McSTRIKE! - build the fight for £10now and a union

September 4th 2017 should go down in the history books as the start of a fight by a new generation of workers against poverty pay, insecure jobs, bullying, intimidation and lack of union rights. 

A very brave group of 40 McDonald's workers in Cambridge and Crayford, south east London, voted by a whopping 96% to strike, in the ballot conducted by their union, the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). 

They defied management threats and victimisation - including slashed hours and sexual harassment - for daring to be in the union; walked out to form pickets, were joined by big crowds of supporters on rallies, plus 14 solidarity demos across the UK. 

Their core demand was for £10-an-hour and a union. 

They chose to strike on 4 September to coincide with US Labor Day, where fast food workers involved in the sweeping mass movement in the Fight for $15 went on strike, as did McDonald's workers in Belgium and elsewhere.

It was the start of global workers' action against global capitalism's totemic symbol - McD's - global casualisation and cheap labour. 

Starvation Wages 

The conditions these workers suffer, and are striking back against, are symptomatic of not just one of the world's biggest multinational corporations, but of the modern serfdom that 21st century capitalism relies on to turbocharge their profits. 

Tyrone is one of the Cambridge strikers. Aged 17, he's on £4.75 an hour. He describes working with the unbearable kitchen heat, the impatient queues, the aggro - but still forced to skimp meals through poverty pay; still unable to get a home of his own, sleeping on a punctured air bed in his mate's bedroom, wakening several times to pump it up again. 

His dream of winning £10-an-hour through the union and strike action is humbling in its modesty: "I could get a proper bed. I could get out of my mate's house. That's all I want, a place and a bed."

Tom, one of the union reps, is 24, and therefore on £7.55.  But he often skimps meals to save enough to visit his 4-year-old son, making do with the one free meal McD's allows him. This is the same corporation with the company line: "We have committed to investing in our people, to competitive rates of pay."

That's the problem; the government's paltry levels of minimum wage means they are often all too 'competitive' - in particular for younger workers, whom McDonald's and their ilk prey on for profit, because they're legally cheaper to hire, due to the lower legal youth minimum wages. 

Them and Us 

McDonald's methods encapsulate the whole system perfectly, grotesquely. 

Their own investment calculator reckons if you'd been able to buy 1,000 shares last December - when young Tyrone started with them - you'd have made £34,025 profit by now... whereas even if Tyrone had slaved in a hot kitchen full-time since he'd have earned only £7,410. 

Tom can barely afford to travel to see his toddler son, but McDonald's Chief Executive, Steve Easterbrook, has use of the company's private aircraft, and enjoys a package equivalent to £5,684 an hour!! 

They use zero hours contracts to wring maximum profit out of their 80,000 UK workers - and almost zero-rated corporation tax; well, a rate of 1.49%, to be accurate! They only promised to offer secure contracts, with guaranteed hours, in a state of panic after the strike ballot. And they've yet to put anything acceptable in writing. 

"I'll Tell You What It's All About!" 

As BFAWU Scottish Organiser Mark McHugh told the recent SSP public meeting in Govanhill, McDonald's were the first to introduce zero hours contracts to the UK, back in 1974! 

"It's taken this long to take them to task. I'll tell you what this strike is all about. It's about respect and dignity at work; the right to join a union; proper health and safety - not suffering burns and being told to take your break now, instead of getting treatment. It's about the right to join a union. About having the same right to go on holiday as anyone else. To actually get a shift when you turn up, not be sent home because it's quiet. 

We owe it to young people to win decent rights, because these retail park jobs are not stop gap jobs, they're what thousands face long-term. The food industry is booming, so they should be treated as serious jobs." 

From Acorns to Mighty Oaks 

It's to the eternal credit of these strikers, and their union, that they've taken serious, courageous action. For £10 and a union. For abolition of zero hours contracts and secure jobs. For an end to bullying and sexual harassment, both of which are rampant in these sectors: fast food, hospitality, retail. 

These are sectors bedeviled by the poverty pay and job insecurity that go with zero hours contracts like burgers go with chips. 

The strikes were a tiny proportion of the total workforce. But a similarity small section of McDonald's workers went on strike in New York City in November 2012, starting the Fight for $15, which through strikes and mass actions in the communities has now won big wage hikes for 22 million workers in the USA. 

£10 Now! 

The trade union movement needs a leadership that is serious about its own grand words and wishes. A long, torturous 3 years ago - September 2014 - the TUC congress voted unanimously for the BFAWU Motion for "a £10 minimum wage for all workers." 

Since then most union leaderships have done little - or literally nothing - to implement that demand. The BFAWU and some other union branches have campaigned for it - as has the Scottish Socialist Party, on the streets, in our unions, and as a demand we put to councils and the Scottish government to immediately introduce. 

And unlike even Labour's best, Jeremy Corbyn, the SSP wants £10 immediately, not three years hence, in 2020; in fact £10 is rapidly approaching its sell-by-date, given the inflation on daily necessities. 

Defend the Strikers

These McDonald's workers deserve a medal, but above all deserve the protection and solidarity of other workers and other unions. As the BFAWU President, Ian Hodson, told a strike rally,

"If even one striker is victimised for going on strike, we demand that others come to the McDonald's branch and occupy it." 

That's the militant spirit of defiance and class solidarity that pioneered the creation of the trade unions, especially amongst the most exploited sections of workers nearly 150 years ago. 

We owe it to the next generation to build on the courage of the first ever McStrikers in the UK, to fan the spark they lit into a flame that helps burn out the casualisation and super-exploitation faced by millions. 

The SSP pledges to play its part, alongside the BFAWU and others, for £10 now and a union; for a guaranteed minimum 16-hour contract instead of the serfdom and insecurity of zero hours contracts; for full union rights and full employment rights from the first day in a job. 

Ultimately, for a society based on workers' solidarity and sharing out the collective wealth workers produce. As a Guardian columnist put it, "The problem isn't one company, but the system of which it is part." 

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Here's the video the SSP did to build solidarity as the McStrikers prepared their brave action:

DON'T GET APRIL FOOLED! - £7.20 is not a living wage

The Tories must think we're all April Fools. 

On 1st April, their much-trumpeted and obscenely mis-named 'National Living Wage' takes effect. But you have to be 25 or over to qualify. And £7.20 an hour is nothing like a living wage. In their own hidden government documents, Cameron and Osborne more accurately label this a 'Minimum Wage Premium'. It's an extra 50p for those reaching their 25th birthday, compared to the miserly National Minimum Wage suffered by millions aged 18-24, not to mention the insulting pittance earned by younger workers and apprentices. 

The Tories' scheme is a conscious campaign to confuse the hell out of people about what constitutes a real living wage - as well as being yet another layer of age wage discrimination, which also threatens to displace 'older' workers with dirt-cheap younger wage-slaves.

No Street Parties!

Anyone over 25 getting an extra 50p an hour will welcome it. Even more welcome is the £8.25 Living Wage Foundation figure which 500 employers in Scotland have now signed up to - voluntarily, as this scheme has no legal standing, and is purely at the whims and fancies of employers. A scandalous 29% of women and 18% of men still earn less than this £8.25. 

But street parties are not about to break out across the nation! Neither the £6.70 minimum wage for 18-24-year-olds, nor its £7.20 'premium' rate bear any resemblance to a living wage that guarantees a  decent life for workers. Nor indeed is the voluntary, unenforceable £8.25 - even according to its own authors! Back last summer, the Living Wage Foundation admitted that if their calculations stopped assuming reliance on a full uptake of in-work benefits - such as Child and Working Tax Credits - the London Living Wage rate would have to rocket from £9.15 to £11.65! 

And of course the Tories are hellbent on slashing such in-work benefits. Despite being forced to temporarily retreat on their more blatant version of cuts to Tax Credits a few months ago, they are still brutally cutting them by a combination of a freeze on the amount paid, literal cuts through the new Universal Credit, and new sanctions against part-time workers they deem to not be sufficiently seeking additional hours of work. 

Taking these attacks into account, the Resolution Foundation recently calculated that despite the Tories' misnamed 'National Living Wage', by 2020 the poorest 30% of the population will lose an average of £565 a year, with the example of a low-earning couple with three kids being a shocking £3,000 a year worse off.

SSP Pioneers of £10 now!

The Scottish Socialist Party has consistently and persistently fought for a legally enforced national minimum wage set at the modest level of two-thirds male median earnings - £10-an-hour in today's Scotland. That's the minimum required to climb out of depending on top-up benefits. That's the least required to afford a very basic standard of living. It's still just £18,200 a year for somebody working a 35-hour week, hardly the route to becoming a millionaire. 

We have always demanded that the multiple lower youth rates should be scrapped, with the £10 minimum guaranteed to all workers and apprentices from the age of 16 upwards. That would also help prevent employers turbo-charging their profits by displacing older workers by super-exploited young people, which is precisely one of the Tories' motivations in their bogus 'National Living Wage' at 25. 

The demand for a £10 minimum for all workers was unanimously agreed at the TUC conference way back in September 2014. The time is rotten-ripe for the unions to act on this policy. Not for a £10 minimum in 2020 or some other distant date, but now. Unlike all other parties, that's what the SSP is demanding, as are our allies in the May elections, RISE. 

Slashing Real Wages 

In fighting for this modest but radical wage rise, the unions and socialists also need to organise ferocious resistance to cuts in other payments, conditions of work and hours of work that are - right now - transforming hourly pay rises into actual pay cuts for tens of thousands of workers. 

Capitalist employers have howled their anguish at even paying £7.20 to those old enough. Other profiteers have won massive Brownie points in the media for signing up as Living Wage Employers, giving a grandiose £8.25 to those who produce profits frequently measured in £billions rather than £millions. Meantime, behind the backs of society, smothered in silence from the mainstream media, these same employers are systematically slashing the incomes of many of their workers.

Retail giants like Tescos and Morrisons have scrapped double time premium payments for working Sundays.

In response to the Tories' £7.20 for over-25s, B&Q have just forced workers to 'sign up or be sacked' to a package that reduces many workers' wages by thousands of pounds, including loss of winter and summer bonuses equating to 6% of annual salary, and removal of double time for working Bank Holidays. 

McVities biscuit factory has been handing out 6-day weeks in recent months, on the miserable £6.70 minimum wage, but days before the £7.20 rate came into being, suddenly announced a lack of orders for the next two months and told workers they'd get no work at all - whilst denying they employ these people on zero hours contracts! 

The 15% leap last year in the numbers suffering the cruel insecurity of zero hours contracts is a sure recipe for capitalist employers - and cost-cutting public sector employers - to compensate themselves for a piddling pay rise by slashing hours of work, with the added, backbreaking workload on staff that accompanies these cynical steps to reduce the overall wage bill. 

Unions Need Action 

The unions need to step up to the task of organizing a battle to win their own declared policy of £10-an-hour minimum for all workers - regardless of age - and to defend and enhance premium payments for working unsocial hours, such as weekends, nightshift and public holidays.

Unions in Scotland's local authorities - who employ about 250,000 staff - need to organize appropriate industrial action to stop councils slaughtering these premium payments, and build a campaign to win back the funding off Holyrood and Westminster to defend all jobs, wages and local services.

Socialist Alternative 

This whole issue raises the need for power over the minimum wage (and employment law) to be devolved to Holyrood - this side of outright independence - so workers can organise and demand a £10 Scottish minimum wage without any loss of hours, jobs or premium payments. And within the private sector it points up the need for the socialist alternative of democratic public ownership - to remove the dictatorship of capital, where profiteering capitalists hold workers hostage, slashing hours of work, jobs and other conditions in order to boost their profit margins, whilst basking in the kudos of signing up to a marginally higher hourly wage rate. 

Join SSP 

Join the SSP in campaigning within the unions and on the streets for an immediate £10 minimum wage for all at 16, without loss of hours, jobs, premium payments or working conditions. 

Vote for that in the Scottish elections by using your second vote - the regional list vote - for RISE, Scotland's Left Alliance, to elect SSP members and other socialists to boost the battle for a legally enforced living minimum wage of £10-an-hour, without strings. 

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YOU'VE READ THE ARTICLE, NOW BUY THE BOOK!

If you want to read far more extensively into the issues surrounding and underlying poverty, pay and profit - and a vision for an entirely different (socialist) future - buy a copy of my recently published book, Break the Chains.

And for all the stories, statistics and socialist arguments it provides, it's cheap at twice the price! You get 276 pages for less than an hour's wages in the kind of system we want here and now!

Order online at www.scottishsocialistparty.org

Buy, read, enjoy and use it - and let me know what you think. 

BREAK THE CHAINS: a book is born!

Behold - a book is born!

My absence from this blog in recent weeks was due to being 'chained' to the computer finishing off this book.
With 276 pages, it's a bargain Christmas present for yourself, family or friends!
Cover price is £7.99 (plus £2 packaging & postage if you can't arrange face-to-face collection) - or £9.99 solidarity price (plus £2 p&p)... which is only right for those who can afford it, as workers' solidarity to win back a greater share of the wealth we produce - and ultimately win power for the working class majority in a socialist democracy - are the central themes.

To get a copy or copies, look out for the official launches next week,
OR contact me through this blog,
OR send a cheque, payable to 'Scottish Socialist Party' - for either £9.99 or £11.99 - or any amount above that!! - to:
Scottish Socialist Party, Suite 370, Central Chambers, 93 Hope St, Glasgow G2 6LD.

Some trade union branches are already ordering multiple copies, in the belief it will contribute to their campaigns and membership's awareness of key issues.

I hope you get it, read and digest it, discuss it. I hope it will make you feel all the more motivated and informed in the struggle against poverty, inequality, exploitation - and the capitalist system that spawns them - and join the battle for socialist democracy.
Enjoy!

STANDING UP FOR SCOTLAND'S WORKING CLASS MAJORITY

It was Easter Monday. As I drove to work, the car radio announced the next programme, 'Wake up to Money'. Aye, right, is that what they call £7.13 an hour, at this hour of the day, on a public holiday?

At least many of my workmates get double time for working a public holiday, but I arrived in the job an infuriating five weeks too late; five weeks after they altered the contracts to just pay plain money on a day when many other people enjoy a day off. Nothing unusual about that nowadays, unfortunately. It's all too common in the private sector, but also chunks of the public sector.
And our national union did absolutely nothing to challenge it at the time; they claimed not to even know about the change of contracts when I contacted them about it as a new member, seven long years ago. Weak national union leaderships plus profit-hungry multinationals equals working for £7.13 an hour at anti-social times on a Bank Holiday.

Still, it could be worse. I could be on the £6.50 minimum wage paid to the contract cleaners in our place - with absolutely no nightshift premium when they start before 6am, and a miserly £7.50 for all the additional responsibilities of being a supervisor.

'WAKE UP TO MONEY'! 
Back to 'Wake up to Money'. Some analyst from Aberdeen was bemoaning the latest report by KPMG on the profits of the five biggest banks. Apparently he found it disappointing they only mopped up profits of £20.6billion in 2014 - a 62 per cent leap compared to 2013.
Seems like some people really do 'wake up to money', mountains of it!

But they're a tiny handful, the 1 per cent: the wealth owners, not the wealth creators. We live in an ill-divided world, a class-divided Scotland, with 510,000 workers in 'severe poverty' whilst a handful of bankers 'wake up to money'.

'WE'LL TAKE CARE OF THE BOSSES'
Which brings us to the general election campaign. A spat between the Tories and LibDems has erupted - is there an election or something, forcing the spineless, treacherous LibDems to try and appear different from their Tory partners in crimes against the 99 per cent?

Apparently a 'senior Tory' told LibDem Coalition Minister Danny Alexander: "You take care of the workers and we'll take care of the bosses".

Well, one part of that is true: witness the 100 top bosses publicly declaring how good the Tories are, calling for their re-election. They wouldn't be doing that if the Tories were clipping the power, profits and privileges of the bloated rich.

On the other hand, did the 'senior Tory' fail to notice it was ever-so-Liberal Vince Cable who has spearheaded many of the vicious anti-worker laws introduced by the Twin Tory Coalition, such as Employment Tribunal fees, which charge a minimum of £1,200 to take a case towards a hearing, pricing workers out of justice?
But this incident inadvertently highlights one simple, central truth: we live in a society made up primarily of millions of workers and a very few, but very rich and powerful, bosses.

THE PROSPEROUS AND THE POOR?!
So since Labour's Jim Murphy launched his leadership bid for the Scottish branch office of British Labour a couple of months ago with the preposterous slogan "Standing up for the prosperous and the poor", he has some explaining to do.

Is Murphy really standing up for the low-paid Usdaw union members in retail whose votes he relentlessly courts, workers who 'wake up to very little money', on wages hovering around the pathetic national minimum wage? Or is he doing what he and his Blairite Labour Party have done for decades, standing up for the supermarket bosses, bankers and billionaires, who have plundered society's wealth for booming profit margins - with the help of the Thatcherite anti-union laws kept by 13 years of Labour government, and the most deregulated labour market in the whole of Europe, as his mentor Tony Blair boasted, when Prime Minister? 

FILTHY RICH
Has Murphy ever attacked his erstwhile collaborator and co-thinker Peter Mandelson for infamously declaring himself to be "Intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich", now that Labour needs to salvage the votes of 'people becoming intensely poor' as a result of basement level wages and benefit cuts which the Tories proposed and Labour MPs voted for?
What are Murphy and Labour planning to do to enhance workers' rights, including the ability and facilities for unions to organise workers in battles for better wages? 

CONVERSION ON THE ROAD TO DOWNING STREET 
Labour has belatedly discovered some rhetoric about 'working people', after years of telling us, in the infamous phrase of Tony Blair, "We're now all middle class". Not so much a conversion on the road to Damascus, as on the road to Downing Street.

In their desperate bid to con workers into voting for them, these Labour chancers are making a couple of carefully choreographed claims about what they'll do for us 'working people'. They promise "an £8 minimum wage", and to "tackle exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". 

Two immediate, vital health warnings are required to protect the ill-informed from Labour's trickery.

An £8 minimum wage seems attractive to those who do NOT 'wake up to money' - including the 1.2 million languishing on the pitiful minimum wage, or the millions more below anything like a living wage. Well, it would be a substantial improvement if it was introduced now, immediately, in 2015! But Labour has no intention of such a bold gesture towards fighting the scourge of poverty pay. They only pledge £8 by 2020 - leaving millions to struggle with the bills for another full five years, with the promise of a minimum wage which by 2020 wouldn't be worth much more - if any more - than today's £6.50! 

ABOLISH - NOT AMEND - ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS 
And as we have forewarned in previous articles, when it comes to Zero Hours Contracts, these Labour vote-seekers speak with forked tongues. What do they mean 'exploitative' Zero Hours Contracts? They're all exploitative! They should be abolished outright, straight and simple.
But Labour curries the favour of working class voters whilst dodging this clear, honest solution of unqualified abolition. They want to amend Zero Hours Contracts, rather than abolish them. To have a scheme where after 12 weeks on one of these contracts, you'd get a contract for the average hours worked. Certainly, when or if that happened it would represent an improvement. But it leaves the power with employers to dodge and weave, cutting down average hours worked, or dismissing and replacing workers after 11 or 12 weeks to avoid this clause, especially as many of the jobs involved are relatively low-skilled, fairly easily replaced by a new batch of temporary workers.

In any case, we can be forgiven for doubting Labour's promises on Zero Hours Contracts; Blair promised to abolish them back in 1995 at the Labour conference, but in contrast to the rhetoric, despite 13 years of subsequent Labour government, Zero Hours Contracts have in reality rocketed to an estimated 200,000 in Scotland alone.

LABOUR MAKES IT EASY FOR THE SNP
Labour's lamentable stance on these issues makes life easy for the SNP, making it easy for them to sound much more radical and worker-friendly than the party originally founded by trade unionists and socialists over a century ago.
But before giving carte blanch to Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, workers need to listen carefully, both to what they say and what they do. 

£8.70 - BUT NOT 'TIL 2020!  

On the issue of poverty pay, the SNP make all the right attacks on the uphill struggle to cope faced by working people in 21st century Scotland. Up until their very recent conference, the SNP confined themselves to their headlined support for the so-called Living Wage - currently £7.85 an hour. A very welcome short-term boost to many workers, but with the fatal flaws of being entirely voluntary, at the whims and fancies of employers, unenforceable by law - and still far too low to merit the name 'Living Wage', given the current cost of living.
At their recent pre-election conference/rally, the SNP sought to outbid Labour's cooing sounds towards workers by pledging not £8, but an £8.70 minimum wage. At least that would have the merit of being legally enforced. But again, not for another 5 years, not until 2020, at the very best making it worth no more than today's £7.85 'Living Wage', but in all likelihood worth substantially less than that when inflation rises again, as predicted by the economists. 

WHAT ABOUT REPEALING THE ANTI-UNION LAWS?
At least up until now, the SNP has regularly used the same phrase as Labour's about 'abolishing exploitative Zero Hours Contracts'. So far, no unequivocal announcement of total, unqualified abolition of them all.

And whilst the SNP have spoken and written about 'embracing the trade unions' and 'the advantages of collective bargaining' - in positive contrast to the words and deeds of modern Labour - they have nowhere and never committed to outright repeal of the battery of anti-union legislation that makes this country the most repressive, in terms of workplace rights, in the whole of Europe.

STANDING UP FOR SCOTLAND - WHICH SCOTLAND?
The SNP make much of 'Standing up for Scotland'. Sounds good, to people downtrodden by undemocratic diktats from Westminster for decades, suffering the theft of our natural wealth and taxes by a business elite concentrated in the City of London and the stockbroker belt of the Home Counties.

But which Scotland do the SNP claim to 'stand up' for? 

Over the past four years, in contrast to their current promises to oppose austerity, the SNP government in Holyrood has failed to 'stand up' to about £4billion in cuts to the nation's funding by Westminster. They've passed on these cuts to local authorities and the likes of Further Education colleges.

In councils they control, the SNP has just as shoddy a record of imposing cuts to jobs and services, and of keeping apprentices on the slave-labour rates of £2.73 an hour, as their Labour councillor counterparts. And in the case of Edinburgh council, the SNP has joined forces with Labour in an axe-wielding coalition.

They've restricted Scottish public sector workers' pay to derisory, below-inflation levels.
Certainly the SNP has shielded the likes of the NHS from the worst excesses of cuts, closures and privatisation imposed by successive Labour and Tory Coalition governments down South.

THE GREAT CLASS DIVIDE
But a party that imagines you can 'stand up' for everyone in Scotland is ignoring the stark truth that there are two Scotlands, divided by class, by a gaping chasm of differences in wealth and power - and by a fundamental clash of interests, where the increased profits of one class are the decreased wages of the other (majority) class.

Which Scotland are the SNP offering to 'stand up for'?

The three richest families in Scotland - or the poorest 20 per cent of the population, the one million Scots, whose combined wealth doesn't even match that of the three richest families in the same nation?

The Royal Bank of Scotland with its £2.64billion profit in 2014, or the 510,000 Scottish workers officially living in extreme poverty, according the Scottish government's own recent report?

The Scotland of the 432 individuals who own half of the entire land in the nation, including the vast tracts of rich, arable land - or the tens of thousands (including employed workers) who rely on the indignity of food parcels from food banks, for three days at a time, to avert literal starvation?

FOR THE MILLIONS, NOT THE MILLIONAIRES 
The Scottish Socialist Party doesn't hesitate to declare which Scotland we side with. We will stand up for Scotland's working class majority. For workers, not the bosses who exploit them; for labour, not capital; for the millions, not the millionaires.

We are a working class socialist party out to end the dictatorship of capital, for socialist democracy, including in our workplaces and communities.

In stark contrast to the carefully chosen phrases of the other parties, we want outright abolition of all Zero Hours Contracts. We want secure jobs with guaranteed hours - either full-time or part-time. 

GUARANTEED HOURS - SECURE JOBS
In conjunction and consultation with the unions and their members, we want to campaign not only for a maximum working week of 35 hours, as the first step to a 4-day week - crucially, with no loss of earnings - but also for employers to be obliged to offer a minimum number of guaranteed hours per week. This could be, say, contracts of at least 16 hours a week - as I've negotiated in my own workplace in the last year - with the proviso that if a worker wants fewer hours they could freely opt into that.

In contrast to talk of £8 or £8.70-an-hour minimum wage a full five years down the road, in 2020, the SSP demands £10 NOW, in 2015, based on the modest formula of two-thirds median male earnings, with equal pay for women - rising with wages or inflation, whichever is the greater.

SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY - NOT ILLUSORY SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP 
Instead of empty pre-election mood music towards the working class from Labour, or the social democratic illusion of a partnership of interests between workers and capitalist big business as espoused by the SNP, Scotland's socialist party has a proud, consistent track record of siding with the working class majority, against the rapacious profiteering of capitalist companies.

We stand up for outright repeal of the whole array of anti-union laws, and the implementation of a Charter of Workers' Rights. That to include: full employment rights from day one in the job; the right to join and organise unions without victimization; full facilities for elected union reps to recruit, organise and represent members during working hours; full and equal employment rights and in-work benefits for part-time, fixed-term contract and agency workers; the constitutional right to strike, after a simple majority vote, including the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers, and removal of the ban on so-called political strikes; full union recognition and free collective bargaining in all sectors and workplaces where members join; workers' control of health and safety through elected union health & safety reps.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL 
We stand up for public, democratic ownership of the profiteering banks, all forms of energy, transport, construction, big industries, services - with majority control by elected workers', communities' and government representatives on the boards of management, not a few token 'worker directors' outvoted by capitalist owners whose sole aim is profit maximization.

WAKE UP TO CHOICES!
For those millions of working class people in Scotland who do not 'wake up to money', we need a party that stands up for the millions, not for Scotland's millionaires. We need to 'wake up to the choices' between profit and pay; between decent, dignified and secure jobs or the curse of casualisation designed to exploit workers for profit maximization; between the full and democratic rights of the working class majority, or the untrammeled right to get rich, at our expense, for the 1 per cent. The growth of support for the SSP amongst Scotland's working class majority is a vital part of that awakening.

RECOVERY: WHAT RECOVERY?

If you believe George Osborne, David Cameron and a chunk of the media, workers are back in the land of milk and honey. We're told our wages are exceeding inflation for the first time since before the 2008 recession. Reality is a bit less rosy for those working to remain poor.

Real wages plummeted by £50 a week in 2014. For the first time since the 1920s, real wages are lower at the end of a government's term of rule than when they seized office.

And a special report by Ernst Young ITEM Club last month punctured the Tories' celebratory balloons. Their chief economist, Martin Beck, wrote:

"Real wages have fallen by nearly 10% since 2008, but workers will finally see more money in their pockets this year. However, this is not a normal recovery. The move towards later retirement and huge increase in the workforce has depressed real wages as workers have priced themselves into jobs. We don't expect a return to boomtime wages any time soon."

ZERO HOURS BOOM

Try telling the 200,000 Scottish workers consigned to the pitiful pay and hellish uncertainty of life on Zero Hours Contracts that things are getting better!

In any case, any workers aspiring to be as well off as they were before 2008 severely lack ambition! This was already one of the most unequal states internationally, with some of the lowest pay, longest hours of work and shortest holidays in Europe.

The SSP campaign against dreadful Zero-hours contracts.

THE BRIBES DON'T WORK

But just in case we're not all convinced to rush off to vote Tory by their claims of rising wages, the Tories hope to bribe the gullible as the general election looms. Osborne's plans have leaked out: to raise the tax threshold "towards £11,000", with bogus boasts that this will rescue the lowest paid. In fact it wouldn't even touch many of the poorest people, because they're paying no taxes right now, due to earning below the existing £10,000 tax threshold.

That includes vast armies of part-time workers, women in particular. It includes hundreds of thousands in retail jobs, the biggest single employer in the country, and also the biggest single sector of poverty pay.

Nor will this minor tax threshold adjustment compensate public sector workers for the increased pension contributions they face next month - so they can work longer and get less in their pensions, if they aren't forced to work 'til they drop.

Very few will be fooled by the Tories' claims. Workers know full well that when VAT, Council Tax and other regressive taxes are added, the poorest 10% of the population pay 43% of their lowly incomes in taxes - whereas the richest 10% only pay 35% of the incomes they grudgingly declare! And of course they systematically dodge tax on an industrial scale, as the recent HSBC scandal confirmed.

SETTING THEIR PALS' PAY

Anger at the way wages make up a shrinking slice of the national cake of wealth is turned into justified rage when you look at the incomes of the giant employers - and of those who decide the salaries of their chief executives.

A recent survey of the incomes and directorships held by what's called the Remuneration Committees of the FTSE 100 top companies makes dangerous reading for anyone with high blood pressure! These bodies decide the pay of company executives. They consist of a narrow pool of directors of other companies, a cosseted elite who might as well be from another planet. The survey found that the average income of the members of these Remuneration Committees was £441,383 last year, 16 times the average worker's wage of £27,200. And the highest paid member of this self-serving clique of capitalists was awarded over £9.2million - an incredible 339 times as much as the average worker's wage for 2014.

OVERPAID LOW PAY COMMISSION

In stark contrast, workers eking out an existence on poverty pay have their very own 'Remuneration Committee' - the Low Pay Commission, which annually recommends what levels of national minimum wage the government should introduce. Their latest report shamelessly boasts of 'inflation-busting increases' for the minimum wage, claiming 'the highest increase since 2007' - because they've recommended a 3% rise on the over-21s rate...wait for it...to the princely sum of £6.70 an hour!

In case such 'inflated' pay might bust the allegedly booming economy, these worthies have proposed £5.30 for workers aged 18-20, £3.87 for 16-17-year-olds, and a slave rate of £2.80 for apprentices.

This Low Pay Commission has one distinct feature: none of its nine members has even the remotest idea what it's like to live on low pay! It's made up of employers, 'independents' and those allegedly from an 'employee background'. One of the two claiming the latter role is John Hannett, general secretary of Usdaw, the biggest union in the retail sector, with 45,000 members in Scotland alone.

STAND UP FOR WORKERS!

But those of us who are Usdaw members, working in retail on £6.50-£7.20 an hour in various firms, don't seem to be our general secretary John Hannett's first consideration; he and the UK leadership of Usdaw actually submitted a proposal to the Low Pay Commission for a £7 minimum wage from next October!

As reported in the Usdaw union magazine, our general secretary isn't on £6.50 an hour, nor even the £10 an hour he voted for at the TUC conference; he's on a salary of £94,514, plus NIC and pension contributions, plus a union car - in-work benefits totaling another £42,408! No wonder he's not storming heaven to mobilize workers in retail and other low-paid jobs to demand a decent living wage.

LOW PAID 'COMMISSION'

Far from feeling that all is glorious and comfortable for millions of workers, people are not seeing the benefits of the much trumpeted recovery in the economy, are struggling to cope with the household bills - and desperately need to become part of a massive campaign for a living minimum wage. We need our own, genuine, 'low pay commission', a force made up of the low paid and their allies, organized and determined to demand decent wages.

The SSP is determined to be at the heart of such a struggle, and are proud to have common cause with the Bakers union (BFAWU) and others battling for £10 now for all workers. We appeal to the leaderships of all trades unions to take up the cudgels in pursuit of the £10 minimum wage which every one of them voted for at the 2014 annual conference of the 7-million member TUC. And we appeal to workers to join us in the fight for union rights in every workplace - as part of the struggle to banish poverty pay, Zero Hours Contracts and the disgusting inequality created by capitalist profiteering.

A TALE OF TWO CLASSES: MPs' and workers' wages

                                             

A tale of two classes; or two planets, more like! 
All that is rotten and unequal about the capitalist economic system is reflected in the accompanying political system and the capitalist politicians, regardless of whether Tory or Labour.
Tory MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind shamelessly asserted this week: "It's quite unrealistic to believe MPs will go through their parliamentary career being able to simply accept a salary of £60,000 a year", as he told us mere mortals that he is "entitled" to earn "far, far more than that."

20p - or far, far more?!
With unfortunate timing for those who want working class people to put up with what we get and shut up from complaining, on the very same day as Channel 4 broadcast the sting operation that exposed Rifkind and Labour's Jack Straw promising favours and access to diplomats and EU officials for cash in their hands, the Low Pay Commission's annual report was published. It recommended a whopping 20 pence an hour rise on the UK's national minimum wage next October! 

That's £6.70 an hour if you're 21 or over; apprentices should be suitably thankful for the 7 pence rise the LPC has proposed for them, to a giddy £2.80! 

And their proposals were headlined in the same media as 'inflation-busting', the 'biggest increase since 2008', and other paroxysms of excitement at the glories on offer to millions of workers!

Artificial Increase?! 

The bosses' Confederation of British industry had no hesitation in telling the working class to shut up and count their blessings. Spokesperson for the engorged rich, Katja Hall, said the CBI "welcomes this balanced approach", adding "Any artificial increase due to political expediency will help no-one and ultimately damage one of the most successful government policies of recent years."
Artificial increase?! If the national minimum wage had increased by the 243% rise enjoyed by company executives in the 15 years since it was introduced, it wouldn't be £6.50, or £6.70, but £18.89 a hour - now!

Great Wages Robbery
These creatures at the heart of big business buy politicians to do their bidding, shaping the tax laws, employment legislation and rampant privatisation that fattens their profits with obscene success. 

Systematically driving down workers' wages as a share of national wealth has been a central mission of successive Tory and Labour governments for the past 40 years. Otherwise, if wages as a percentage of GDP were at the same level today as they were in 1975, a worker currently on £12,000 would be earning £21,300; one on £20,000 would instead enjoy £31,300; and a worker on the current average wage of £27,200 would instead be on £35,931!

Coy Crook
Two former government Ministers who played their part in hampering workers' trade unions, hammering workers' wages and helping boost capitalists' rent, interest and profit are the disgraced reprobates Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw. 

Rifkind obviously takes the 'far, far more than £60,000' that he believes he's 'entitled to'. In fact he's on £81,936 as an MP and chairman of a Westminster Select Committee. Not to mention the £800,000 he's grabbed in the last 5 years from the 5 jobs outside parliament that he actually declared.

In the undercover journalists' sting operation, posing as a Hong Kong communications agency backed up by a fictitious Chinese businessman, Rifkind was recorded boasting:

"You'd be surprised how much free time I have. I spend a lot of time reading, I spend a lot walking. I am self-employed. Nobody pays me a salary, I have to earn my income, but when I'm not doing something I can do what I like." 

The coy crook fails to mention his parliamentary salary of £81,936, paid for by those 'nobodies', overwhelmingly working-class and lower-middle-class taxpayers. 

Self-employed or Self-seeking

Rifkind proceeded: "One sensitive issue, but I have to mention it. You mentioned there would obviously be remuneration...I would simply give it as an example, but when I did a series of presentations on the Middle East...it wasn't a whole day, it was usually a whole morning or an afternoon, and that was somewhere in the region of £5,000 to £8,000."

The 'sensitive' Sir Malcolm obviously feels 'entitled' to a damn sight more than the growing band of self-employed people that has sprung up in desperation at the lack of jobs available since the 2008 bankers' crisis. Their median incomes fell by £4,000 - a massive 28% drop - between 2002 and 2012.  

Entitled... Rifkind

Cheap at Half the Price
Labour's Jack Straw admits he earns - in one day - nearly as much as the annual wage of a worker on the £6.50 minimum on a 20-hour contract: "Normally if I'm doing a speech or something it's £5,000 a day, that's what I charge". Cheap at half Rifkind's price!
Up until he was caught on tape boasting about the price he can be bought for, Straw subscribed to Labour's promise of an £8 minimum wage...but not until 2020, making it barely any more than today's pathetic £6.50.

Bloodsuckers
When Tory millionaire David Cameron recently told the assembled business fat cats of the British Chambers of Commerce that "Britain needs a pay rise", you know there's something happening in the real world. 

First and foremost, there's a general election in two months' time. 

Secondly, the ruthless ruling class Cameron is part of are increasingly scared a revolt is growing against the outrageous system of poverty pay these exploiters rely on to make record profits, directors' bonuses and dividends to the big parasitic shareholders. 

That's how the 3 richest families in Scotland own more wealth than the poorest 20% of people, and how Britain's richest family has more in their pocket than 12.5 million people in the UK!
These capitalist bloodsuckers have drained workers dry, leaving one in five workers below the breadline; creating the longest, deepest fall in real wages since 1856; making the average Scottish worker £1,900 a year worse off than in 2010.

Stark Political Choices
One of the central issues in the May general election is poverty pay and galloping inequality. People face stark choices in those seats where the SSP has been able to afford to stand candidates. 

Vote for Labour to continue their obnoxious track record of suppressing workers' wages with the help of the Thatcherite anti-union laws they retained in 13 years of Labour government. 

Vote for their bogus headline of an £8 minimum wage, ignoring the stark reality they are only promising this figure 5 years from now, in 2020, with inflation on life's basic necessities meantime wiping out any meaningful increase this figure would mean.
Vote SNP, with their welcome but extremely limited support for the £7.85 Living Wage. Limited, because the level is still far below what is required to match the mounting cost of living, and limited because it's entirely voluntary, not legally enforceable, left to the whims and fancies of employers.
Or people disgusted by corrupt, careerists politicians can vote for the SSP, and our relentless, determined campaign for a £10 minimum living wage for all over 16 - now, not in 2020 or some other distant date.

Straw:  Usually on £5000 a day...

Socialist MPs on a Worker's Wage
MPs are so divorced from the struggles of everyday life faced by the rest of us that they have no interest in combating poverty pay. 

Their current basic salary is £67,060. That's set to rise to £74,000 after the elections. 

But even that is not enough for these greedy swine. When the body that now sets MPs' salaries - the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) - surveyed MPs' views on what they thought they should be paid, back in 2013, the AVERAGE response was £86,250!

And in stark, stinking contrast to the CBI's talk about a 20p rise on the £6.50 minimum wage avoiding the pitfalls of "any artificial increase due to political expediency", the chief executive of the IPSA justified the 11% rise for MPs, to £74,000, with the following comments to the Sunday Telegraph:

"MPs' salaries have fallen behind others working in comparable public sector roles. The £74,000 is now seen by some as at the low end. 

Pay needs to be fair to attract good candidates. They are there to represent us - to form laws, to send young people to war. It's not an easy thing to do. We want to have good people doing the job and they need to be paid fairly." 

Dry up your tears of sorrow for these poor, underpaid MPs! Tighten your belts, because 'we're all in this together'. Pity the poor warmongers who send young, working-class economic conscripts to the killing fields of Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, to kill and be killed.

Nice Little Earners - and Day Jobs

Of course MPs from all the 'mainstream' pro-capitalist parties will gladly pocket the full 'rate for the job' - and on top, many of them grab hundreds of thousands more on jobs outside parliament, treating being an MP as their 'day job'.

In fact, just the ten MPs with the highest earnings outside parliament last year grabbed a combined additional income of £3,378,857. That's an average of £33,789 each! 

Top of the pile was Labour's Gordon Brown, who coined £962,516 on top of his MP's salary. 'Gorgeous' George Galloway reached 4th place on the charts with £277,350 on his Commons Register of Members' Financial Interests for 2014. 

The future is not what it used to be!

In contrast, any SSP MP or MSP will only take the average skilled worker's wage, to stay in touch with the working class we seek to represent and help fight for a sweeping redistribution of wealth through socialist measures.

Two classes; two planets! The SSP knows which class we fight for. 

The despicable Malcolm Rifkind once said, in a completely different context, "The future is not what it used to be"! 

Let's make sure of that by organising for a socialist future that banishes poverty, inequality and corrupt

BILLIONAIRES - AND BUTTONS FOR WAGES

The crime of poverty pay is becoming even more criminal.

In a cheap stunt to absorb some of the growing fury of working class people at appalling hourly wage rates, even the Tory government has been obliged to 'name and shame' some of the companies not even paying the legally required national minimum wage, the pathetically low £6.50 for workers aged over 21.
The biggest company named, with the biggest number of workers denied even this pitiful hourly rate, is Swedish-owned clothes chain H&M. 

Known for its fast fashion, cheap chic range, Hennes & Mauritz was founded in 1947 by Erling Persson. The current company chairman is his son, Stefan Persson. He is the world's 24th-richest billionaire, with a personal fortune of £16.01billion. He gained from last year's 25 per cent rise in the stock value of his company, H&M.

But he didn't do too badly from his other sideline, land ownership in England. Last year he bought Savernake Estate in Wiltshire: no crofter's strip of land, nor modest family farm, but a colossus of 8,700 acres! And for Stefan's convenience, this latest acquisition isn't far from Linkenholt, a village in Hampshire, which he bought in 2009!

Billionaire Wage Dodgers

In contrast to this mind-boggling wealth, in the hands of Sweden's richest citizen, his company and primary source of wealth, H&M, dodged paying over 500 of its staff the paltry £6.50 an hour that the national minimum wage legally obliges them to pay! 

Billions for bosses, buttons for their workers!

That's just the stand-out example of obscene class exploitation highlighted by the 'named and shamed' list recently published. And it shouldn't hide the more fundamental point: how the hell are workers meant to live on £6.50 an hour even when companies do pay it?

Below the Breadline

As the SSP steps up its street campaigning for a living national minimum wage of £10 an hour, legally enforced, horror stories of working people who can't cope multiply with every street stall. The woman who told me she has five part-time jobs, as a cleaner, and still can't survive the bills.

The 23-year-old hairdresser who told me she works for a major chain but is having to give up and go back to college, as she only gets £4.50 an hour actual wages, topped up to the legal minimum £6.50 through commission - which is drying up as people can't afford to spend as much on hairdos or shampoos... because of low wages!

The proud people who work part-time but still have had to resort to foodbanks for emergency food supplies.

Inequality: the 1% v. the 99%

Obscene levels of inequality in Scotland actually add to economic crises.

Low wages suppress spending power, thereby adding to job insecurity and unemployment. Workers getting a boost to their wages would spend it, investing in the local economy - in contrast to company bosses on unimaginable sums who just squander their wealth on luxury yachts, works of art that they often stick away in a vault...or in buying up a whole village!

But inequality is the ugly twin of poverty. The richest tenth of people in Scotland have 900 times as much wealth as the poorest tenth of the population.

That's in keeping with the global obscenity of inequality: as Oxfam recently reported, the richest 1% on earth own 48% of global wealth, and by 2016 the 1% will own more than the other 99% of humanity!

£10 easily affordable

Fighting for a £10 an hour national minimum wage for all over 16 - with equal pay for women - is hardly asking for the moon and the stars. It's roughly equivalent to two-thirds the median male wage in Scotland. In other words, two-thirds of the income that half of all men already get more than.

It's the minimum wage unanimously voted for at last autumn's British Trades Union Congress, which adds a mighty potential force behind the demand.

The SSP is appealing to people on the streets to raise their chins, raise their sights, and fight for a living minimum wage, legally enforced.

We are appealing to trade unionists to take up the cudgels and seriously campaign for the policy agreed by all unions representing over seven million members.

And we are arguing that such a wage is easily affordable. The biggest armies of low paid workers are massed in retail, hospitality and the care sector. They are employed by retail giants, including supermarkets, who make £billions in profit every year, and could easily afford a decent living wage for those who make them their profits. Likewise the big chains in the fast foods and hospitality sector.

And the battalions of low paid workers in the public sector could be afforded at least £10 an hour if governments radically changed their spending priorities. From squandering £100billion on Trident weapons of mass destruction, and cutting tax workers' jobs whilst the rich dodge £120billion a year in taxes, to investment in well-paid jobs in the likes of care services for children, the elderly, sick and disabled.

Pay Before Profit

We live in a fabulously rich country - with obscene levels of poverty. Wage levels are a prime cause of that poverty, with half a million Scots working to stay below the breadline.

It's time to stand up and demand a share of the growing wealth for the working class that produce it in the first place.

Just as Syriza won power by, amongst other policies, pledging to restore the minimum wage to its 2010 level (double its current appalling level), so too the Scottish Socialists are determined to lead the fight for a decent living minimum wage of £10 now. Join us.