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.  

DEMAND SCOTTISH £10 MINIMUM WAGE: demand the powers to transform our lives

                                                                    

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", was the memorable satirical line in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Well the pigs with the biggest snouts in the trough here and now in capitalist Britain would agree. As millions of people work to remain poor, we have a new obscenity on parade: the UK's best-paid boss, Simon Peckham of Melrose engineering investment company, last year 'earned' £31million! 

That means he grabbed 2,238 times as much as the annual wage of a worker on the so-called Living Wage of £7.65 an hour. Put another way, whereas it would take a worker a whole year on £7.65 an hour to earn £13,923, this chief executive only has to spend 49 minutes to get that much.
The mind boggles! And your blood should be boiling, your resolve to fight poverty pay hardened by such examples of the worst levels of inequality ever recorded.

A YEAR'S LIVING WAGE IN 49 MINUTES!
The directors of the top 100 companies in the UK only need spend one single day at work to earn a year's Living Wage; their incomes average £3.195m.
Most companies studiously conceal the facts about the incomes of their top dogs compared to those of the workers they hire to produce their profits. And no wonder! Just one example in retail tells the story they don't want told.
NEXT shops CEO Lord Wolfson last year grabbed a modest £4.6m for himself, which is 459 times as much as the average annual wage of workers in NEXT. They are paid a miserly £6.70 an hour - if they're 'adults'!
And 3 out of every 10 jobs in NEXT are 12 hours a week or less - one of the common causes of crucifying poverty in retail, where profit-crazed employers want workers at their beck and call, with very few guaranteed hours a week, but a reserve army of labour to work additional hours at busier times, without the overheads of holiday and sick pay for longer contracts. And of course many big companies go the whole hog and rely on Zero Hours Contracts, the ultimate in casualised, low-paid labour.

RECOVERY? WHAT RECOVERY?
We are told daily about the economic recovery. "What recovery?" is the universal reply of the army of workers who slave away without the reward of a share of the booming national wealth.
A clutch of charities published figures in March 2014 showing that a devastating 870,000 people in Scotland live below the poverty line. And although it was ancient news for some of us, their Report's most damning indictment of capitalist employers and capitalist politicians was the revelation that over half of those in poverty - 436,000 of us - are in jobs, working to stay poor!
80,000 kids in Scotland in 2014 suffer the hunger, disappointments, and stunted ambitions of growing up in poverty despite having one or more parent in work.
A more recent report confirmed that the root cause of this national scandal is the blindingly obvious: low hourly rates of pay.
372,000 workers in Scotland - 18 per cent of the national workforce - earn below the £7.65 Living Wage, which has been calculated as the bare minimum required for access to a decent life.
93 per cent of these workers are in the private sector: by far the biggest proportions are in retail and hospitality.

TORY CLASS WAR
Throughout the Referendum campaign we in the SSP warned of the horrendous consequences of remaining under the heel of Westminster Tory dictatorship for the working class majority population. We warned a No vote would usher in assaults on pay, benefits and public services on a scale unprecedented. 

But even we underestimated just how swiftly this revenge attack would be unleashed. Within a week of the No vote being achieved by a cocktail of lies, scaremongering and false promises for 'far more powers for Scotland', the Tories launched full-scale class war on workers and working class communities.
The obnoxious George Osborne declared war on benefits - including child benefits, working tax credits, income support and other in-work benefits - robbing an average of £480 a year off a million Scots, ten million across Britain. He further announced plans to rob people under 21 of Housing Benefit, and of all Job Seekers Allowance after six months unemployed.
In shameless contrast the same Cameron-Osborne Tory dictatorship slashed taxes on the rich, awarding the well-off at least £1,900 a year in tax reductions, and even more outrageously announced what Osborne boasts is "the largest reduction in the burden of Corporation Tax in our nation's history." 

CASH PILES STASHED AWAY
Corporation Tax is to slump to 20 per cent next year, the lowest in the G20 richest capitalist nations. That will mean £8billion less in big business taxes in 2016; £8bn less for vital services, job creation or - god forbid! - a decent minimum wage.
And it's not as if the big companies that hire the majority of workers - often on pitiful pay - are in need of a handout. Just the FTSE 100 companies alone have already stashed away a monstrous £53.3billion in what is politely termed 'cash piles'; wealth they refuse to invest in jobs, or modernization of their business, or improved wages. That's close to twice the annual budget of the entire Scottish government, salted away in the vaults of a mere 100 companies, waiting to be added to when they have to pay even less in Corporation Tax next year.

THE HUMAN TOLL
Reams of statistics fail to convey the human misery and insecurity caused by this ocean of poverty pay and rocketing inequality.
People in work are amongst those who have to swallow their pride and traipse to Foodbanks for a handout in this rich, food-exporting nation. People are literally starving whilst those at the top of the pile of wealth gorge themselves shamelessly, grabbing a year's Living Wage in a day, or in 49 minutes in the case of Simon Peckham.
We face another winter where many elderly people will suffer a cruel, avoidable death through hypothermia because they can't afford to eat and heat their homes. Because their pensions are the worst in Europe compared to average wages, whereas the chief executives of the supermarkets and the Big Six energy companies rake in utterly immoral levels of profit and personal perks.

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
Others have reported the crime of poverty amidst plenty: the point however is to challenge it, fight to banish the root causes, fight fire with fire in the face of the Tories' class warfare.
For most of this year, the SSP campaigned on the streets of the west of Scotland with the slogan "Vote YES for a decent living minimum wage", arguing that independence would open the door to organise and demand such a central anti-poverty measure. We didn't get independence - yet! So now we need to link the battle to banish rock-bottom wages with the debate over what powers are to be granted to the Scottish parliament.
The Smith Commission on this issue speaks of "financial powers". The trade union movement, including the STUC, should join the SSP in demanding that Holyrood must have the powers to set the level of guaranteed minimum wage in Scotland; that's a key financial issue!

LIVING MINIMUM WAGE OF £10
There's a lot of confusion around terms like Minimum Wage and Living Wage. 

The National Minimum Wage is legally enforceable by government legislation - and the vigilance of the trade union movement, to outlaw wage-dodging cowboy employers. But it is set at a pathetic level: £6.50 an hour for over-21s, and the slave-wage £2.71 for Modern Apprentices. It is a recipe for poverty - and brazen profiteering by employers, who are more than happy to let taxpayers subsidise their low pay through Working Tax Credit.
As a reminder of the class-divided society we need to change, if the national minimum wage had kept pace with company chief executives' pay rises since it was introduced in 1999, it would now not be a miserly £6.50, but £18.89 an hour!

CAPITALISTS DON'T VOLUNTEER LIVING WAGES!

The Living Wage is the product of research and laudable campaigning by the Living Wage Foundation, Poverty Alliance and others. It is calculated as the bare minimum required for a basic standard of decent life, currently set at £7.65 an hour.
But it has two fundamental flaws: it is still far too low to match the mounting cost of living, and it is entirely voluntary, relying on the whims and fancies of employers. Employers are under no obligation to pay it; they can volunteer to do so and win 'Living Wage Accreditation' from the SNP government-funded Poverty Alliance/Living Wage campaign. But to highlight the problem, a mere 23 companies in Scotland have signed up so far!

What is needed is a legally enforced national minimum wage, set at a level to guarantee a decent life. A decent, living minimum wage. Which is why since 1998 the SSP has fought for such a minimum to be set at two-thirds male median earnings - about £10 an hour in today's figures. And that £10 an hour was agreed as the national minimum wage demanded by the recent TUC congress in Liverpool - unanimously!

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
The recent STUC march to 'challenge poverty' needs to be urgently built upon with a systematic campaign in workplaces and on the streets demanding the powers to implement a £10 Scottish minimum wage - for all at 16, with abolition of the lower youth rates, and equal pay for women. Further rallies, demos, pickets of low-paying companies and support for workers who strike for better pay needs to accompany the demands on the Smith Commission.

And alongside that central demand we need a drive for other powers and policies to tackle poverty in 21st century Scotland. Powers to transform our lives. The power to implement a living level of state pension in Scotland, linked to a £10 minimum wage. Full powers over welfare and benefits to reverse the savage assault on the sick, disabled and unemployed by the millionaires' Westminster bootboys. 

SCRAP ANTI-UNION LAWS

And a critical issue is repeal of the battery of anti-trade union laws implemented by Thatcher, retained by 13 years of Labour governments, and made even worse by the current Coalition. Handcuffing workers and their unions was a central strategy in the fundamental redistribution of wealth and power to the rich and big business by successive Tory and Labour regimes. As recent academic reports confirm, inequality in Britain was at its lowest, its least obscene, in the years when 58 per cent of workers were in trade unions and 82 per cent of wages were covered by collective bargaining. Now, by 2012, only 26 per cent are in unions, and a mere 23 per cent of wages are determined by collective bargaining, by the combined efforts of workers banded together through their unions. And the gap between the highest and lowest incomes is the greatest it's ever been since records began.

DON'T PLEAD - ORGANISE!
The link between poverty and the most repressive anti-union laws in the whole of Europe is glaringly obvious. And the position needs to be reversed, if we are serious about banishing the poverty and inequality that scars the face of Scotland.
Likewise, the leaders of the 630,000-member trade unions in Scotland need to face up to a simple truth: begging and cajoling employers for a decent wage doesn't work! There's no excuse for poverty pay, or poverty pensions, or skinflint benefits. There's oceans of wealth surrounding us - but it's in the hands of 'the 1%'.
So those who fought for independence, plus those who didn't, should demand the power to tax the richest minority and big business by Holyrood, to fund decent pay, benefits, pensions and public services.

TAKE SIDES!
The Tories have launched ruthless class war on the rest of us in defense of the rich. That's in their political DNA, so no surprise there.
Labour has joined them at the hip in pursuit of profit for the millionaires and poverty for the millions. It's time the trade union leaders woke up to that reality too, and stopped funding a party that declared their own war on workers with plans for cuts of £27billion by 2017.
And those who have rushed off to join the SNP should pause and ponder some fundamentals: you can't appease the profit-hunger of the multinational corporations - including with pledges of even far lower levels of Corporation Tax than the Tories' 20 per cent - and at the same time hope to banish the crushing poverty of nearly a million Scots. When the rich and their political puppets unleash class warfare, you can't stand in the middle, or take both sides.
The SSP has no hesitation in taking sides with workers, their families, people on benefits and pensions, the millions in open conflict with those in charge of the massive wealth created by nature and generations of working people. Join us in a crusade against poverty and inequality, here and now, as part of the struggle towards an independent socialist Scotland.