“We’re All In This Together” declares the signage in one famous supermarket.
Far from it! The household name displaying those posters, Marks and Spencer’s, have just announced another tranche of job losses, tossing 7,000 workers onto the growing scrapheap of mass unemployment.
Workers are being made to pay a heavy price for the Coronavirus.
The government and capitalist employers are making us pay with job losses, pay cuts, slashed conditions, intensified exploitation, the massacre of sick benefits and, yes, loss of lives.
Years of failure to invest - and consciously planned poverty pay – contributes to the slaughter of the innocents during this pandemic.
Care Home Carnage
Decades of austerity left the NHS prone to being overrun when COVID-19 hit these shores, so both the Tory government and the SNP Scottish government prioritised clearance of bed spaces in our hospitals over securing the safety of elderly patients thrown into residential care homes.
Freedom of Information investigations have revealed at least 1,200 elderly patients in Scotland were transferred from hospital wards into care homes without being tested for COVID-19. And that is a gross underestimate, because five of Scotland’s health boards, including the two largest, refused to answer.
Worse still, the same investigations revealed many others thrown in amongst the most vulnerable elderly population at the height of a pandemic had been tested positive in the hospital.
As professor Allyson Pollock commented “This was like throwing a lighted match into a tinderbox.”
This austerity-rooted regime helped trigger the care home carnage that accounts for half of all COVID-19 deaths.
Workplace Infection and Death
As we repeatedly warned and denounced in recent months, whilst the governments told us to stay at home they also told us to get to work. They were driven by their preoccupation with upholding the profit margins of the profiteering rich.
The Health and Safety Executive this week reported 600 people in Scotland have caught the virus in their place of work, nearly two-thirds of them in care homes.
As the STUC points out, that figure is only the tip of a vastly larger iceberg. Especially given the notoriety of sectors that employ many of the lowest paid for not reporting accidents at work let alone infection with the killer virus.
Now a new virus is sweeping the country, demolishing jobs, wages and family livelihoods.
Whilst their capitalist competitors in Germany have extended the wage subsidy furlough scheme for a period of 2 years, to mitigate redundancies, the short-sighted get-rich-quick brigade in charge of capitalist Britain are cutting off the life support machine of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, triggering mass redundancies.
Those of us who remember Maggie Thatcher’s Dark Ages in the 1980s are suffering deja-vu; TV news back then always ended with a massive list of redundancies and closures, in part designed to browbeat workers into thinking job losses were an unstoppable force of nature.
In recent weeks, thousands of job losses have been announced daily: Boots, John Lewis, M&S, Debenhams, hospitality, airlines and even the public sector.
Fire and Rehire
This relentless slaughter of jobs is not always purely based on companies suffering the economic impact of the pandemic.
It’s often something previously planned, but now implemented with maniacal zeal by company bosses under cover of Coronavirus, in a race to the bottom, making workers pay the price for sustained profiteering.
British Airways’ “fire and rehire” tactic is the best known of these assaults on workers with the excuse of COVID-19. An extremely profitable company grabbed public funds to furlough staff, but still fired all 42,000 and then bullied and blackmailed 30,000 of them into accepting wage cuts of 50-60% - or else join the 12,000 chucked out the door.
Centrica Cowboys
Centrica is not far behind BA in these criminal methods.
As one of their workers explained to me,
“At the moment we get six months full pay for sick absence. Centrica want to abolish that entirely unless we opt into a taxable private health scheme. If we do that, 13 weeks will be on full pay and the next 9 months on two-thirds of pay. Otherwise if we refuse to opt into private health we're meant to survive on nothing but £95 a week Statutory Sick Pay. And it's even worse for those of us with less than 2-years service; just 10 weeks full pay if we go into private health, the rest on £95 SSP.
For the industrial staff, Centrica plan to increase contracts from a 37 hour week to 40, with no uplift in pay. So they want 3 hours a week free labour. Office staff are expected to gift them half-an-hour a week free of wages, with worsened opening hours.
And the overtime rate is to be slashed from time and a half to single time, with a cap of 25 hours a year.
Centrica call centres seem to be the new Victorian mills.”
Pockets of Resistance
Thankfully, pockets of resistance by workers to the slaughter of their jobs and theft of their wages is beginning to erupt, but urgently requires coordination and leadership from the wider trade union movement.
GMB union members in Centrica have voted by a whopping 95% for strike action, in a 68% turnout.
British Airways workers - cabin crew, baggage and loading staff alike - are poised to vote on taking strike action.
Healthcare workers have got together and staged a series of marvellous rallies demanding pay justice and pay equality, many of them pushing for a 15% pay rise, after being slapped in the face by the government when they were excluded from the all-too-miserly public sector pay rise - after having put their lives on the line, face-to-face with COVID-19.
Many other workers are furious at attacks on conditions, including sick pay entitlements, which is particularly outrageous and dangerous when COVID-19 has hit chicken factories, meat plants, textile factories and other workplaces.
For example, one multi-billioned retail giant has gone from stopping wages to workers with COVID-19 to slashing company sick benefit entirely after 3 days’ absence per year.
Precisely those workers with underlying health problems, and therefore most vulnerable to the ongoing Coronavirus, are the same people most likely to be disqualified from anything more than £95 Statutory Sick Pay, because ill health has forced them off work for periods.
Stark Choices
Workers face harsh, stark choices, thrown into high relief by the Coronavirus and its economic consequences.
The road being travelled not just by the Tories but also the Scottish government involves mass redundancies as the subsidies to big business dry up, and the massacre of pay and sick pay. Which not only further endangers lives by dragging people into work despite being infected, but also blows to smithereens the previous nonsense talked by governments and some economists about a rapid V-shaped recovery.
With household savings at an all-time low, household debts at an all-time high, and wages being crushed down even further as a share of national wealth - in order to enhance the share that goes in profit - the consumer-led boom, which capitalist Britain and Scotland has been far too reliant on, has now turned into its opposite.
Far from being “all in this together”, the Corona crisis has highlighted the gaping chasm between the classes in this system of running society.
Britain’s 45 billionaires increased their personal wealth by 20% in the months of March and April alone.
In neat, grotesque contrast, the average NHS worker has suffered at 20% pay cut since 2010.
Two-thirds of all care home staff are thinking of leaving their low-paid, insecure and dangerous jobs, in a new survey by the GMB.
Fighting Socialist Alternatives
So what’s the alternative to this tsunami of job losses, pay cuts and life-threatening attacks on sick pay?
Scotland’s trade union movement embraces nearly 650,000 workers - and could recruit as many more if they demonstrated an iron determination to fight for immediate improvements in working conditions and organised action that would remove the fear factor that dominates the minds of many workers.
At the height of the pandemic the STUC and its affiliated unions called for an immediate £2-an-hour wage increase for all key workers.
That should not wither on the vine and become just an empty rhetorical flourish.
Turned into serious campaigning and collective action, it could be one part of unified demands for better wages across the board, underpinned by an absolute minimum, legally enforced wage of £12-an-hour for all at 16.
Such improved wages will transform the lives of hundreds of thousands and radically improve workers’ spending power, which in turn would make jobs far more secure in sectors such as retail, hospitality, tourism and entertainment.
Minimum 16-Hour Week
At the 2019 STUC annual conference, I proposed my union USDAW’s policy motion for abolition of all zero hours contracts and other forms of insecure, casualised labour, to be replaced by a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it.
That pioneering policy was passed at the STUC without a single vote against. It now needs to be turned into a major plank of the trade union movement's alternative to low wages, rampant job insecurity, and the vicious spiral of job losses they both contribute to.
We live in a society where capitalist ownership of the core economy leads to monstrous levels of work-related stress, as the profiteers strive for greater output by fewer workers on lesser wages.
An epidemic of mental ill health has already been stored up and is now added to by the lockdown - and indeed new forms of physical and mental illness created by working from home.
Capitalism is a system which by its very nature puts profit before people; the health of bosses’ wallets before the health and wellbeing of the working class who produce society's wealth.
100% Wages for Sick Workers
An increasingly critical issue for the massed ranks of the trade union movement to struggle for is sick pay equivalent to 100% average wages, instead of the pathetic £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay and the rapid obliteration of company sick benefit schemes currently being witnessed.
That one measure could have prevented countless COVID-19 deaths by removing the financial pressure to go to work despite carrying the virus, thereby infecting others.
The Tories have severed the lifeline of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme despite the fact the deadly disease is still here and still as lethal.
They've thrown the sop of £1,000 grant for every worker not made redundant.
Plenty of big businesses will pocket that publicly funded grant to the benefit of their profit-and-loss accounts.
Means Tests for the Rich!
The trade union movement should demand means tests for businesses, instead of the humiliating means tests to which the poorest people are subjected.
Let’s examine the secret accounts of every business. Where a small enterprise, doing useful work in safe conditions, genuinely cannot afford a minimum wage of £12-an-hour and retention of all staff, they should be granted state funds or loans to save jobs and pay decent wages.
No such largesse can be justified for big businesses, whose profits are measured in £millions or £billions.
If they announce job losses or closures and they are involved in socially useful production or services, the unions should mobilise action for measures like a 4-day week on 5 days’ pay - and the takeover of their assets and operations by the government or local authorities, in order to sustain jobs and their workers’ contribution to the economy for the benefit of society.
4-Day Week on 5 Days' Pay
Even the capitalist government of Germany is contemplating a 4-day week, after the giant 2.3 million-strong IG Metall union called for a 30-hour week to save jobs.
We face a crossroads. What kind of economy, what kind of work and what kind of society do we want for the 21st century?
Vast areas of human life require work to be done, yet the system we live under means the optimists around the Bank of England predict 2.5 million unemployed by Christmas, whilst the economic pessimists warn of about 4 million, including one in every three young people.
Such waste of talent, energy and skills, and the attendant misery and poverty of mass unemployment, is a searing condemnation of a capitalist economy founded on the profit motive.
School leavers should be guaranteed either an apprenticeship on at least a £12 minimum wage, free further education with a living student grant, or a decent, meaningful, unionized job.
Society is screaming out for adequate numbers of highly trained workers in areas as varied as the NHS; social care; mental health services; education; council services; environmental improvements; house building and retrofitting; vastly expanded public transport; production and distribution of clean green energy and all the equipment that goes with it.
150,000 Green Jobs
The potential for a vast green jobs plan was illustrated in the recent STUC report showing where 150,000 new, green jobs could be created in Scotland.
But instead of fulfilling the verbal flourishes of “Scotland becoming the Saudi Arabia of renewables”, as declared in the past by Alex Salmond, the SNP government has utterly failed to challenge the system whereby growth in wind farms and other green energy projects has almost entirely bypassed any job creation in Scotland itself.
Instead, they preside over the obscene absurdity of wind farm construction and decommissioning of North Sea oil and gas installations being carried out abroad, as far afield as cheap labour Bangladesh and Indonesia, while fabrication yards and other facilities a few miles inshore lie idle. For example the BiFab yards in Fife and Lewis.
Rubbing salt into the wounds of a country facing mass unemployment, the new Viking onshore wind farm on Shetland, the biggest of its kind in the UK, is now to be built and operated by the Danish Vestas company.
At least 400 initial construction jobs are therefore in the hands of an overseas profiteer, rather than being part of a Scottish public sector energy corporation which could provide tens of thousands of well-paid jobs, and apprenticeships for young people, giving them purpose, dignity and a secure future.
Why should the Scottish government leave the fate of Scottish workers in the hands of Vestas, the same company which in 2009 declared mass redundancies at its factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, leading to a factory occupation by the workforce, which the SSP built solidarity for in Scotland, as those workers rightly demanded nationalisation to save jobs? And they were spurned in their demands by the same Labour government of Gordon Brown which previously spoke eloquently of creating 400,000 green jobs.
Green Socialist Recovery Plan
Instead of a new 2020 Dark Ages that could make Thatcher's atrocities look mild and more resemble the 1930s, the collective potential power of the trade union movement and socialists needs to be mobilised in pursuit of a Green Socialist Recovery Plan.
Based on public ownership of key sectors like construction, public transport, energy, major industrial enterprises and the banking system, Scotland could lead the way by immediately creating at least 150,000 new green, well-paid jobs with full collective union rights, and workers’ control over health and safety and other day-to-day decisions.
Imagine what such a planned socialist recovery programme could mean for the construction of 100,000 social sector houses, built to the highest environmental standards, with varieties of stock guaranteeing gardens or other outdoor spaces for all who want it.
Imagine how household energy bills, which have rocketed during the lockdown, could be slashed through retrofitting and insulating existing housing stock, and removing the profit margin in a publicly owned energy sector.
Imagine the scale of green re-industrialisation Scotland’s shipyards and factories (including under-threat Dennis buses) could enjoy in the production of vast new fleets of ferries, buses and trains for a vastly expanded and integrated public transport network - free at the point of use, thereby combating poverty, social isolation and pollution.
Imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers could be liberated from the health-threatening drudgery of 12-hour shifts and more, by employment of new staff in areas of greatest need on a maximum 4-day week.
Imagine – and Organise
Workers and their unions need to imagine this and much more, but turn these entirely realistic visions of our collective future into reality by fighting for it.
Truly the choice we face is that posed by Rosa Luxemburg a century ago: socialism or barbarism.
