivers in charge of train dispatches from stations, with all the huge risks to passengers that we've explained in previous articles and videos. 
But in the deal now being recommended by both the RMT and ASLEF negotiators, the driver will open the doors and the conductor/guard will close the train door, thereby retaining their vital role in checking for passengers' safety at the Passenger Train Interface (PTI). 

Compared with the current system that is a step backwards. It adds pressure to the driver; it increases the risk of trains stopping short on platforms (especially with the new, longer, eight carriage EMU trains) without the driver spotting the problem, which potentially could mean passengers spilling out onto the track. 
But with agreement that the guard will dispatch the train after safety checks at the station, and door technology that will help them correct mistakes by the driver on door controls, the most fundamental demands of the RMT strikers have been granted. That's a far cry from the original aims of the profit-driven Abellio bosses and Scottish government, to remove all control of the doors from the guards. 

FULL CREDIT TO THE STRIKERS 
This prolonged battle has shown the willingness of workers to take action if given a lead by their unions. It is to the eternal credit of those union activists who refused to just roll over and accept the DOO plans at the very start of the process. Their refusal to comply, or to just 'see how it goes', has been vindicated by the outcome. Above all, every one of the strikers who was prepared to put public safety top of the agenda, willing to lose wages in order to 'Keep the Guard', deserves the admiration and applause of every trade unionist, every passenger, every self-respecting worker. 

NOW DEMAND A GUARD ON EVERY TRAIN! 
This successful workers' struggle should now be the launchpad for the ongoing campaign to make trains safe: to win back a guard on every train that was converted to a DOO train, in most cases over 30 years ago. To win investment in safe, comfortable, fully staffed stations. To halt the cuts to infrastructure jobs and ticket offices. And to further the struggle for democratic public ownership of the railways, so that safety is put before profit, passengers before shareholders, the millions before the millionaires. 
The Scottish Socialist Party is proud to have fought alongside these courageous fighters - and we will continue to do so in favour of a fundamental change in the type of society we live in.