STAND UP - PAY UP - DEFY TORY AUSTERITY!

Christmas is supposed to be the season of goodwill towards all. Not so when it's the season of budget-setting at Scottish and local government levels. With the knives being sharpened and wielded, far from being a source of good cheer, it threatens ill-will towards public service workers, and wilful damage to public services - including life-and-death services for children and elderly people. 

Most of us are already long-since convinced that the obnoxious Tories are the chief axe-swingers, with a callous record of killing people through health and safety cutbacks, benefits sanctions and decimation of lifeline services. 

Their claims that austerity is ended fools nobody living on below-breadline benefits, the derisory minimum wage, or stressed into a state of mental illness from insecurity in their job. Nor do the Tory soothsayers convince elderly frail people subjected to mere flying 15-minute visits from overstretched care workers; or teachers and students crammed into overcrowded classes; or people absolutely desperate for a home, who confront the slaughter of decent social sector housing.

Words and Deeds

Things are supposed to be different in Scotland. Millions voted for candidates declaring their undying opposition to Tory austerity, particularly in the 2017 general election. That was the central feature of Jeremy Corbyn's improved performance for Labour; his pledge to ditch austerity. That was pivotal to the SNP's appeal to voters, with their 2017 Manifesto declaring "we will roll back the impact of Tory austerity". 

But words are cheap, and they don't put food on the table. Governments and parties will be judged - harshly - by what they do when they are handed the reins of office by voters, as opposed to any ringing declamations in glossy election manifestos. 

And growing tens of thousands of Scottish workers are judging those holding office in Holyrood and the town halls as Ebenezer Scrooges on pay and conditions, rather than being seen as bountiful Santa Clauses. That's why a vast - and potentially very powerful - army of workers are marching, meeting, lobbying, protesting and voting for strike action, particularly on pay.

The Lost Decade

Millions of workers have suffered over a decade of pay cuts, in both the public and private sectors. It's been officially declared the longest period of real pay cuts since the Napoleonic Wars, 200 years ago. Plunging wages have choked off spending power and added to the horrendous epidemic of job insecurity, with workplace stress and mental ill health spreading like a modern plague. 

In the recent survey of 10,500 members of my own union, Usdaw, we discovered 63% feel worse off compared to five years ago, with a shocking 76% of them relying on pay day loans, credit cards and overdrafts to pay everyday, essential bills. As well as two-thirds of these workers - employed in the second-largest sector of the entire economy - saying financial worries are damaging their mental health, a full 10% of retail workers who put food on the shelves are unable to put food on their family's table, resorting to food banks over the past year!

Unison Scotland surveyed 2,000 Scottish union members last June. The picture that emerged is a bleak condemnation of the politicians who promised to end or roll back Tory austerity. A full 74% of these public service workers have witnessed job cuts in their department, leading to 52% feeling their workload is unmanageable, and 57% of them regularly working unpaid overtime to try and catch up in the provision of services to often vulnerable people. 

Their horror stories of overcrowded, mouldy housing; increased rat infestation; and vulnerable children and adults not getting the services they desperately need, led to 78% of council workers having no confidence in the future of local services. And exactly half of them are thinking of leaving their council job for something less stressful elsewhere; good luck to them in finding that, we have to add. 

Which Response to Mayhem?

Such dire conditions of insecurity, falling incomes and unprecedented stress and anxiety can fuel one of two types of response. Utter despair and resignation (and for some, openness to right-wing demagogues who blame immigrants). Or an angry, well-directed collective revolt through trade union and political struggles, to put the blame squarely where it belongs, the profiteers and their political representatives, with a rational alternative based on putting people before profit. 

The potential for the positive, latter course of action is to be seen in a rash of recent outpourings against pay cuts, unequal pay for women workers, and demands for proper funding of local services. 

Pay Revolt Erupts

Over 8,000 low-paid Glasgow city council workers, about 90% of them women, recently staged the biggest equal pay strike in the country's history. They are in revolt against a pay system which means they are £3-an-hour worse off than they should be under equal pay legislation - a criminal system in place since at least 2012, mostly under a Labour-run council, now under the SNP-run administration. This was an eruption of working-class anger and mass, collective power - not calls for equal places on company boardrooms by a handful of extremely privileged women.

The power and vitality of the strike - driven from below by carers, caterers, cleaners and classroom assistants - has raised the sights and confidence of thousands of other workers, and put the SNP council on the run. So much so that a vocal section of ultra-loyal nationalists have insulted the intelligence of these workers by claiming they are mere puppets in a cunning Labour Party plot to discredit the SNP council and SNP Scottish government. They should try telling that to one of the mass meetings of women, who are seething at being treated as second-class citizens for years, furious that far too many of them have died before getting the equal pay and back-pay compensation that was rightfully theirs. 

Labour's Stench of Hypocrisy

Of course the hypocrisy of Labour on this issue stinks to the high heavens. Up until 2017, it was a Labour council which resisted union demands for equal pay - including during 10 different strikes against the council - and squandered over £2.5million of Council Taxpayers' money on court cases to overturn rulings in favour of equal pay. And they suppressed the findings of the Equality & Human Rights Commission in 2010, which found the Labour council guilty of discrimination.

Equal pay will cost the council at least £500m, plus the ongoing increase in the wages bill when the necessary new pay structure is hammered out in talks with the unions, to banish pay inequality for the years and generations of workers ahead. But as union activists have rightly insisted, this must not be at the cost of pay cuts to other workers, nor even further cuts to services; it should be a case of equalizing upwards, with demands for adequate funding off the Scottish government. 

Education, education, education?

The 2016 SNP Manifesto declared: "The defining mission of this government will be education." 

Music to the ears of parents and teachers alike, after decades of cuts, rising class sizes, class-based inequality in attainment, and mind-breaking workloads for staff. But such melodious promises are turning into an ugly echo of Tony Blair's infamous mantra that his Labour government would prioritize 'Education, education, education', only to then slash the service. 

The same noisy handful who have accused Glasgow's equal pay strikers of being puppets worked by Labour Party plotters have likewise claimed the eruption of school teachers' demonstrations and ballots for their 10% pay claim is all a ploy to discredit the SNP government. I doubt if even the most big-headed Labour MSPs or spin doctors could dream of having the power to pour out 30,000 teachers on their recent mass demo, with its combination of family carnival atmosphere and determination to turn the tide on pay cuts, work overload and recruitment crisis in many schools! 

No, Cabinet Minister! 

It was an outpouring of years of teachers' frustration and angry rejection of the divisive 3% offer from COSLA and the SNP government. And far from being mere stooges of some Labour plot, it's a fair guess that a majority of the teachers on this 3-mile-long demo will have voted SNP in a recent election! No wonder they were dismayed at the letter jointly issued by COSLA bosses and SNP Cabinet Secretary John Swinney, designed to bypass the teachers' union representatives, in the vain hope of atomizing and browbeating individuals into surrender. 

On the heels of the demo, EIS teachers voted by a landslide 98% majority, in a whopping 74% turnout, to reject the 3% offer, and look set to ballot for strike action in the New Year. 

Parallel to these high profile pay battles, local authority workers in the three unions - Unison, Unite and GMB - have rejected COSLA's 3% pay offer, and have started to vote for strike action. 

Simultaneously, lecturers in Scotland's further education colleges are voting for strike action in pursuit of a cost-of-living pay rise. These members of EIS-FELA union are furious at college management only offering a 2.5% pay rise over three years - a pay cut, given inflation levels - with the added atrocity that the employers want to tie this offer to the pay increases won through strike action for pay equality across all the FE colleges two years ago, robbing back up to £1,000 from the rises won then. 

Combine - Make Them Pay Up!

These combined workforces make up nearly 200,000 workers. The coming together of these separate strands of the same struggle - for decent pay that compensates a bit for inflation and years of pay cuts - should be an opportunity for coordinated campaign rallies and industrial action. 

The 'Pay Up' lobby of the Scottish parliament on Budget Day, 12th December, and similar localized events targeting council meetings, should be used by union leaderships to spell out a clear, bold alternative to the litany of annual cuts to pay, jobs and services. 

No Cuts Budgets

Given the slaughter of services, jobs and wages over the last decade and more, we actually need a crusade to reverse austerity cuts. But as an absolute bare minimum, unions should demand that the Scottish government and all 32 local councils set No Cuts budgets for 2019/20, incorporating the immediate pay claims and equal pay claims of the workers already taking action. And also including the minimum employment standards in their budgets of a £10-an-hour minimum wage and guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for all their staff and contract workers who want it - as unanimously demanded at our recent Scottish Usdaw conference, representing 45,000 members. 

Roll Back – or Roll Over?

Some will plead that councillors or MSPs simply cannot take such a defiant stance, given the budget cuts handed down to them by Westminster. If that's the case, why make false election promises to "roll back the impact of Tory austerity"? Why not honestly declare "we will roll over in the face of Tory austerity"?! 

It's true that after all the huffing and puffing and claims to have ended austerity in their recent Budget, the Theresa May Tory government has only increased the block grant to Scotland by a minuscule 1.8%, to £30.5billion. 

But where's there's a political will there's a way! May's Tory government is in an unprecedented crisis. Surely the political leadership of Scotland, in collaboration with the leadership of about 200,000 trade unionists already poised for action - and those of over 600,000 organised trade unionists in Scotland as a whole - can turn the Tories' difficulties into our opportunity? 

By setting No Cuts budgets, and mobilising mass demonstrations and supporting any strike actions voted for in union ballots, the Scottish government and council leaderships could cudgel the besieged Tories with demands for extra funding to avoid all cuts and meet workers' demands. They could popularise the demand "Give us back some of our stolen £billions!" That's what a socialist council or government would do. 

Tax the rich – double the money!

Furthermore, the SSP has for 20 years persistently advocated an immediate, straightforward, fully-researched alternative form of council funding which could shield Scotland from the atrocities of austerity. 

It's true that the majority (54%) of all council funding comes directly in a grant from the Scottish government. But 18% of all funding (last year) came from the Council Tax, and amounted to £2.24billion across Scotland. But the Council Tax is an unfair, regressive tax, that hammers the poorest and middle income families, and merely tickles the wallets of the rich with a feather. 

Scottish Service Tax

The SSP has fully costed our alternative, a Scottish Service Tax, based on income, on ability to pay, with rising tax bands. And the beauty of this progressive tax proposal is that about 80% of people would pay less, but by taxing the rich minority the funds raised would be double that coming from the regressive Council Tax; over £4billion a year instead of £2.24billion. 

So instead of hammering workers with higher Council Tax bills, or pay cuts, or job losses, or the slaughter of services... and in reality a cocktail of all these multiple attacks... the Scottish government has the full powers under devolution to stop all austerity, pass legislation to implement such a Scottish Service Tax, and shelter Scotland from the Westminster storm. And the additional £2billion raised would almost reverse the cuts of the past five years in one year alone! 

Whose Side Are They On?

We approach 2019 with Scotland at a crossroads.

We can sit down in surrender as the Tories at Westminster issue austerity, which the Holyrood government meekly devolves to local councils, health boards and college managements to implement, which in turn they do without a whimper. 

We can blithely pass by while SNP MSPs line up alongside Tory MSPs to block an end to the profiteering debacle of Dutch-owned Abellio ripping the profit out of ScotRail workers and ScotRail passengers - so that the same profiteers can two weeks later announce abolition of free travel for children. 

We can accept poverty pay, cheap casualised labour and a mental health epidemic with the plea "there's nothing we can do about until independence". 

Or we can seek to weld the several strands of struggle on pay and public services into a coordinated resistance movement, armed with a vision. 

The vision of an alternative system that taxes the rich; that demands well-paid, secure jobs, including a minimum wage of at least two-thirds average male earnings, and a guaranteed 16-hour minimum working week; that provides cradle-to-grave public services fit for the 21st century; that constructs a free, publicly-owned transport system that helps tackle poverty, pollution and provides decent jobs and apprenticeships at one fell swoop; a clean, green socialist Scotland that builds green energy technology instead of warships. 

The Scottish Socialist Party is determined and willing to stand up on our hind legs in resistance; to play our part in pursuit of these aims, in the workplaces, unions, colleges and streets. 

We appeal to fellow-workers to demand the same of their unions, and those who regard themselves as socialists in Labour or the SNP to demand nothing less of their own party leaderships. It's time to decide whose side they are on! 

I spoke to a teacher about her reasons for preparing to strike for 10%...

Q: What has created such strength of feeling – the 98% vote to reject the 3%?

A: Teachers have reached the end of their tether like all workers in the public sector, working increasing hours through more changes in education, and in mitigating some of the worst poverty-related issues we have seen since the Thatcher and Major years with their time and money. The huge cuts in provision, our salaries, and the increased pressure of increased classroom sizes, really have pushed teachers to emotional limits.

Q: What did you think of letter from COSLA and John Swinney?

A: I think John Swinney and COSLA made huge errors in treating teachers as scabs. Swinney and the SNP won the elections after betrayals of workers by New Labour. Swinney should carefully reconsider his disregard of workers’ representatives and proper negotiation.

Q: Why is 10% justified - when most workers get 2%?

A: All workers should have confidence in fighting for what we are due. Tory austerity is completely ideological. It is a cover for the robbery of all workers. The millionaires and billionaires are becoming richer beyond most people's imaginations while workers are paying their gambling debts.

Q: How will employers pay for it? Cut other services or jobs??

A: Simple. Raise taxes of the highest earners, and replace the dreadful council tax with a fair, Scotland wide, service tax.

Q: What should the union do now to win the 10%?

A: Industrial action, in my opinion, is the only way forward. A simple work to rule would be a start. Teachers in my school are working 50-60 hour weeks. Working 35 hours a week will expose the huge hole in funding we are plugging with our extremely stretched good will. Teachers really don't want to impact on already stretched working class families. But the increasing pressure on delivering a curriculum with less resources, fewer adults in schools and with ever decreasing free time, is pushing teachers towards industrial action that will see schools closed.

DEMAND £10 NOW AND NOT A PENNY OFF JOBS OR SERVICES!

Part of SSP National Day of Action 18 November  

As the Scottish government and 32 local councils prepare their Budgets for 2018/19, the Scottish Socialist Party has launched a new campaigning drive for an immediate minimum £10 Living Wage to be written into 'No Cuts' Budgets. 

This is an urgent, realistic demand, well within the powers of Holyrood and the local authorities - who between them employ 500,000 workers - and a potentially powerful breakthrough in the battle for a £10 minimum wage, here and now, for all workers over 16, with equal pay for women. 

"I'm for Austerity - Get me out of here!"

If SNP, Labour, or any other MSPs and councillors reject this demand - alongside reversing seven years of the income-slashing pay cap, plus protection of every single service - they should be rejected and evicted by voters. 

To amend the slogan currently made 'popular' by Kezia Dugdale, such axe-wielding politicians should admit: "I'm for austerity, get me out of here!"

There's absolutely no excuse for one, single person suffering the indignity, deprivation and inhumanity of being impoverished in such a rich country. Scotland has ten billionaires, piles of profit, enormous resources and skilled workers. It's a question of radically redistributing the wealth. 

Paradise for the Parasites

This battle is set in the midst of paradise for the profiteers, and hell on earth for millions struggling to survive in a sea of poverty. 

The recently leaked 'Paradise Papers' confirmed the grotesque, legalized robbery of the rest of us by the rich, with conservative estimates of big business and obscenely rich individuals hiding over £30trillion in offshore tax havens. 

Corporations like Apple and Nike are in the company of tax thieves like Bono and the Queen; dodging taxes, robbing society of £billions, stealing wages, pensions, benefits and public services off the working class. 

A full 80% of all offshore wealth is in the hands of a minuscule 0.1% of the population (that's one in 1,000). 

Multinational businesses shifted $600billion to these (overwhelmingly British) offshore tax havens last year alone. 

The PCS civil service union's research has already shown £120billion every year is dodged in taxes by the rich and big business - the equivalent of four years of Scotland's block grant budget from Westminster. 

Tales of Poverty Amidst Plenty

This legalized, systematic theft helps create a living hell of plummeting pay, life-threatening benefit cuts, and decimation of vital public services. 

Socialist exaggeration? Absolutely not! Anyone in touch with the conditions of the working class majority will testify to the mounting desperation amongst the poorest; the inability of even middle-income workers to match the rising cost of living; and the ticking time-bomb of mental ill-health created by impossible workloads and stress from poverty and debt.

Let's sample just a few examples. 

The one million people in Scotland officially below the poverty line, 52% of them in jobs, working to stay poor. 

The 'hunger-watch' scheme initiated by the EIS teachers' union two years ago, to help spot children unable to concentrate because of literal hunger. 

The equivalent of Dundee city's population who swallowed their pride and turned to food banks in Scotland last year to avert starvation. 

The welfare rights workers who are on the brink of physical and mental collapse with overwork and the harrowing daily experience of desperation amongst clients: the man working 60 hours a week as a taxi just to pay the mortgage and feed his child after his marriage ended; the blind man removed from sickness benefits, relying on his son's income from one or two shifts a week on a zero hours contract, while he waits since June for his benefits appeal, which drove him to attempted suicide. 

The fact teachers' real pay has fallen by 16%, and the EIS union describes teachers' massive workload - working 50-60 hours a week - as having "desperate effects on their health and well-being." 

Heart-breaking human stories are accompanied by chilling statistics. A new LSE Report calculates that since the June 2016 EU referendum and subsequent plunge in the value of Sterling - pushing up prices of items with a high import content, such as food - the average Scottish worker has lost £404 a year in wages. On top of the 10.8% fall in real wages since the banking crisis of 2008. 

Demand Action from the Anti-Tory Parties  

Hell will freeze over before the Tories start looking after the wellbeing of the millions, as opposed to the profits and privileges of the millionaires. So it's right - and urgent - that we demand action from those politicians closest to the ground in Scotland, who also like to define themselves as anti-austerity. 

The SNP helped win its historic landslide by denouncing austerity. That was the key platform of Jeremy Corbyn in his defeat of New Labour leadership candidates, with their record of implementing austerity. Latterly, Richard Leonard tried to echo his opposition to cuts.

We want words made into deeds by Scotland's anti-Tory parties.

That's why the SSP - who since September 2014 have campaigned in the streets and trade unions for an immediate, statutory £10 minimum for all over 16, with equal pay for women - is stepping up pressure on the SNP Holyrood government and Labour and SNP councillors. 

That's why the SSP held a National Day of Action on the Baltic Saturday 18 November,  demanding a guarantee that from April 2018, nobody these governments directly or indirectly employs would be trying to survive on anything less than £10 an hour.

SSP members braved the bitter cold to hold street stalls and street meetings in Glasgow's Partick and Govan; Nairn; Edinburgh; East Kilbride; Paisley; Cumbernauld; Coatbridge and Irvine. 

We met the man who simply stated: "I looked at an old wage slip from 15 years ago, and there's very little difference in my earnings now."

The Richmond Fellowship care worker who was furious at being on £7.50 an hour, unable to afford a holiday, when she has dedicated herself for years to a job she loves, caring for the most vulnerable.

People scrimping and saving simply to pay the rent and buy food. 

Braving the Baltic conditions in Nairn on SSP Day of Action

Demand 'No Cuts' Defiance Budgets

Local authority workers expressed their anxiety at yet more cuts looming in the forthcoming council budgets. Which is why our campaigning demand for councillors to defy austerity, set No Cuts Budgets, with the £10 minimum included, and then fight for the funds to do this, is so timely and important. 

No councillors - whether Labour or SNP - should be prepared to trade wages for jobs, or workers' conditions for public services. Yet that's what they've done for years. And unless the unions, STUC and community campaigns unite in decisive action with socialists, and demand the cash off Westminster and Holyrood, a repeat of the Ice Age of cuts to pay, public services and jobs looms large.

COSLA Cuts Warnings

The council umbrella body, COSLA, has just produced a frightening picture of the choices we face, ahead of the SNP government's draft Budget in December, which in turn sets the spending settlements for Council Budgets.

COSLA reiterates that there's been £1.4billion cuts by councils since 2012, with 30,000 people losing their jobs, and communities priced out of facilities and services by the 13% hike in charges - often the hidden form of austerity. 

The same COSLA document warns that to just stand still - not improve people's lives, but merely hold onto the brutally inadequate provision by councils we have now - the Scottish government needs to allocate an extra £545million to councils for 2018/19 - a 5.7% increase in funding. 

The response of the SNP government so far? "We will continue to treat local government fairly." Continue? Last year's SNP/Scottish Greens Budget slashed another £170m off council funding, adding to successive years of butchery. 

Wield Power of Unions  

We can't rely on the powers of pleading - or resort to prayer - to win the funds which protect jobs, conditions, public services... and also guarantee a £10 minimum as part of a pay compensation package for the 7 years of pay cuts suffered by 500,000 public sector workers. It requires a serious, united fight, wielding the potential power of workers, their unions and their communities.

The Battle for BiFab in Fife and Lewis wasn't won (at least until April) by humble pleas to the employers or government. It was won by brave, united and swift action by the workforce - refusing to leave their jobs; defending the fabrication yards from asset-strippers by union control of the gates; stockpiling resources in preparation for outright occupations - and by telling the authorities they weren't budging. 

Workers' Action Against Austerity 

That's the spirit and method needed to stop the slaughter of services, jobs and pay that has crucified workers and communities alike, as we pay for the bailout of the bankers and billionaires' profits. 

We won't win the modest, increasingly inadequate demand for £10 now - nor replacement of the abomination of zero hours contracts with a guaranteed 16-hour minimum contract for all who want it - without a mighty battle involving street protests, demos and coordinated strike action, putting the politicians and employers on the spot. 

The SSP's street action on 18 November is just the prelude to an orchestrated campaign of explanation and pressure on the Scottish government and councils to put their money where their mouths are. 

The SSP will step up this demand for an immediate £10 in our unions as well as on the streets. 

Sign and Share the Online Petition 

The Online Petition I recently launched on behalf of the SSP is targeting demands for action on Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and the heads of COSLA, but also Richard Leonard, who we correctly anticipated would become the new Scottish Labour leader. 

Richard's victory speech referred to offering 'hope' to the Scottish people. Here's his chance: we are calling on him to instruct his Labour Party councillors to break the habits of several decades and refuse to vote for a single penny in cuts, and instead inspire public sector AND private sector workers by implementing a £10 Living Wage immediately - not in 2020, as Labour has so far pledged, which will be severely devalued by inflation by then. 

Photo by Craig Maclean

Volunteer to Help Win £10 Now! 

We have no intention of making this campaign a one-day wonder. 

We need more street campaigning; more propositions for this policy and for action in the public sector unions; more volunteers to do all this... and we need thousands of signatures on our Online Petition. 

Please get in touch to play your part in this battle to set the pace in the public sector, transform the lives of tens of thousands of workers - and vastly boost the battle for an immediate, legally-enforced £10 minimum, rising with inflation, for all workers across the land. 

SIGN PETITION HERE

2017:For United Class Struggle and Class Politics

2017 cries out for a reawakening of collective struggle and class politics in an age of class war by the rich against the rest of us.

The wide and growing chasm between the richest and the rest of humanity makes the Grand Canyon look like a small sheugh. Just eight billionaires on the planet - yes, 8 men - have more combined wealth than the poorest 3.6 billion people on Earth. 

The global elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum - to ponder how best to plunder workers' labour and the planet's resources for the maximum profit for this class of grotesquely rich.

They quaff champagne and canapés whilst talking about workers' productivity, in a world where one in nine people go hungry, according to Oxfam.

They arrive in private jets whilst pretending concern for climate change.

And just to ram home the class divide across the globe - even in Davos - the white-badged, tax-dodging elite at the WEF have access to the plushest of all posh parties, whilst the purple-badged support staff are excluded.

And these obscenities on legs have the audacity to discuss their 'concerns' about the rise of the populist right, the dangerously distorted backlash against their preferred form of exploitation - globalization. 

Davos - where the world's rich plan

how to plunder our labour and planet

Planned Poverty 

In our own small corner of this class-ridden globe, the UK's fat cat company executives earned as much - £28,200 - in the first two-and-a-half days of 2017 as it takes the average-paid worker an entire year to earn. 

Put another way, the average top dog in the FTSE 100 companies grabs as much for himself as paid out to 10,000 workers in a Bangladeshi garment factory - with none of the risks to life and limb. 

This gaping chasm between capitalist overlords and the real wealth-producing class - workers, of all kinds - is no accident of nature; it's the result of decades of conscious, savage assaults on workers' rights, organizations and conditions. 

Especially over the past 30 years, since the defeat of the heroic miners' strike, wages have been slaughtered to the lowest share of national wealth since records began; the right and ability to combine in collective union struggle has been savaged by the worst  anti-union laws in the western world; casualised, insecure forms of employment have been deliberately used - in tandem with the weapon of fear - to turbocharge profits by enslaving millions in low-paid jobs. 

A new report shows that 20 years ago, 1 in 20 men in this country tried to survive on low-paying, part-time jobs; that has skyrocketed to 1 in 5 men in 2017.

'Precarious Pay Penalty'

Pressure groups and think tanks conjure up ever-new phrases for the same old super-exploitation of workers. The latest is a report showing that the one million workers suffering the nightmare insecurity of Zero Hours Contracts are hit by a 'Precarious Pay Penalty' of £1,000 a year. On average they are paid 38% less than similar workers - with similar skills, experience, education and background, in similar jobs - who are permanently employed.

ZHCs are proven to be weapons to deliberately drive down wages.

Struggle - or Things Can Only Get Worse

And things are set to get worse in 2017, unless a ferocious resistance is organised by workers, their unions and socialists. 

Several new Tory measures are about to be implemented, designed to further batter down workers to boost profits. Their 2016 Trade Union Act makes it harder to hold strike ballots and threatens to criminalize strikers from April onwards. 

Theresa May has pledged a 'Great Repeal Act' in the Queen's Speech this Spring, to provide Westminster a free hand to slaughter employment rights post-Brexit.

Brexit is a handy excuse to jack up prices, whilst wages are forecast (by the Tory government itself!) to remain stagnant until at least 2021. 

Tory Chancellor Hammond has highlighted their willingness to cut corporation tax even further, in retaliation for any import tariffs from the EU, whilst shedding the 'red tape' of the European Court of Justice. Health and Safety regulations (of which 41 out of 65 originated in the EU) face a bonfire. The Tory Brexiteers see that, and the dismantling of EU Working Time Directives, as their golden opportunities to squeeze more out of workers, regardless of the effect on their health. 

What is to be done?
The crunch question is what organised - and not-yet-organised - workers do about this cataclysmic catalogue of exploitation, job insecurity, poverty and inequality. And in Scotland, what the SNP government is prepared to do to resist - on behalf of the working class majority, not of capitalists yearning for a profitable place in the EU single market. 

The recent wave of strikes by workers on the railways, airlines, Crown Post Offices and pockets of council staff are to be heartily applauded for putting up resistance.

But the trade union movement leadership has to do more than applaud; they need to coordinate and build such action, confronting the anti-union laws when they stand in the way of progress; defying laws against solidarity action; coming to the aid of any group of workers criminalized for picketing, under the Tory Trade Union Act. 

Victories for workers and their campaigning allies in the gig economy - Uber, Deliveroo, etc - and other precarious sectors (such as hospitality) needs to be spread and replicated by a plan of action by all unions. 

SSP demanding funds for council jobs and services

Defy all Cuts

Council unions need to step up to the mark and resist savage council cuts, issued by Westminster, passed on by Holyrood, and implemented by Labour and SNP councils alike.

The call for No Cuts Defiance Budgets and cancellation of historic debts at council level, as a platform to demand back the £millions stolen by Westminster and Holyrood, is critical to this opposition - in the wake of 40,000 job losses in Scotland's 32 local authorities since 2007.

£10 Now - with 16 Hours Minimum Guaranteed

Central to the struggles required in 2017 are measures to combat poverty-stricken, insecure jobs, and its ugly twin, inequality.

Trade unions and socialists need to escalate the campaign for a decent living minimum wage - legally enforced - of £10 for all over 16. Not in 2020, but now!

Instead of letting Zero Hours and Short Hours Contracts drive down wages, we need to demand security of employment, including for workers who prefer part-time jobs. That's where the unions should adopt the pioneering demand - which I first raised in Break the Chains, and is now official SSP policy - for a guaranteed minimum contract of 16-hours-a-week, only allowing employers to give fewer hours when a worker, accompanied by their elected union representative, requests it. 

Demand a Workers' Charter 

Instead of offering a Hobson's choice between the UK's brutal anti-union laws - which the Tory Brexiteers want to make even worse - or the anti-nationalisation, anti-worker laws of the capitalist EU, trade unions and socialists should demand a charter of workers' rights from the Scottish government, demanding devolution of the powers to implement them. 

The right to freely organise unions; full collective bargaining; the right to strike, including solidarity action with other workplaces; elected workers' committees to control day-to-day workplace operations and conditions; and elected boards of management with a working class majority - not token 'worker directors' who turn into prisoners and stooges of the capitalist chief executives.

Immigrants are Not to Blame 
Instead of falling for the vicious lies about immigrants causing low pay or job losses - or even conceding an inch to this divisive deceit, as some union leaders have done with their talk of needing to 'control the movement of labour' - they need to fight for all workers, regardless of origin, to have the nationally negotiated rights, rates and conditions for the job, with unity forged in their unions. That's the method deployed by the RMT on the Seatruck freight ferries to the north of Scotland, to their eternal credit. 

In the face of frightening new facts about appalling health risks through escalating air pollution in Scotland's streets, the unions and their political allies have a duty to popularize the case for full, democratic public ownership of our railways, buses and all transport. With the chaos on the railways, rip-off fares and cuts to bus routes, this is a policy whose time has come. 

home of billionaire speculator Georg Soros

- not a supporter of a 10:1 maximum wage!

For a Maximum Wage Ten Times the Minimum 
As working class people's fury at widening inequality grows, we have an opportunity to cut across the poisonous appeal of the populist right by broadcasting clear, fighting measures.

Alongside the fight for £10 Now - which the SSP has fought for consistently for years - we will campaign to convince the unions to champion a maximum wage. As a first, modest, even over-generous step, a 10:1 differential between the maximum and minimum wage would radically redistribute wealth. 

When Jeremy Corbyn hesitantly floated a much-diluted version of the idea of a maximum wage - suggesting a 20:1 ratio between chief executives and their average employee in companies with government contracts - the press and Labour's right wing went apeshit, abusing Corbyn's idea as 'idiotic'. Instead of retreating in the face of this onslaught, the SSP is determined to make 2017 the year when a £10-an-hour minimum and £100 maximum is on the lips of tens of thousands as a key weapon against poverty and inequality. 

2017: a Year for the Fearless

This is not a year for the faint-hearted. But as the cliché goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. 

If you're working class, the going has been tough for far too long.

It's time to get going in a battle to reverse the tide, with fighting slogans and a willingness to struggle against all the vicious forces waging class war in defence of profit, poverty and poisonous inequality. 

STRIKE BACK AGAINST ALL CUTS!

Councils are setting budgets that plunge the knife into the heart of workers' jobs, working conditions and the services available to children, the elderly, sick and disabled vulnerable people.

TORY CELEBRATIONS

For the Westminster Tories this is grounds for champagne-fueled celebrations. It's hacking away at the public sector, which they detest on principle, and boosting the prospects for profiteering by the private sector - and to hell with the human consequences.

For the SNP government, it's a case of much hand-wringing, justified attacks on Westminster's cuts to the Scottish block grant, and then meek and supine devolution of Tory butchery to local authorities, college and university boards... and ultimately the workers and service users who voted in their droves for the SNP as an allegedly 'anti-austerity' party.

For Labour and SNP councillors, all we see is jockeying for propaganda advantage in advance of the May elections, with councils run by both parties 'regretfully' wielding the axe to an estimated 15-20,000 jobs over two years, and countless losses of vital services in the working class districts most in need of a safety net. 

DEFY WESTMINSTER! 

Instead of passing on cuts - £350million this year alone - the SNP government, and councillors (Labour and SNP), should be standing up for the people who gave them an anti-Tory, anti-austerity mandate, and set No Cuts Budgets in defiance of Westminster, to mount a mass campaign of workers and communities to demand back some of our stolen £billions. 

Alongside that they should be declaring emergency legislation in the Scottish parliament to scrap the Council Tax and replace it with an income-based Scottish Service Tax, shifting the burden from low-and middle-paid workers to the bloated minority, thereby doubling funds for council jobs and services from £2billion to £4billion, on last year's figures.

TAKE THINGS INTO YOUR OWN HANDS!

However, those facing horrendous job insecurity, mind-wrecking workloads, and cruel cuts to daily life necessities, would be wise not to wait for either SNP or Labour politicians to discover a spine and rescue them! 

Labour carries out cuts whilst proposing to increase taxes on workers. The SNP implements cuts and has now - according to a speech by Nicola Sturgeon yesterday - dropped their pledge to abolish the Council Tax, after winning tens of thousands of votes on that promise.

Increasingly, council workers support the call for No Cuts budgets, but also see the need to take things into their own hands, by staging industrial action. 

STRIKING BACK

West Dunbartonshire teachers are staging courageous strikes in defence of children's education, threatened by cost-cutting reorganization. They've resisted brutal attempts by the Labour council to pitch parents against the teachers. 

The Justice for Jannies campaign is gathering steam in Glasgow, as school janitors stage prolonged strikes against a Labour council which has stooped to hiring non-union staff to cover up the chaos.

As cuts budgets are set, with disregard for the opposition of workers and communities, the union leaderships, STUC and socialists need to help prepare workers for united, coordinated action against the cuts. 

A COUNCIL WORKER'S VIEW

I spoke to a Glasgow City Council worker about the impact of cuts, and the need to prepare strike action. 

"Previous years of funding and job cuts have cascaded down to people in most need. For example, under 'personalization' of care, last year people were entitled to five days a week at Day Care Centres, but due to Centre closures, this year they only get two days. People can't afford to buy the placements, so with Social Workers bogged down in bureaucracy, trying to deal with ever-decreasing budgets, the burden increasingly falls on carers. Many are elderly, in some cases parents in their 70s caring for children in their 40s.

Glasgow City Council want to shed 3,000 jobs over the next two years by non-filling of vacancies. But already, after years of job cuts, stress related illnesses are rocketing. Managers are reluctant to let Social Workers go because they know the post won't be filled. 

Non-replacement in Social Work has led to increased caseloads and stress, increasing sickness, meaning a worse service to the vulnerable people in need of attention, and back-breaking workload, a vicious spiral.

Goodwill hours are built up through flextime. Staff don't build up flexi to take a day off, because their diary is filled up for four weeks in advance. So it's really unpaid overtime.

I know of people off sick but using annual leave and earned flexi time to cover sick absence because they're scared to build up their sickness stats, in case it leads to disciplinary action.

Senior management were surprised at the level of uproar about the planned attacks on flexitime and other terms and conditions. We're surprised that they were surprised! 

The system couldn't function without goodwill, where staff stay behind half an hour or more to deal with urgent cases. The council wanted to take away payments for this, through attacks on Flexi-time. They also wanted to cut annual leave to new employees - if we ever get any! - from 28 days to 25. And to give up 6 days of public holidays for annual leave, which would mean refuse collectors and residential care staff losing out thousands of pounds on enhanced payments, plus the childcare complications. 

These attacks, clawing back about £4million from workers' terms and conditions, is one of the reasons we've had record levels of attendance at union meetings, including 350 at the UNISON branch AGM.

The fury that erupted over these attacks has forced the Labour council to back down, at least for now. But we need to be vigilant. They'll come back at us, when they think the time is right, for example after the elections are over!

The mood of our UNISON branch AGM was electric, and determined to fight all cuts. All £131million. If they get away with that, what next year? The 350 members there felt it will take strike action to stop these cuts. And not just token one-day strikes either.

Through individual strikes by small sections of workers we've already cushioned the blow in recent times, winning victories and regradings. People acknowledge we've prevented some cuts through struggle, but they're worried about their security longer term, committed to the job they do, but unable to see themselves working until they're 67! 

This is a savage attack on local government, and it's being carried out by the SNP. In previous elections I'd have given the SNP my first, constituency vote. But what's the point? They're carrying out the attacks."