FIGHT TO SAVE EVERY TESCO JOB!

Retail giant unilaterally declares 9,000 job losses 

Tesco workers have reacted with a mixture of shock, anxiety and fury at the announcement of 9,000 job losses, and the manner in which this jobs slaughter was declared.

In what was undoubtedly a cynically calculated leak from the higher echelons of Tesco's bosses, the weekend press was full of speculation about 15,000 job losses. If they thought this would lead to a collective sigh of relief from thousands of distressed workers when the official announcement of ‘only’ 9,000 job losses was subsequently made, they were badly mistaken. Workers are rightly furious at Tesco bosses treating them, and their unions, with such utter, high-handed contempt.

An unprecedented number of retail workers are talking about the case for industrial action to stop these job losses. Unless talks with Tesco produce an acceptable, total retreat from these plans - protecting all jobs, wages and conditions - union activists and members in general are going to have to seize the bull by the horns and make it plain that they are indeed prepared for collective action. Otherwise, unless serious resistance is mounted, three times as many jobs as were infamously wiped out at the Lanarkshire Ravenscraig steelworks could be decimated.

TESCO RIP UP PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT

What does this grotty episode say for Tesco’s attitude to the oft-trumpeted partnership agreement with Usdaw?

They've arrogantly ripped this agreement to shreds, not even consulting the union, let alone negotiating their plans. Instead, unilaterally declaring their savagery via the media, proving in action that they believe in the dictatorship of big business over workers and their elected representatives.

Even the pathetically weak employment laws in this business-dominated state prescribe consultation – and meaningful consultation at that – at the formative stage of any planned changes to a business. This plan of butchery is in flagrant contradiction to that procedure, let alone the alleged partnership agreement Tesco’s signed up to with Usdaw.

As I've often written before, social partnership is the partnership of the rider and the horse, with big business in the saddle.

Tesco bosses plan to slash 9,000 jobs, closing fresh food counters in 90 of their 790 large stores. They also want to only open the meat, fish and deli counters part-time in the other 700 stores, plus cut back on staffing levels in the replenishment and layout design operations. To add insult to injury, they aim to replace staff canteens with glorified vending machines. That in itself means loss of jobs for canteen staff. And when worries about the future of their bakeries are raised, they trot out those well-worn, weasel words, “we have no plans to shut the bakeries”; aye, no plans now, but what about the next phase of cuts, if they get away with this round?

HOW IS ENDING FRESH FOOD COUNTERS ‘SUSTAINABLE’?

What does this plan do for the growing, modern demand for fresh, locally-sourced food? How does that match their soothing words about merely wanting “a simpler, more sustainable business”? In truth, it’s just the latest link in the chain of strangulation of small businesses, small farmers and food producers which the big supermarkets wield every time they move into a town or area. For instance, they wipe out local butchers’ shops and fishmongers, and now plan to get rid of fresh fish and meat counters in their own super-stores.

Of course, the immediate task of the union is to challenge Tesco’s bogus claims, and demand that there is not a single job loss, nor a penny lost in any worker’s pay, in any changes to roles in the stores that might be (belatedly!) negotiated with the unions – where Usdaw itself represents over 160,000 Tesco workers. And every store should have a proper staff canteen – not to mention protection and expansion of fresh food counters, sourced locally.

TESCO’S SKYROCKETING PROFITS

What possible justification can there be for this jobs brutality? 

Workers’ efforts have achieved 12 consecutive quarters of growth for the business, plus a successful Christmas trading period.

And this is no struggling family corner shop!

Tesco’s profits have skyrocketed in recent years, after top bosses incurred a loss of £2billion in share values by, putting it plainly, fiddling the books. Profits rose from £145m the previous year to £1.3billion in 2017, a gargantuan 800% increase. And this bounty rocketed by a further 28% last year, to £1.64billion.

In the UK and Ireland alone, the efforts of Tesco workers produced over £1.1billion in profits last year - another 31% rise on the year before.

Where have all the profits gone? That's one of the central questions workers and the union need to pursue and expose, in fighting to rip apart Tesco’s so-called business case for this butchery of jobs and conditions. They should be forced to open up their company plans and balance sheets to public inspection by the unions and financial experts. What have they got to hide, if they are merely wanting to meet changing customer expectations and “building a simpler, more sustainable business”, as they claim?

DEMAND A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME 

We already have a partial answer to the question of where the profits sweated from workers have gone: the bank accounts of top Tesco bosses. Chief Executive,  ‘Drastic’ Dave Lewis, enjoyed an increase of 17.5% on his income last year, to a staggering £4.9million. 

Leaving aside the combined incomes of the other directors, Lewis’s obscene greed alone justifies the policy which I successfully proposed at the 2018 Usdaw national conference (ADM) - for a Legal Maximum Income initially set at ten times the legal minimum wage. 

If that was applied to the Tesco CEO, imagine the impact of ploughing over £4.7m back into workers’ wages and job security, instead of it going into the coffers of one fat-cat.

LOW PAY AND INSECURE CONTRACTS THREATEN JOBS

Retail in general is in crisis, with multiple causes. Last year, 70,000 jobs were shed, and the British Retail Consortium forecasts a further 90,000 job losses this year. 

One of the root causes of the terrible insecurity and loss of conditions facing the 3 million workers in retail is the chronic low pay and insecure contracts imposed by the profiteers on this vital sector of the economy - which contributes at least 11% of GDP.

Low wages and low hours – zero-hours and, more commonly, short-hours contracts – strangle workers’ spending power, and thereby threaten jobs. And it's not just poverty pay in retail that causes this problem; it's a plague across all sectors.

That's why Usdaw’s centre-piece Time For Better Pay campaign is so critically important.  The demands for an immediate £10-an-hour minimum wage for all workers, and a guaranteed minimum 16-hour contract for every worker who wants it, would help fuel the economy, boost workers’ spending power and their sense of security. And it would substantially redistribute wealth from profits to pay.

Likewise, Usdaw’s campaign for a Retail Industrial Strategy is critical in resisting this jobs slaughter, highlighted by the Tesco announcement, but common to all the Big 4 supermarkets and the rest of the sector.  This calls for measures including changes to taxation to end the unfair advantages enjoyed by online traders over ‘bricks and mortar’ stores; reform of local commercial rents, business rates, public transport and car-parking, to help save our High Streets; investment in upskilling retail workers to meet the challenges of new technology; and improved productivity through decent pay and contracts.

DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF RETAIL GIANTS

But in my personal opinion, the outrageous butchery declared by the unelected, totally unaccountable profiteers also highlights the need for a radical overhaul of who owns and controls retail. 

Why should multi-millionaire owners and Chief Executives have the power to destroy the livelihoods of thousands of workers, and create havoc for entire families and communities?

Why should they be entitled to cream off £billions in profit and then ‘reward’ those workers who created this mountain of wealth for them with a P45?  

At the 2017 Usdaw national conference it was agreed to call for public ownership in such situations. That would lay the foundations for a democratic plan of action - embracing retail workers’ union representatives, local authorities and governments - to invest in town centres and other retail outlets in a fashion that maximises jobs, retail services to communities, and indeed the interests of family farmers and small businesses. 

A retail sector based on public needs and agreed priorities, rather than dictatorship by the retail giants; an end to the rule of private profit for the few over the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.  

£10 NOW - outlaw poverty pay!

Poverty scars the face of Scotland. Poverty pay is at the heart of it. And the only thing more ugly than the national scandal of a million Scots struggling to survive on pitiful incomes is the fact there's absolutely no excuse for it. 

We live in a fabulously rich country - officially the 14th richest economy on the planet. A nation with a super-abundance of energy resources; a net food exporter; a leading centre of life sciences, with several world class universities; one of the world's financial centres; home to many advanced industries - and the priceless asset of a skilled, educated working class.
Scotland now 'boasts' its first billionaire, but is shamed by 220,000 kids living in poverty, a thousand foodbanks issuing handouts to the desperately hungry, and one in three households shivering their way through another winter because of fuel poverty - in a nation that has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of green energy production! 
The ugly twins of poverty and inequality are a national disgrace, and we need urgent action to banish them from the face of Scotland.

Poverty kills
On a global scale, a child dies of poverty every 3 seconds. That's a devastating indictment of the system of capitalist economy we live under, a system that knows everything about profit for the tiny elite and nothing about the needs of humanity. A system where 65 multi-billionaires possess more wealth than half the global population.
A bit closer to home, the capitalist system of markets and profit means the richest five families in Britain have more combined wealth than the poorest 12.4 million people in the UK!
In the case of Scotland, the richest ten fat-cats have grabbed £13billion between them, just short of half the entire annual budget of the Scottish government. 
We live in a brutally class-divided society.

Forms of poverty
There are several sources of poverty in Scotland, all of them easily solved by a government with the vision, courage and political will to carry through sweeping change to the ownership of wealth.
Pensioner poverty needs to be eliminated by a decent level of state pension, in answer to the crime of older people being unable to heat and eat, after a lifetimes' contribution to society.
Fuel poverty is not for lack of resources; it's because the Big Six energy giants that dominate domestic supplies are ripping the profit out of us, jacking up prices to feed their greed for profit. And the green energy sector is equally a source of obscene profit for big landowners granting us a corner of their landed estates for a few wind turbines - paid a fortune through 'green taxes' on our electricity bills - and multinational marine engineering companies. 

Public ownership of all forms of energy, turning our natural resources into a public service, is at the heart of a solution - alongside public ownership of the construction industry, investment in free home insulation and the building of 100,000 new public sector homes for rent in the lifetime of a Scottish parliament, to the highest environmental standards.
The Westminster dictatorship of and for the rich are crucifying people on benefits, with even worse to come after their announcement of another £25billion cuts over the next two years. We need a serious, resolute campaign of resistance to this butchery, demanding a welfare and benefits system that protects people in need, instead of demonising the poorest, as part of their divide-and-rule strategy against the working class.

Poverty pay the biggest cause
But underlying all these sources of poverty is the biggest of them all: poverty pay.
An absolute majority of those below the breadline live in working households. Far from being a route out of poverty, having a job nowadays is one of the chief sources of being poor!
The cold statistics cannot begin to convey the stress and strain of working to stay poor - in a fabulously rich country. Over one in five workers (22%) in Scotland earn less than the so-called Living Wage of £7.85 an hour. That figure rises to 25% of women, and rockets to 43% of us who work part-time, and an appalling 72% of workers aged 18-21.
The wage freeze in the public sector has meant zero pay increases for millions for several successive years. With rip-roaring real-life inflation on the daily essentials of food, fuel, rent and transport, this means an Ice Age of pay cuts. 

On average, wages have fallen by £50 a week for every worker since 2008, when the bankers brought the economy to the brink of collapse and were bailed out from the public purse to the tune of £1.3trillion. It's publicly-funded bonuses for the banking executives, pay cuts and job losses for the rest of us (including bank workers!).

Minimum wage pittance
Back in the mid-1990s those of us who later founded the SSP fought for the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage to banish poverty pay. We welcomed its introduction in 1999. But from day one, the Labour and subsequent Tory governments made sure the national minimum wage was at rock bottom level, and included an outrageous batch of exemptions and exclusions. In particular, the lower youth rates have blighted a generation of workers seen by employers as a source of even cheaper labour to boost their profit margins, bosses' bonuses and big shareholders' dividends.
Right now the levels of legal minimum wage are a scandalous route to exploitation: £6.50 at 21-years-old; £5.13 for 18-20-year-olds; £3.79 for workers aged 16-17; and modern slave labour on £2.73 for Modern Apprentices!

Mass armies of the low-paid
Instead of being the legal minimum, with higher rates for many workers negotiated by their trade unions in free collective bargaining, these basement level wages have increasingly become the norm.
The biggest concentrations of poverty pay are retail, hospitality and care services. So it's not just a case of small, backstreet sweatshops ripping profit out of super-exploited workers. Huge armies of low-paid workers are producing £billions in profit for multinational giants - who are aided and abetted in their exploits by the government's minimum wage legislation. 

For example, in the pre-Xmas spending spree, with the commercial frenzy of 'must have' advertising bombarding low-paid families, retail workers are pounded into doing extra shifts - part-timers on flat money with no overtime premiums - to feed the tills of a handful of giant firms that could well afford a decent living wage for all. For instance, Tesco's are driving through all manner of cuts to terms and conditions for their workers, whilst paying just above the minimum wage, but whinge about 'only' enjoying profits of around £1.4billion this year! 

Ban Zero Hours Contracts
One of several devices used to maximize profits and minimise wages is Zero Hours Contracts. A brutal system of being at the beck and call of your employer, unsure of what hours, if any, you get next week; a recipe for mayhem in daily life. They should be banned outright - not just amended or reformed as proposed by Labour in their weasel words about "ending exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". Workers need guaranteed contracted hours, part-time or full time, and a decent hourly rate of pay guaranteed, as negotiated by fully recognized trade unions.

Living Wage 
The current minimum wages of £6.50, £5.13, £3.79 and £2.73 are a criminal guarantee of poverty for workers. And although the much-trumpeted Living Wage of £7.85 is a very welcome advance on these paltry incomes for the hundreds of thousands scraping by on them, it is not only still inadequately low, but fatally flawed by one simple fact: the Living Wage is entirely voluntary and not legally enforceable.
It is laudable that the Scottish Living Wage Campaign has helped cajole three times as many employers into becoming Accredited Living Wage Employers during 2014. But to highlight the problem of it not being a legally enforced minimum, that means it has merely risen from 23 to 60 companies in Scotland paying the Living Wage. Not a single one of them is in retail, one of the two big centres of poverty pay. And some of the same outfits might pay the Living Wage to their direct employees, but rely on lower-paid contract workers from firms not paying the £7.85.

£10 now!
Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has campaigned for a legally enforced national minimum wage for all at 16, calculated on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings. In today's figures that is a minimum wage of about £10 an hour. That is also the figure unanimously agreed at the recent British Trades Union Congress.
Some might say it's unrealistic. But nothing is realistic unless you're prepared to fight for it! 

And it's extremely modest compared to the cost of living. It's modest compared to the fact that if even the (paltry) current minimum wage had kept pace with the rise in income for directors of the top 100 companies since 1999 it would now be £18.89 an hour!
But should it apply to workers and apprentices from 16 upwards? Yes! When did you last see special discounts on the price of clothing, food, footwear or rents for the 16-21 year olds?! Abolition of the lower youth rates is a key part of banishing super-exploitation. And of course it needs to be coupled to a crusade to unshackle the trade unions, by repealing all the anti-union laws, allowing free collective wage bargaining by workers' unions, so that additional skills, responsibilities, anti-social hours of work and experience can be rewarded by rates above the national minimum.

Subsidies to low-paying profiteers

What about small firms that say they couldn't afford to pay £10 an hour to the handful of staff they employ? We would argue for open public inspection of their accounts, to look at wages, bosses' bonuses, profit margins and conditions of work. If a small firm is not a backstreet death-trap that deserves to be shut down and their workers redeployed, then the government could subsidise genuine cases from taxation of the rich and big business to help them afford to pay a legal £10 minimum. 

Right now we have the opposite, where it is mostly big, profit-hungry companies who are being subsidized by taxpayers to exploit their workers with poverty pay, through the likes of Working Tax Credits. We should turn this situation on its head, force big companies to dip into their profits to guarantee a living wage of £10 at least, and help smaller, socially useful businesses flourish with decent-paid jobs.

SSP: the workers' party
None of the mainstream political parties are willing to confront the national crime of poverty pay. The Tories and LibDems are opposed to national guaranteed minimum wages on principle. Labour is trying to appease the working class who are deserting their New Tory agenda by promising an £8 an hour minimum - but try to hide the fact they only aim at this by 2020, meaning it would barely sustain the current, pathetic £6.50 rate when you account for inflation.
The SNP say they support the Living Wage, which is very welcome, but also very limited as it's entirely left to the whims and fancies of company bosses rather than enforceable by law. 

And the SNP have belatedly joined the call by the SSP for minimum wage levels to be devolved from Westminster to Holyrood - but in the SNP's case only so that its level "will rise by at least inflation". Based on the bogus official inflation measures of today, that implies a pathetic 13 pence an hour rise on the current 'adult' minumum wage of £6.50!

Act on TUC policy 

The SSP is determined to make this issue the centrepiece of Scottish politics in 2015. We are demanding £10 now - not in 2020 or some distant date beyond that. The fact the TUC has voted "to campaign for a £10 per hour minimum wage for all workers" - with not a single union delegate opposing it - adds powerful potential force behind this battle for a decent living minimum wage.
The SSP stands up for the working class. We are Scotland's working class party.

Join the SSP in the campaign for £10 now, to outlaw the crime of poverty pay and Zero Hours Contracts. We live in a fabulously rich nation, but one scarred by the twins of poverty and inequality. We need to organise and demand a massive redistribution of wealth. The guarantee of secure jobs with at least a £10 hourly rate is a measure that would transform the lives of millions currently swimming in a sea of poverty and insecurity.