TAX WEALTH, NOT WAGES: for a legal maximum income

 

Contrary to all the fuss and brouhaha, Boris Johnson's new taxation for health and social care is a pitiful failure to match the scale of monumental crisis in both social care and the NHS.

And equally damning, the Tories' new taxation scheme is one of the most unfair and regressive of all, in a state awash with taxes that hammer the lowest-paid whilst tickling the tummies of the grotesquely rich.

First, the headline facts. From next April, and for the three subsequent years, National Insurance Contributions will increase by 1.25 percentage points - which is a rise of over 10% on the current rate. In total that will raise an additional £36billion, spread over 3 years.

It's a UK-wide tax. In response to the backlash about this being Boris's 'social care poll tax', levied on Scottish workers to (allegedly) bail out social care in England, the Tories have conceded that £1.1billion a year will come to Scotland from this 'health and social care levy'. They furthermore 'magnanimously' granted the Scottish government the powers to decide how to use that extra funding, after being accused of undermining devolution.

Broken Tory Promises

In once again breaking a Tory election promise not to raise taxes – at the same time as also spitting in the faces of those who believed the Tories when they promised not to end the pension 'triple lock', whereby state pensions rise with inflation, average wages or by 2.5% - they try to fool people into thinking they are dealing with the catastrophe in social care, so blatantly exposed during 18 months of pandemic. They are not!

For starters, only £5.4billion of the total £36billion is to go to social care; the rest is to be poured into the gaping hole in NHS funding, which is facing its own escalating crisis. And of that sum, only £2.5billion is being allocated to funding of the social care workforce, training and associated council costs – despite England alone suffering 120,000 unfilled vacancies in that sector! Age UK reports that at least 1.5 million elderly people are not getting the care they need (and deserve).

The £1.1billion a year allocated to Scotland certainly puts to shame the pitiful £148million previously promised by Nicola Sturgeon – and now officially signed up to by the Scottish Green Party – in their entirely bogus claims of establishing “a National Care Service on a par with the NHS”.

But it still goes nowhere near tackling the crises in Scotland's care sector or Scotland's NHS.

Scotland's Health and Care Crisis

Shocking new figures by the nursing union, RCN Scotland, reveal that our hospitals are suffering the highest levels of unfilled vacancies in history. Almost 5,000 full time equivalent posts in Scotland's NHS remain unfilled – 7.1% of all roles in the service. In areas like the Highlands, Shetland and Dumfries & Galloway, over one in every 10 nursing and midwifery posts lies empty, unfilled, adding to the health catastrophe exacerbated by Covid-19. As a mental health epidemic sweeps the country, one in every 12 mental health nurse positions remains vacant, unfilled, unfunded.

And that says nothing of the terrible state of affairs in Scotland's social care sector.

NIC: Regressive, Unfair Tax on Wages

But as well as being nothing like adequate to the urgent tasks posed, the entire health and social care levy – the 1.25 percentage points increase on NIC contributions – is obscenely regressive, hammering those least able to afford it compared with the rich minority.

Under uproar about increased taxation of workers whilst share dividends were to remain untouched, the Tories have conceded that tax on share dividends will also rise by 1.25%. But let's not get too grateful! Let's look at the relative taxation rates, and how they hammer workers rather than wealth.

NIC is one of the most regressive taxes in the UK. The existing rate for all incomes between £9,658 a year and £50,268 is currently 12% - rising to 13.25% from April 2022. By stark contrast, all income above £50,268 only contributes a miserly 2% NIC – or 3.25% from April!

Wealth Inequality Even Wider

And of course it gets worse. Wealth inequality is infinitely greater than income inequality.

The millionaires and billionaires sink much of their wealth in mansions, yachts, super-cars, diamonds and the likes, and hire vast armies of accountants to devise devilishly ingenious ways to dodge paying taxes on their ill-gotten wealth – whereas you or I would face the jail for refusing to pay taxes on our wages.

Instead of walloping wages, health and social care should be properly funded by taxation on wealth. Here are a few illustrative examples of what could be done, in a fashion that would at least trim some of the worst excesses off the inequality inevitably produced by capitalism - a system that is constructed to create inequality.

Wealth Tax

Even a 5% wealth tax on all couples 'worth' more than £1million would raise £50billion a year – dwarfing the paltry £12billion annual income from the Tory scheme that disproportionately comes from the incomes of the lowest paid worker.

Or a puny 1% wealth tax on households worth over £4million would give the state an additional £20billion a year to fund health, social care and other public services.

Capital Gains Tax comes from selling something which has increased in value. But the highest rate of CGT is a modest 28%. If that was raised to 40%, it would give the state an extra £9billion a year.

Entrepreneurs Relief!

One of the lesser known, perfectly legal, tax schemes is called Entrepreneurs Relief! No, this is not some dodgy form of recreation, but legalised theft of public funds by the hard-at-profiteering. Over 50,000 business people benefit from this state handout. If it was included in Capital Gains Tax, and increased to 40% instead of being zero-rated, it would bring in £13billion a year!

The lowest paid millions unavoidably pay income tax starting at 20%. Just to show how 'equitable' capitalism really is, tax on earnings on stocks and shares is a puny 7.5% right now; we can hear the screams of agony from the big shareholders at facing a tax rate of 8.75% from next year!

Even a hopelessly inadequate rise to 15% taxation would gather £7billion a year extra for health and social care.

Legal Maximum Income

All these facts and figures are mere samples of what a progressive taxation system could do, at the expense of the millionaires, for the benefit of the millions.

But they also serve to highlight the need to transform the whole system with measures that would mean a vast transfusion of wealth and power away from the rich to the rest of us; the opposite to what has actually happened, particularly under successive Tory and Labour governments since the Dark Ages of Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s.

One of the policies pioneered by the SSP over the 23 years since our formation is a Legal Maximum Income, set initially at 10 times the legal National Minimum Wage. It's a policy which in turn I fought for and won as national conference policy in my own trade union, USDAW, the fifth-largest union in the country.

Frankly, the idea that a legally-enforced national minimum wage of at least £12-an-hour should be accompanied by a Legal Maximum Income equivalent to £120-an-hour is absurdly over-generous to the rich. But it would be a good start, in tackling inequality and providing Universal Free Basic Services.

And it could raise a fortune! At risk of boggling your brain, imagine such a policy applied even just to Scotland's 10 billionaires, whose combined wealth rocketed to £22.4billion last year. If a legal cap was imposed on them, at 10 times the proposed £12 minimum wage, that would leave about £21billion for Scotland's public services!

Or extend the geography of this Legal Maximum Income to the whole UK: the richest 250 people increased their wealth last year by over £1million a day, each, on average – every day!

A mere 171 people, the UK's billionaires, have a combined fortune of £597billion. Slap the cap on them, at 10 times the minimum wage, and you can do the sums for yourself.

Capitalism is Designed to Create Inequality

Capitalism by its very nature is a grotesque machine for creating inequality. As even the right-wing Sunday Times was moved to write when it published its annual Rich List in May 2021,

“Many readers will feel uncomfortable that such astonishing fortunes have been created as Britain battled a virus that has so far claimed 128,000 lives, increased unemployment to 1.7 million, ramped up government debt, clipped civil liberties and heightened levels of depression and other mental health illnesses.”

Uncomfortable? Furious more like, but all the more resolved to overturn that system. Which would require democratic public ownership of the major industries and services to fully tackle, but which a Legal Maximum Income would certainly begin to transform.

Socialism – not Tinkering with Capitalism

The Tories are openly the political wing of capitalism and its inherent inequalities and exploitation. Labour under Starmer is the New Labour New Tories! It's led by the knight of the realm who led the opposition to mild increases in Corporation Taxes on the giant corporations in this year's Westminster Budget debates!

But neither the SNP nor Scottish Greens fundamentally oppose the continued rule of capitalism, and therefore satisfy themselves with minuscule measures to redress the balance of inequality; measures that are puny in their scale.

The health, social care and general well-being of the population will not be noticeably improved by the funds raised by the regressive taxation schemes just announced, which will serve to exacerbate inequality.

The SSP's policy of a Legal Maximum Income of no more than ten times a living, minimum wage, rapidly reduced to ratios of 5:1 or less – alongside our fight for democratic public ownership of energy, transport, construction, major industries, landed estates and the entire financial system – is what is required.

Successfully proposing Legal Max Income policy at 2018 USDAW National Conference

NOW WATCH THE VIDEO!

This video was made over 3 years ago, so a few of the statistics are dated: we need a MINIMUM hourly wage for all aged 16 upwards of at least £12. 

But the message and policy is even more relevant today than then, with galloping inequality, exacerbated by the Tories' 10% hike of NIC taxation of ordinary workers. 

Copy and paste this VIDEO link in your search, or right click on it for options:

https://youtu.be/oIqKUohclN4

 

RESIST A PREMATURE STAMPEDE BACK TO MONEY-MAKING

Employers demanding 'business as usual' could threaten workers' lives

for PPE, mass testing and workers' control over health and safety 

Nobody wants the so-called lockdown to continue indefinitely. But for the preservation of human life, it's absolutely essential. All the evidence shows it's helping to suppress the spread of this deadly killer. 


It may appear bizarre to raise this in the same week the governments of the UK and Scotland announced continuation of the lockdown until at least 7 May, but the growing danger is a premature removal of restrictions, motivated by big business profits, at terrible risk to human life.

As we warned two weeks ago, sections of employers, of the Tory party, and indeed right wing Labour figures such as Sir Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, are ramping up the drumbeat of demands to 'reopen the economy'. 


Literally as we post this, the Scottish government has published a paper on future criteria for easing the lockdown. 
However well-intentioned as "the start of a conversation that treats the public like adults", the danger is it could be turned into background music for a growing chorus of demands by profit-itchy businesses to 'get back to normal'. A dangerous stampede towards a premature exit strategy motivated by their desire to make money, whatever the human risk. 

The Pressures of Social Isolation

Millions of workers are currently stuck at home. The Resolution Foundation think tank predict 11.7 million will have been either furloughed or made unemployed in the UK over the next three months. 
The ability to work from home is closely linked to earnings levels, with the lowest paid almost entirely unable to do so. 


Many of those millions not only live in fear of infection - including from household members who are working in essential services - but also suffer isolation, sometimes family tensions, increased incidence of domestic abuse, and even a lack of adequate food supplies through combinations of poverty and the inability to access supplies. 


Cramped housing, and lack of a garden to enjoy the pleasant weather, add to the frustration for millions. Whether living alone or with small children in a small flat, each creates its own pressures, plus humans are a naturally social being. 
And millions are on 80% or 90% of their normal wage, as employers with profits measured in not just millions but billions take the public subsidy of the Job Retention Scheme, but whinge that they simply can't afford to top up workers' wages to 100%. 

Trump leads the wreckless stampede

So no trade unionist or socialist worth their salt would advocate an indefinite lockdown. But that is not the threat we face. The growing and present danger is the government bending to big business lobbies to prematurely revive production, in pursuit of recovering profit margins, putting thousands of workers at risk of death.  


The most glaring, grotesque display of this trend is to be found in the USA. As far back as 24 March, a group of powerful billionaires met with Donald Trump, bombarding him to set an early date for lifting health restrictions, so as to reassure the money markets. 

The rich and powerful lobbyists Trump met included chief executives of private equity companies, hedge fund managers and others with so-called 'net worth' ranging from $17.1billion to a mere $2.8billion. The same fat cats are enjoying splendid self-isolation on vast holiday estates or lavish private yachts, but are hellbent on throwing millions of American workers back into production, and to hell with the consequences. 


Within hours of meeting this batch of brass-necked billionaires, Trump appeared on Fox News, declaring he would like to see the economy open up and "just raring to go by Easter," 12 April. He gushed that it would be "a beautiful timeline because Easter is such a beautiful day". 


Just days later Trump handed over $500billion in a bailout of big business. But not content with being subsidised to the hilt, many business moguls persisted with their demands to reopen production. 
For example, Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo demanded that people aged under 55 should return to work by late April, stating: 
"Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know. Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose." 


Not to be outdone, Paychex Inc's Tom Golisano - whose personal wealth sits at $3billion - said: 
"The damage of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse then losing a few more people. You're picking the better of two evils".

Tragic scenes of mass, unmarked graves on Hart Island, Bronx, New York

‘I’d rather die than kill the country’

One other singer of this song in a whole chorus-line of the obscenely rich is conservative TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who even six years ago had personal wealth of $90million. He blurted out the opinion: 
"I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working. Even if we all get sick, I'd rather die than kill the country".


The same week that the global death toll crossed the grisly landmark figure of 100,000, refrigerated lorries stacked high with human corpses stood outside hospitals in the USA, and people were buried in unmarked mass graves in a field in the Bronx. But that same week the media emphasis switched from grim warnings of the mounting death toll to talk of 'light at the end of the tunnel', with Trump advocating the US "open with a big bang." 

And Texas governor Dan Patrick was but one of many politicians leaving no doubt about their priorities:

"American senior citizens should accept the likelihood that some of them would die in order to allow the economy to reopen and preserve the America that all America loves for their children and grandchildren." 
Now Trump is actively encouraging small but highly publicised right-wing, gun-toting demonstrations calling for an end to the lockdown, with vicious, populist slogans like 'Liberate Minnesota', 'Liberate Virginia'.

Gun-toting right-wing demo to 'Liberate Florida' from lockdown

British bosses put profit first

However, this mounting pressure to put what they call 'the economy' before public health is not restricted to the USA. 

In fact, we've seen an intensification of aggressive national capitalist rivalries, in the face of a global pandemic that knows no borders. We witness this as they not only grab hold of safety equipment intended for other countries, but also ignore scientific warnings in a race to reopen production in the interests of the separate national ruling classes. 


Across Europe, governments are being pressurised by the big profiteers to reopen 'business as usual', and nowhere more so than in Britain. 

With its customary brutality, the Economist magazine has written: 
"COVID-19 presents stark choices between life, death and the economy. It sounds hard-hearted but a dollar figure on life...is precisely what leaders will need if they are to see their way through the harrowing months to come. Eventually even if many people are dying, the cost of distancing could outweigh the benefits."


Director of Wellcome Trust and Tory government advisor Sir Jeremy Farrar told Sky on Sunday on 19 April that the lockdown should be eased within weeks.
"The damage it's doing to all our health, our well being, our mental health, is disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable."

Tories 2018 Act to hamstring union safety reps

What Tory & corporate con-merchants really mean

We even suffer the grotesque spectacle of Tory Scottish Secretary of State, Alistair Jack, declaring:
"I would hate it if we come out the other side and the poverty that came from a broken economy killed more people than COVID-19. We know from previous analysis of recessions and depressions that poverty kills."


There should be no doubting what these voices of big business really mean, behind their honeyed words of 'concern'.  


When they speak of 'the economy' they actually mean the profits of a tiny clique who own the bulk of the economy. 

When they express concern about people's mental health being damaged through social isolation, the lockdown, these are the very same class of business owners who have generated an epidemic of mental illness before COVID-19 ever appeared. 
They've caused record levels of mental illness through insecure jobs; alienation at work from total lack of control by workers, even over their working hours; poverty pay; and horrendous physical and mental pressure by them overworking a shrinking workforce in pursuit of maximum profit. 

The same Tories, like Alistair Jack, who belatedly stumble on the truth that poverty kills, preside over a system that is built to consciously create poverty for millions to provide the wealth of a few millionaires -  in the full knowledge that poverty kills. 
They have systematically dismantled wages, benefits, sick pay, and the health service in a fashion that has caused countless avoidable deaths. 


The same Tories listened to and echoed the same big business voices by not calling a halt to non-essential production in good time, and thereby caused thousands of unnecessary infections and deaths in February-March, as they let COVID-19 rip through the population, with their ruthless theory of 'herd immunity', until they eventually conceded a partial lockdown on 24 March.


They couldn't give a damn about workers' health. Their one concern is owners' wealth. They are quite prepared to sacrifice human life on the altar of their great god, Profit.

London Mayor's warning, as calls to lift lockdown there earlier raised

Tories split under pressure?

The Tory Cabinet appear split on the issue. Leaks to the Times newspaper report that Gove and Chancellor Sunak want restrictions lifted once the peak of death has passed, arguing the government should "run things quite hot". 
Health Minister Hancock was more cautious, and de facto deputy PM Dominic Raab remained silent but is expected to side with those who want a rapid return to work. 
Boris Johnson, not noted for his humanity or care for workers' health,  has come out against lifting restrictions too early in fear of a second wave of the virus. He no doubt feels the pressure of scientific experts and public opinion, at least for now - especially in the wake of milking his own illness for every droplet of propaganda and popularity.


For example, when The Sunday Times reported senior ministers wanted to reopen schools on 11 May, it provoked a ferocious backlash from concerned staff and parents, with the head teachers' union (NAHT) denouncing unattributed government comments for spreading fear and confusion. 
"Instructing school leaders and their teams to return without including them in the planning stages or sharing proper safety arrangements would be extremely reckless." 

Meantime, the National Education Union (NEU) launched a petition to delay schools reopening until it is safe to do so, gathering 160,000 signatures within days.

"Now is not the time to ask if Tories were too slow" - Sir Keir Starmer

Starmer: being savaged by a dead sheep!

In a devastating display of the nature of the new Labour leadership, Sir Keir Starmer has for weeks repeatedly opined "Now is not the time to ask if the government was too slow to act."

When he did eventually question the government in parliament on 22 April for 'being slow', his criticism of the Tories whose actions have caused countless unnecessary deaths was about as effective as being savaged by a dead sheep. 


Starmer instead says "The critical question is the exit strategy from lockdown", even demanding a recall of the parliament to discuss it. Starmer has even seemed more eager to reopen schools than at least some of the Tory Cabinet. 

That working class hero and warrior for truth, justice and peace, Tony Blair, has been resurrected to parade round TV studios preaching the same gospel. 


At best, Starmer and Blair could be accused of attention seeking in a fashion that creates confusion around the need for strict measures to suppress the virus, as death still rips the heart out of families, not just in hospitals but in care homes and in the community. At worst, they are echoing the chorus line of profiteering businessmen who put profit before people and are prepared to ignore or deny the evidence that the lockdown is at least one part of what is necessary to stem the fatal tide.


When Starmer insists "now is not the time to ask" if the Tories were too slow to initiate social distancing and (at least partial) lockdown of non-essential businesses, he is dangerously letting them off the hook, removing pressure from them. 
Because the same Tories are just as liable to prematurely end these precautionary measures as they were reluctant to introduce them, for the same reasons: not wanting to undermine private profiteering, putting what they misleadingly call 'the economy' before public health, profit before people, regardless of how many are slaughtered in the hunt for renewed production and sales. 

Scientists warn of catastrophe

An array of eminent scientists, nationally and internationally, are warning against premature removal of lockdown restrictions. 


The World Health Organization has warned it could lead to a deadly resurgence of the disease, which in turn could force governments to reinstate even more severe lockdowns. They warn that there is no clear evidence that people who have contracted COVID-19 then become immune to it. And in fact reports from South Korea and China indicate people who had recovered from it have caught it a second time, which further punctures the callous nonsense of relying on 'herd immunity'.  


Directly contradicting Donald Trump, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, recently said: 
"We need to shutdown all non-essential business for several months, with social quarantine, to at least slow or stop COVID-19."


Professor of Virology at the University of Surrey, Nicholas Locker recently stated:
 "You can't lift the lockdown as long as you're not testing massively. As long as the government is not testing in the community we're going to be on lockdown." 



Editor of The Lancet magazine Richard Horton says: 
"It's wrong to say we don't have an exit strategy. We do. What is missing are the plans for its implementation. Surveillance, early detection, isolation, contact tracing, monitoring, real time estimates for the speed of spread of the virus."

Mass testing, tracing, isolation 

Emphasising that much more needs to be done than the current partial lockdown, the head of the Institute for Global Health at University College London warns isolation of the elderly and vulnerable on it's own is doomed to failure. These people do not live apart from others, they will inevitably catch the disease if it lets rip in the rest of the population, and it's unlikely those most at risk could be isolated for the four to five months they reckon is required to get 'herd immunity', which they in any case reject as unethical. 


This body of experts has a different plan they calculate will avert 353,000 deaths in Britain. It includes mass testing of everyone; contact tracing for those testing positive; care and thorough isolation; alongside proper provision of PPE for workers in essential services, such as the NHS, care workers and those in food supplies. They advocate weekly testing for everyone which would require 10 million a day, something they estimate is possible to virtually reach by August. The same Institute for Global Health estimate this would require 70,000 public health workers (about 6-7,000 in Scotland). 

Very limited testing early March abandoned by UK & Scottish governments 

But there is no evidence that the government has such plans. 
They have failed to provide PPE of either the quantity or quality required to frontline staff putting their own lives on the line to care for others. 
The alleged 'Health' Secretary Matt Hancock recently advised hospital staff to wash and re-use contaminated gowns, and blamed the scarcity of PPE not on supplies organised by his government, but on how much NHS staff use it! Nurses have died of COVID-19 after complaining of lack of proper protection. 


The Tories' promises of 100,000 tests a day at the end of April sound increasingly hollow and insulting as they only just reach the figure of 18-20,000 daily. 
Every day, the 5pm UK government briefing claims progress on testing and provision of PPE, followed an hour later by TV news horror stories of hospital staff and care workers left unprotected and untested for the virus, with increased numbers pronounced dead as a result. 

JD Sports warehouses still working - unsafely

Unions must demand concrete safety measures

Rather than allow workers to be victims of a premature stampede back to 'business as usual', the unions have a particular duty to demand a concrete plan of safety measures before non-essential businesses reopen. 
And not just empty promises of such measures from a government shown to have lied and prevaricated throughout this crisis, but actual concrete supplies and measures already in place. 


Those would need to include recruitment of a vast army to conduct mass testing of the population without stripping frontline workers from other lifeline services. 


'Test, trace and isolate' needs to be transformed from a mantra to a material reality before it's safe to consider reopening non-essential businesses. 
And isolation for those who test positive should include safe, caring health facilities, not just being stuck at home with others in the family, when the evidence from China suggests most transmission occurs within families or households. 

Seize production to match needs

It should include demands for the government to take over appropriate production units for the emergency, sustained supply of quality PPE for all workers in the firing line. 

It's brilliant and life-affirming to see networks of people sewing scrubs for NHS staff in their homes, but the scale of mass production required can only be organised by the state. Which raises the need for the government to take over major companies to coordinate armies of workers producing - in safe  conditions - all the safety equipment for NHS, care, food retail, and other essential services staff. 


Likewise, rather than the unseemly squabble between different nations for supplies of masks, scrubs, ventilators and Intensive Care Units, the government should commandeer factories to produce all that is needed, in the same fashion industries were taken over by governments for war production during World War Two. 
We cannot rely on the whims of the capitalist market to meet the life and death needs of workers and their families.

Recent scenes inside JD Sports warehouse: putting profit before people!

Unions' critical role

This whole crisis has heavily emphasised the critical importance of organised trade unions and collective action. It took intense lobbying by union reps, and mass walkouts by workers in many cases, to gradually force employers to introduce basic safety standards, or to shut down non-essential workplaces, with the demand for 100% average pay. 

Likewise, the RCN was right to offer full support to any of their 450,000 nurse members who "make the difficult decision to refuse to work without proper PPE" in the hospitals. 


The Royal College of Anaesthetists has since conducted a survey of members, who are at the very front line of treatment, applying ventilators to patients with severe COVID-19 infection. They found one in every five lacks proper PPE, and one in four feels pressurised to work despite this lack of protective equipment. 
They have now, rightly, advised members to refuse to work without adequate PPE, not only to protect their own health but that of patients too. 

Demand workers' control of Health & Safety through elected union reps

For workers’ control of health & safety

At workplace level, this whole experience underlines the importance of workers' control of health and safety, through elected shop stewards and Health & Safety reps. 

Such bodies need to be revived or established in every workplace, applying concrete demands for safer working conditions where they are already at work, or before non-essential production or sales resume. 

These to include reorganisation of workplaces to guarantee safe social distancing; deep cleans and intensified daily cleaning routines; screens, masks, surgical wipes and increased washing facilities; full average pay for vulnerable workers to self-isolate, or to shield vulnerable family members; and the right to refuse work when feeling endangered, as already exists as a right on paper, under Health & Safety legislation. 


Mass, weekly, professional testing at workplace level, as well as in the community, would be a major strand to any serious plan towards reviving production, sales and public transport.


Through this whole process it's right there needs to be a plan on when and how to ease lockdown. But workers' union representatives,  alongside scientists, need to be fully involved in decision-making, not just told what senior management have already decided in their absence. 

Construction workers still being forced to work: how can they keep 2m apart?

Workers’ voices must be heard 

It's welcome that Nicola Sturgeon has established a panel to look at this scenario, but very unwelcome that the unions are not represented on it, certainly not so far. 


The initial members of the SNP government's Advisory Group on Economic Recovery gives us a warning glimpse of the 'business as usual' outlook of that government. It's to be led by Benny Higgins, former Chief Executive of Tesco Bank for ten years, after stints as a top boss in RBS and HBOS. His first comrade-in-arms is Sir Anton Muscatelli, overpaid Principal of the University of Glasgow, not best known for his support for striking staff or protesting students! 


Both at national level and in each workplace the expertise and knowledge of workers themselves needs to be harnessed to ensure the safest possible working arrangements regardless of the impact on short-term profits. 


We need to organise resistance to any premature return to capitalist 'business as usual'. 

Workers' lives must come before the profits of the parasitic plunderers.  

TORIES ADMIT GUILT - BUT CONTINUE INSECURE WORK CRIMES

When is a radical new package of workers’ rights nothing of the kind? When it’s announced by a besieged Tory government, increasingly bombarded by public anger at the horrendous insecurity of jobs and workplace rights in Britain.

Theresa May is today trumpeting a package of measures that her spin doctors describe as “the most radical upgrade of rights at work in a generation”. Let’s look behind the manufactured headlines.

They plan legislation that insists employers issue a “statement of rights” from the first day of a worker’s employment – including what paid leave they are entitled to for illness, maternity and paternity.

Anything that improves transparency in worker’s rights is welcome. But this is a planet apart from what many have fought for: the demand of full employment rights from day one in a job, as opposed to having to wait full two years before having legal rights on things like unfair dismissal – the same Tory government doubled the qualifying period.

The Tories promise to “close a loophole that allows agency workers to be paid less than permanent staff.” A welcome small step, if it refers to hourly rates of pay, but it still does nothing to combat the short-term, crushingly insecure nature of agency work.

Oliver Twist, Tory-style

The new legislation will give workers “the right to request more predicable hours”.

To ‘request’!? This pre-Christmas promise is about as useful as Charles Dickens’ starving child, Oliver Twist, having the right to utter “Please, Sir, I want more”, only to be walloped over the head with the gruel-serving ladle by his over-fed master!

Already, workers have ‘the right to request’ changes in their working shift patterns – but employers have the right to reject that request, and habitually do so, using the catch-all ‘business needs’ excuse.

Crimes Admitted – Without Solutions

This new legislation is an implicit admission that workers’ lives are wracked by the rampant insecurity caused by zero hours contracts, short hours contracts, agency work and the gig economy. But it falls far short of actually tackling these issues.

For instance, the Tories have reiterated the viewpoint of former Tony Blair aide, Matthew Taylor – whose Review on modern working practices they commissioned – that an outright ban on zero hours contracts “would negatively impact more people than it helped.”

This is all part of their deliberate and malicious conflation and confusion of two entirely different things; flexibility and insecurity.

Workers need flexibility, on the likes of starting and finishing times, to cope with the increasingly complex demands of family life, or juggling a job with a college course, for instance. But that’s not provided by the insecure, low-paid jobs that are increasingly the only employment on offer – part-time, short-term, agency, zero hours or short hours contracts.

Ban Zero Hours Contracts

Deliveroo delivery workers at a solidarity protest. [Photo: Craig Maclean]

Zero hours contracts give all the flexibility to the employers, who have workers at their beck and call, sending them home “unwanted” and unpaid on a regular basis, and denying workers shifts for weeks as a punishment if they have the audacity to turn down one shift. And all the insecurity of income, working patterns, denial of access to credit and mortgages, etc, is the lot of workers on this modern epitome of casual labour.

As a major recent survey of 10,500 retail workers by my own union, Usdaw, confirmed, this insecurity of income and lifestyle is the root cause of a galloping epidemic of mental ill health.

Real Protection – With Real Flexibility

Instead of token gestures about “the right to request more predictable hours” we need real, radical legislation to guarantee every worker the right to a minimum working week of 16 hours, if they want it, as pioneered by my own party, the SSP, and now my own union, Usdaw – and as agreed unanimously as policy at the recent TUC congress.

That would mean outright abolition of zero hours contracts. It would help eradicate the criminal situation where a full one million workers are only in part-time jobs because they can’t get the full-time job they actually want. It would erase the startling fact that – by the Tory government’s own admission – 400,000 workers regularly work 6 hours a week or less. And it would confront the atrocity that sums up the modern curse of underemployment, governments can boast of record levels of employment: but the Office of National Statistics counts anyone working a minimum of one hour a week as being employed!

Unionise and Organise for Guaranteed 16-hour Minimum Week

And legislation guaranteeing a minimum week of 16 hours to all workers who want it would also offer genuine flexibility; as the policy Motion I put forward at the 2018 Usdaw national conference put it, the 16-hour minimum would apply “except where a worker, accompanied by their union representative, requests less hours”. That’s also the wording of the Motion we successfully submitted from Usdaw at the British TUC.

Workers in the burgeoning sector of insecure work, in its various forms, would be wise not to rely on the Tories’ false claims of providing protection. Instead, they need the collective protection of being in a union, and in turn the unions need to get stuck into fighting for implementation of the policies adopted at union and TUC conferences.

This latest Tory announcement amounts to an admission of guilt, but without any real plans to end their crimes against workers.

As ‘the Good Book’ might put it, the sinner hath sinned, but repenteth not!