COVID-19: Workers Dying for Sick Pay and Safety

 

Thousands dying from lack of safety action or income support 

Several new Reports confirm what we have contended for the past year: governments and employers are killing workers as they put big business profits ahead of workers’ health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TUC reports over 10,000 workers have died of the virus, arising from workplace infections, and countless more are suffering the long-term health problems of long-Covid.

Yet, the very same week, Public Health England identified 3,549 outbreaks of COVID-19 in workplaces since last July, with another 100 last week alone, despite the whole of the UK being in lockdown. Over 500 workers tested positive in the big Swansea DVLA centre recently, and unions in Scotland have just written to the Scottish government demanding urgent action to curb the spread of COVID-19 clusters in call centres.

Those figures will be a gross underestimate, as they only cover outbreaks in offices, factories, construction sites, etc. actually reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Not One Single Employer Sanctioned!

What are the HSE - and the government which funds and directs their operations - doing in response?

Not one single employer has been prosecuted for presiding over the supreme hazardous workplace conditions; failure to tackle the spread of COVID-19, with its lethal consequences.

Not one single workplace has even been issued a HSE Prohibition Notice, whereby inspectors have the power to stop workplace operations, where they judge continued industrial or commercial activity is “deemed to be injurious or damaging to health.”

Not one employer has even been fined for negligence, whereas individuals who breach lockdown regulations face penalties of up to £1,000.

One of the prime causes of employers escaping any significant sanctions from the HSE is that the latter decided to classify COVID-19 as only a “significant” threat, rather than place it in its highest risk category, of being “serious”.

In making this breath-taking decision, the HSE has been fully backed by governments.

Tory Minister Thinks COVID Deaths 'Non-Permanent'?!

In an astonishing declaration - even by the standards of the Tory government - Employment Minister Mims Davies tried to justify this inaction by the HSE when she told Parliament:     “the effects of Covid are non-permanent or reversible, non-progressive, and any disability is temporary for the working population as a whole.”

Those of us who have suffered the loss of friends or family members can angrily testify to this heartless Tory hack that death from COVID-19 is both permanent and irreversible.

HSE Pressured to Keep Workplaces Open

One experienced HSE inspector, who withheld his name for fear of retribution, told the press: “HSE internal instructions have said they would be very reluctant to support an inspector who did serve a prohibition notice.”

He went on to confirm government pressure is being brought to bear on them to keep workplaces open, failing to take account of risks to workers and their families.

“HSE are telling us ‘walk off site if you feel unsafe’, but you can’t do anything to stop work. We can leave crowded workplaces lacking social distancing if we feel ourselves threatened, but we can’t stop people from working.”

That simply confirms what we wrote last April about a complete lack of safety inspections on many construction sites, exacerbated by the advice to HSE inspectors to stay clear of risks to themselves, while meantime building workers put themselves on the line - including for non-essential work, such as building luxury apartments.

The underlying reason for this hooligan inaction by HSE bosses, in tandem with the government - taking no meaningful actions against workplaces being super-spreaders of the Coronavirus - is cuts.

The Tories tried to make much of investing £14million in HSE last June, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with previous cuts of £100million.

No wonder HSE can’t cope with the deluge of over 100,000 Covid-related complaints from workers and the public in the past year – 25,000 of them last month alone.

It Takes Collective Workers' Action

It took strike action, and the threat of walking off the job, to force governments – in the UK, Scotland and internationally – to extend the closures of many non-essential building sites and non-food retail, or for employers to provide even the bare necessities of hand cleansers, social distancing and other safety measures in workplaces across all sectors that remained open.

And amongst the unsung frontline heroes of this year of the plague are the thousands of shop stewards and union Health and Safety representatives who have confronted employers with demands for concrete safety measures, risk assessments and cessation of unsafe work. Often facing obstruction, hostility, even victimisation, as they seek to defend workers’ lives.

For Workers' Control

This volunteer army of workers’ representatives should be at the heart of improving workplace safety - with the full collaboration of an expanded HSE inspectorate. Not just during the pandemic, but for the ongoing future.

Workers’ control of health and safety - based on the day-to-day knowledge of these people rooted in the shop floor - is not only democratic, but a far safer mechanism than reliance on remote, well-paid senior managers, wielding pressure on behalf of the owners to maximize profit, even where that means cutting corners and risking lives.

Lost Wages Prevent Self-Isolation

Meantime, medical professionals have published new Reports underlining the fatal risks workers are being subjected to, especially amongst the lowest paid, due to the utter failure of governments to provide proper support to those who should be self-isolating.

Dr Muge Cevik is an expert in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St Andrews.

She and a group of other experts have just published a damning report in the British Medical Journal which demonstrates that less than 20% of people are able to adhere to isolation regulations - even though the overwhelming majority are willing and wanting to do so.

The report carries data showing the vast majority of people are willing to self-isolate when tested positive, but the actual ability to do so is 3 times lower amongst those on less than £20,000 a year, or with less than £100 in savings.

The article’s other underlying conclusion is hardly a new revelation to those of us who have fought throughout the past year for full, 100% average wages for every sick or self-isolating worker, to prevent them being dragged into work by the threat of financial ruin. Lost wages are the primary reason for not following full isolation guidelines.

Low Pay and Crowded Housing

In other statements, Dr Cevik has highlighted the majority of hospitalizations are from infections amongst key workers. 

She told CNN: “There are huge outbreaks in warehouses, meatpacking plants, care homes... and the only thing that combines these sectors are low-paid workers likely to live in crowded houses.”

Back in April 2020, I wrote that the government should provide not just full average wages but the option of safe, staffed and caring self-isolation facilities (quarantine) as part of the NHS, for example by usage of unoccupied hotel rooms.

In the recent BMJ article the medical professionals argue that governments “need to focus support on those in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing... and should include free and safe accommodation, alongside adequate income support, job protection and help with caring responsibilities.”

They cite examples of Test-and-Care schemes in San Francisco and New York where people testing positive are offered either free hotel accommodation or free delivery of food, medicine and transport (and even dog walking services) to help them quarantine at home.

Predictably, those measures have not only boosted adherence to self-isolation but greatly increased the uptake of testing itself, as workers on a pitiful income are more likely to avoid getting tests, even though they have symptoms, because they are terrified at the prospect of being forced to take time off work on barely any income.

Terrified to Take Time Off Sick

Examples of the latter are rampant. That was one of the factors in the cruel carnage in Scotland's privatised care homes last year, where workers on or just above the miserly minimum wage, with no worthwhile occupational sick benefit schemes, dragged themselves into work to avoid going under financially.

A union organiser for taxi drivers explained: “I know a driver who had to self-isolate four times in 2 months. How does that work? These are people currently only earning £35 to £50-a-day and are in most cases being charged to install protective screens in the cab. When you’re in a desperate situation you take risks.”

Or as a cleaner described, she has been forced to come in to work in an empty office, where the staff are all working from home, to clean it 4 days a week. Last month she caught COVID-19, probably on a bus.

She stayed at home a few days but then went back to work:

“I couldn’t afford to stay at home because I was getting hardly any income. I feel guilty that I went to work and might have infected more people but I had no other option.”

When is £500 Worth Nothing? - When It's Refused!

The Tory Minister in charge of Test and Trace, Dido Harding, told Parliament that 20,000 people a day are failing to stay at home after being instructed to. Of course, countless others have avoided taking tests, out of fear of losing their income.

In a grotesque and cynical PR stunt, the government conceded payment of £500 to those forced to self-isolate... but with enough strings attached to strangle it as any kind of support for low-paid workers that could help them stay off work and help break the chains of infection. In real life, nearly half of all those who’ve applied have been refused this modest sum, including 86% of all applicants in Liverpool.

Stop a Premature Stampede Back

The governments of Westminster and Holyrood are in danger of using the rays of hope felt by us all at the rollout of Vaccines to stampede people back to non-essential work, risking yet another eruption of disease and death, as was caused by the profit-driven lunacies of ‘Eat Out and Help Out’ last summer, and the commercialised craze over the Christmas period.

Shop-floor workers’ representatives, including Health and Safety reps, should be given the full backing of their national union leaderships to resist premature reopening, and to insist on enforcement of proper health and safety measures in those workplaces unavoidably functioning.

Full Average Wages - Workers' Health Before Bosses' Wealth

In tandem with that, socialists and trade unionists need to step up to demand that employers and governments pay full,100% average wages to every worker, whether on furlough, sick leave or in self-isolation.

Elimination of COVID-19 will require more than just vaccinations. It also needs localised Test, Trace Isolate and Care systems, free of charge.

And looking beyond immediate palliative measures, working-class people need a leadership prepared to tackle overcrowded housing, low pay, the sick joke of £95 Statutory Sick Pay – and the deeper root causes of increasingly frequent pandemics, themselves the products of a globalised capitalist system which trashes the planet and its people for profit.

 

 

Solidarity With Scottish Gas Strikers: FIRE THE BOARD!

 

SOLIDARITY WITH THE SCOTTISH GAS STRIKERS!

NO WAY O’SHEA – WE ARE WITH THE WORKERS!

FIRE THE BOARD – AND DON’T REHIRE THEM!

DEMAND DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP: end the corporate thuggery of ‘fire and rehire’ 

As Scottish/British gas engineers stage another round of strikes against savage cuts to their jobs, terms and conditions, and invasion of their family time by bosses demanding more work and longer hours for less money, the Scottish Socialist Party extends them the hand of solidarity. 

We know which side we are on in this showdown between workers who have risked their own lives throughout the pandemic, volunteering to carry out repairs in houses where they knew people had Covid-19 – and a gang of profiteers, led my £800,000-a-year CEO, Chris O’Shea.

Owners of Scottish Gas, Centrica, is run by a club of millionaires. They want to browbeat workers into working from 5 to 8 hours UNPAID EXTRA WORK each week. 

Between four of them, the Centrica Board members have earned £37million since 2015, by sitting on the boards of other companies outside the gas industry. 

Stephen Hester made £18million since 2015 as CEO of insurance giant RSA, and stands to gain a further £16million from sales of RSA shares. 

Heidi Mottram took over £4million in salary and benefits as CEO of Northumbrian Water.

Kevin O’Byrne got £2.23million in 2019 as finance chief of Sainsbury’s, on top of £1.45million the previous year. 

Chair of Centrica, Scott Wheway, is on £410,000. He gets another £200,000 as chair of AXA UK and - up until last year - was paid £240,000 for sitting on the board of Santander UK. 

Privatisation is a licence to print money and hand it to a tiny bunch of remote millionaire directors.  Boardroom dictators who then act like gold-plated, mafioso thugs, holding a gun to the heads of workers whose annual wages they wouldn’t get out of bed for a week for. 

The unelected board of Centrica should be fired and the whole industry taken into democratic public ownership, with elected Boards of Management, including direct workers’ representatives, on a skilled wage, not these mind-boggling incomes. 

The case for public ownership and democratic working-class control could not be more glaring. 

Victory to the gas engineers! Reverse the tide of ‘fire and rehire’ corporate thuggery. Fire the board! For democratic public ownership. 

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RICH VACCINATED BY WEALTH: POVERTY KILLS

 

The rich are vaccinated against Covid-19 by their wealth 

The UK and Scottish governments are stumbling back and forth from lockdown to premature reopening to 'mockdown', under pressure from the business lobby - with current advice to stay at home, whilst giving loopholes for non-essential retail giants, hospitality firms and construction companies to drag workers into work, regardless of the mounting health threat from gathering in large numbers.

Historically low wages, battered down for decades in a systematic theft of wealth from the workers who produce it, have led to historically low household savings and high household debt.

Combined with the derisory £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay, this is a recipe for disaster, endangering the lives of many workers and vulnerable family members because they cannot afford to self-isolate - as part of a plan to not just reduce, but eliminate COVID-19, with mass testing, tracing and isolation alongside vaccination.

Yet the wealth is there if we distributed it to ensure full average wages for all sick or self-isolating workers, or those placed on furlough through temporary shutdowns.

NHS Crisis

A well-funded, fully-equipped NHS, with the necessary staffing levels and decent pay, is at the heart of what's required in the pandemic emergency.

Some Scottish hospitals are even more in danger of being swamped than they were last Spring, cancelling appointments and procedures for some non-Covid conditions.

Decades of governments deliberately refusing to invest in the NHS, despite dire warnings from scientists and health experts, has led to this life-threatening situation.

In Scotland, 6,000 hospital beds – 25% of the total - disappeared in the past 13 years of SNP governments failing to resist and defeat Westminster governments’ butchery.

Nurses Skip Meals

The average health worker has suffered a 20% pay cut in the past 10 years, with catastrophic impact on morale at a time when hospital workers are already drastically overstretched.

A new survey by Nurses United and Nursing Notes confirmed a shocking state of affairs in Scotland's hospitals.

A startling 97% of nurses surveyed feel undervalued by the government; 90% of them have suffered mental health problems during the pandemic.

One in every three nurses has skipped meals to feed their family or pay bills; 58% of them have used credit cards for daily essential spending.

Alongside gruelling 12-hour shifts - caused primarily by understaffing - this has led to one in every four nurses telling the survey they plan to leave their job in the next year. The two most common primary reasons they give for this catastrophic potential exodus of skills, experience and dedication are low pay (18%) and poor work/life balance (15%).

The Virus of Poverty

Poverty kills people.

Poverty pay is a killer, more especially amidst the pandemic.

COVID-19 is not the great leveller. A tiny minority of the population have been vaccinated by wealth. Their wealth affords them spacious, well-heated homes, drastically greater access to working from home than the lower-paid millions, and far better conditions for remote home-learning by their children.

The struggle to eliminate the Coronavirus has to include an urgent struggle against poverty pay, basement level benefits, and a sick pay scheme that at best is a sick joke.

Health staff and millions of other people officially designated as ‘key workers’ have gone from the Tories offering them two-faced clapping, to slapping them in the face.

A public sector pay freeze - with a good dose of divide and rule between different types of Public Sector worker thrown in - is certainly not the cure to conditions which create countless avoidable deaths.

NHS staff fully deserve the 15% pay rise many of them are demanding, to part-compensate for the 20% pay cut in the last decade.

Organise for £12 Minimum Now!

The STUC should muster serious plans to mobilise workers in pursuit of the demand they raised last March: for an immediate £2-an-hour pay increase for every key worker, regardless of which job or sector they work in.

That would be a unifying demand to rally thousands of workers behind. As would the struggle to underpin it with a £12-an-hour, legally-enforced minimum wage for all workers from the age of 16, with equal pay for women.

Plenty of big businesses could easily afford such a modest pay scale, considering the skyrocketing profits during the pandemic - and eye-watering incomes for directors. 

Anyone would welcome the Christmas bonus of one week's wages awarded to B&M Bargains workers at Christmas. But how pathetic a sop that is to low pay, considering B&M’s chief executive grabbed a bonus of £300million!

Those of us who have persistently fought for 6 years to force the USDAW retail union national leadership into serious action to win a £10 minimum wage will welcome that being achieved this week for Morrison's supermarket staff.

But Morrison’s can well afford this, particularly as 25% of the pay rise will be funded by removal of annual bonuses, and more so given the enormous surge in profits that the workforce has put their lives at risk to generate. And Morrison's chief executive, David Potts, should be renamed David Potts of Gold! His income last year was £4.2million.

People and Pay Before Profit

Decent guaranteed pay - and a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it - are important strands to solutions to the pandemic. As is full, 100% average wages for sick or self-isolating workers.

Collective action by the potentially powerful trade union movement on these fighting demands could help prevent further, unnecessary deaths, created by that lethal combination: poverty and COVID-19.

A serious fight needs to be organised to put people and pay before profit; workers’ health before bosses’ wealth.

This article is also published in the fortnightly Scottish Socialist Voice.

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FAT CAT WEDNESDAY: THE URGENT CASE FOR A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME

Today is Fat Cat Wednesday.

According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation, High Pay Centre and others, the typical chief executive of the biggest 100 companies in the UK will have grabbed the typical annual wage of a full-time worker by 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday 6^th of January 2021.

Put another way, it will have taken just 34 hours for the top dogs in the FTSE 100 companies to earn the equivalent of an entire year's wage for the typical UK worker.

But we should spare a kindly thought for these poor buggers, because last year they only had to put in 33 hours work for full year's pay!

The median (or middle income) of a full-time worker was £30,353 as of June 2019 – the High Pay Centre's last available figures - but the median Chief Executives’ income is 120 times that much.

If we switch to the median wage for all workers, full-time and part-time, Company bosses earn 145 times as much.

And taking the average (mean) income of CEOs - which was £4.7million back in June 2019 - then the average worker would have to toil for 154 years to match these parasites’ annual income.

CASES OF CAPITALIST GREED

There are many, many obscene examples of individual greed and privilege amidst the suffering and insecurity faced by millions of workers, particularly during the pandemic.

The highest paid chief executive is Tim Steiner of Ocado on £58.73million. It would take the average full-time worker 8 years to earn as much as he got in one, single day!

As hospitality workers - already low paid - face carnage to their jobs, Whitbread’s CEO, Alison Brittain, got a pay package of £5.59million.

As millions of us yearn for an effective vaccine against the killer COVID-19, AstraZeneca are poised to make gargantuan profits. Even before this new, bountiful source of wealth for Big Pharma, Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca raked in £14.33 million, which is 200 times as much as the average worker.

To rub salt in the wound, only 40 of the FTSE 100 companies bother to pay the mis-named Living Wage of £9.30-an-hour to their workers.

And some super-profitable giants, including TESCO, have been recently named and shamed for not even paying the pathetic government minimum wage!

FOR A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME

This grotesque new batch of statistics underlines the arguments that I and the Scottish Socialist Party have put forward in favour of a Legal Maximum Income, initially set at a 10:1 differential with the legal minimum wage. 

That’s been the policy of the SSP for most of our existence since 1998.

And at the 2018 annual conference of my own union, USDAW, I successfully argued the case for this policy against the opposition of the central National officials, winning a clear conference majority for a legally-enforced Maximum Income, initially set at 10 times the legal minimum wage.

[Watch the short video BELOW]

Personally, I’ve always thought a 10:1 differential between the maximum income and the minimum wage far too generous.

But the modesty of this demand is its great merit; who in Hell could oppose such a modest measure against the systemic and growing inequality in capitalist Scotland and capitalist Britain?

Instead of the 145:1, 120:1, and 200:1 figures explained above, 10:1 would be a revolutionary advance, as a major source of revenue for better wages and vastly improved public services.

As we demand a legally enforced £12-an-hour minimum wage for all at 16, who on Earth could conjure up a case against a ceiling of £120-an-hour as the maximum income allowed?

And I believe it is important to describe this policy as a maximum income rather than just a maximum wage.  Why? Because, for example, chief executives' fixed salaries typically only account for 20% of their total annual income, whereas long-term and short-term incentive schemes account for 75% of their ill-gotten incomes.

WE DEMAND THE BAKERY, NOT JUST A BIGGER SLICE OF THE CAKE!

Indeed, this point is a reminder that whilst socialists and trade unionists should take up the demand for a Legal Maximum Income with ferocious enthusiasm, we will only ever entirely eliminate wealth inequality by challenging the private ownership of the means of producing that wealth; the private accumulation of profits, perks and privileges for the few.

Capitalism by its very nature is a system where the millions make the wealth and the millionaires take the wealth.

Democratic public ownership of all the big companies which dominate the means of production, distribution and exchange is the foundation for an egalitarian society where the vast majority of the population - the working class – gain back the fruits of their labour in the form of wages and the social wage, such as universal provision of services like health, education, housing and transport.

On Fat Cat Wednesday, renew and redouble your determination to combat the obscene poverty and inequality which scars the face of Scotland by demanding immediate measures like a £12 minimum wage and a maximum income initially set at 10 times that. 

Join that fight alongside the struggle for the collective ownership of the natural, industrial and financial wealth that could eliminate poverty overnight, if taken out of the hands of the capitalists, bankers and landowners who rob the rest of us, through the organised exploitation that is capitalism.

 

VIDEO ON THE CASE FOR A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME:

2020 VISION OF CAPITALIST CLASS WAR: build workers’ struggle, solidarity and socialism

Storm clouds are gathering as we turn our backs on 2020 and face the struggles of the rest of the 2020s.

Several groups of workers are flexing their muscles, threatening to fight back against the multiple tributes being hacked out of their jobs, wages and everyday conditions by the obscenely rich elite, to pay for the crises of 2020.

As we reflect on the past year and prepare for the next, nobody should harbour any doubt that class war is raging in the boardrooms of big business.

Employers and governments work in tandem to unleash a massive redistribution of wealth to the rich from the rest of us, with claims this is unavoidable to balance the books after a year of unprecedented state expenditure. And they plan to use Brexit to rob us further.

In battling to defend every penny of workers’ pay, every job and public service, it is necessary to see the bigger picture, to build the widest possible solidarity action in reply.

The past year has given us ‘2020 vision’ of capitalism in all its ruthlessly exploitative nature.

The globalised hunt for ever-greater profit and new capitalist markets has invaded wilder parts of our planet, bringing humans into contact with lethal pathogens, unleashing global pandemics with increased frequency and ferocity - in particular COVID-19, the worst killer pandemic in a century.

Decades of austerity cuts - better described as planned poverty, in pursuit of even more grotesque wealth for a tiny minority - led to entirely avoidable human carnage, with shortages in the NHS and failure to provide protective equipment or safe conditions in care homes and countless other workplaces the most obvious examples.

As 2020 wore on, more and more people spotted the glaring contradiction between rhetoric and reality; between mantras of “We’re All In This Together” and the brutal expansion of inequality.

In just three months the planet's billionaires increased their wealth by 27%, whilst workers on furlough suffered 20% pay cuts, and a record 370,000 others a full 100% loss of earnings from August-October alone, as they were chucked on the scrapheap of unemployment.

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos increased his personal wealth by $87billion since January, equivalent to the entire, combined NHS budgets for the whole of the UK.

The government propaganda nonsense about treating the Coronavirus like a war prompts one picture they would rather hide from us; as with wars, the pandemic has led to further polarisation of wealth, including increased monopolization of ownership.

That is plain to see in the retail sector, the second biggest employer in the country after the NHS. Retail giants like JD Sports and Mike Ashley's Fraser Group battle over who picks up the spoils as Arcadia, Debenhams and countless small firms go to the wall. Big retail thrives, the High Street turns into a wasteland.

Handouts to Big Business

Government policies in response to the pandemic were shaped by the clash of two opposite class interests.

The furlough scheme was the result both of demands by the trade union movement and socialists to protect workers in their jobs, and the fear and loathing of collapsed profits by big business.

Still, it was primarily huge handouts for the capitalist rich and horrendous insecurity for workers. For example, supermarkets got state handouts of £1.9billion in business tax relief, which they converted into handouts of £1.3billion in dividend payments to shareholders and 230,000 redundancy notices this year to retail workers - whose efforts on the front line not only fed the people but fed the profits of the big four supermarkets and their likes.

It's Capitalism to Blame – not just COVID-19

In fighting to shape the future in the interests of the vast working-class majority of the population, we need to be crystal clear it was not the pandemic which created the crisis of job insecurity, pay cuts and threats to essential services, but the capitalist system itself. The pandemic simply exacerbated the crisis.

Pre-pandemic Britain witnessed an incredible 54% rise in the number of people suffering not just poverty, but destitution, between 2017 and 2019. The number of kids condemned to destitution in their formative years rose by 50% in the same two years.

The ultimate indictment of capitalism must be the fact that in the fifth-richest economy on Earth, UNICEF has been obliged to give a grant for breakfast boxes to feed hungry children in South London on Christmas Day; the first such emergency aid to the UK since UNICEF’s foundation in 1946.

Bosses Unleash Class War

As we step into 2021 it is no longer adequate to predict a ruthless crusade by employers and their hired politicians to claw back the costs of 2020 from workers’ pockets; it’s happening already! It requires at least equal determination to defend the class interests of the millions as is on display by the millionaires in their own self-interest.

Patterns are emerging of systematic pay cuts; ‘fire and rehire’ schemes; reductions in sick benefits, terms and conditions; reduced hours of available work, and a slaughter of jobs.

And as Karl Marx identified over 150 years ago, burgeoning unemployment - and indeed underemployment - are being used to bludgeon workers into accepting lesser pay and conditions, with the age-old, obnoxious declaration “You’re lucky to have a job!”

The Struggle Determines the Outcome

Workers in a range of sectors are limbering up for crucial defensive struggles: in BT, Scottish Gas, further education colleges, ScotRail, CalMac ferries, the NHS and wider public sector, etc.

They face the choice of fighting back or being crushed by pay cuts; jobs downgrading: the corporate thuggery of ‘fire and rehire'; decimation of jobs – and the immediate, ongoing threats to health and safety in the workplace, as employers prioritise profit over lives amidst new waves and strains of the killer COVID-19.

There is nothing predetermined in the outcomes of these struggles.

But some things are certain: the employers are out to use the twin viruses of COVID-19 and capitalist recession to beat down workers’ wages, conditions and jobs; to beat workers down onto their knees.

Unless we get up off our knees and fight back with maximum solidarity across sectoral and Union boundaries then working-class people will pay a terrible price at the hands of class enemies who sing hymns of national unity and “We’re All In This Together” as they seek to divide and conquer.

Defeat Divide-and-Rule Tactics

The Tories announced a public sector pay freeze with mock concern at the pay cuts in the private sector, with Rishi Sunak trying to appear sincere when he said: “This means we cannot possibly justify public sector pay rises.”

But they've taken their divide-and-rule trickery even further, trying to split different sections of public sector workers, promising pay rises to at least some NHS staff but not the millions of frontline workers in local government, civil service departments and others who also kept society functioning during COVID-19.

The Scottish government is a bit more cute about this, announcing a £500 award to health and care workers (which of course the Tories insist is taxable!). But that one-off payment still excludes hundreds of thousands of other key workers in Scotland, and should also not be allowed to distract from the entirely justified demands for a 15% pay increase for all NHS staff, which the Scottish government has given no indication of supporting or funding.

£12 Minimum Wage at 16

One of the weapons which SSP trade unionists are determined to popularise in combating the divisive tactics of employers and governments is the demand - first raised by the Scottish TUC during the spring lockdown - for an immediate £2-an-hour pay rise for every key worker, regardless of occupation.

This is an extremely modest but unifying demand in recognition both of the heroic efforts of workers in the NHS, care sector, retail, postal services, bin collections, utilities, council and civil services, and countless others - and of the fact those workers who society most relies upon are usually also the lowest paid.

However, as we explained back on 1st April, it’s not just ‘Time £2 Pay All Key Workers’ (to quote the STUC) but this needs to be underpinned by a legally enforced National Minimum Wage of at least £12-an-hour from the age of 16 upwards, if we are to avoid further divisions between different low-paid workers, and overcome the rampant poverty which also undermines job security - because workers cannot afford to buy the goods or services produced by other workers.

Workers’ Solidarity and Socialism – not ‘Social Partnership’ With the Enemy

Solidarity in action is a critical plank of what’s required in 2021.

Socialists and trade unionists need to challenge and defeat the false and dangerous philosophy which pervades the upper echelons of most trade unions; namely that of ‘Social Partnership’ between union leaders and company chief executives.

The ‘2020 vision’ of capitalism revealed to millions of people surely exposes the idea of common interests between the very rich and the rest of us, the employers and the working class, as a preposterous, dangerous nonsense.

It took courageous struggle - including strike action in many cases, and even a preparedness by union shop stewards to put their job on the line - to even win adequate sick pay or Personal Protective Equipment from employers who put privatised profit before people’s lives.

And the Tories have gone from hypocritical claps to slaps in the face for key workers, as they prepare to pick the pockets of the very people they proclaimed heroes when it suited the government to get them to work in the jaws of death.

Collective action, good old-fashioned working-class solidarity applied to the modern age, is what’s required, not cosying up to company bosses who would cut your throat as quick as they'd look at you in defence of their profit margins.

Workers Need Socialist Party – join the SSP

Going beyond that, one of the clearest lessons of the past year is that in order to end the rule of the rich in a society based on class division and class exploitation, workers need a conscious socialist party rooted in the workplaces and communities.

A workers’party with a socialist vision and ideology - turned into fighting socialist policies capable of mobilising masses of people because they are expressed in the language and needs of the working class.

The SSP enters 2021 determined to help build a socialist force in the unions, workplaces and communities that can link immediate battles over jobs, wages and rights at work with the need to take the likes of energy, construction, transport, all public services and banks into democratic public ownership. As the foundation for a Socialist Green Recovery Plan which could build 100,000 eco-friendly homes; establish an integrated, free public transport network; provide cheap green energy to all; construct universal basic services fit for the 21^st century; thereby also creating at least 150,000 well-paid, unionised jobs and apprenticeships, guaranteeing meaningful work and security to the next generation in a socialist Scotland.

Look back in anger at capitalist 2020, but look forward with determination to shape a socialist future in the 2020s.

Join the SSP (scottishsocialistparty.org)

 

 

 

 

 

DEMAND FULL AVERAGE WAGES FOR ALL SICK WORKERS!

Throughout the pandemic I have argued, both as a socialist and elected trade union convenor, for full average wages for anyone sick or in self-isolation from COVID-19.

My concern, particularly amidst the worst killer pandemic in a century, was that some workers dumped onto £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) would confront the impossible choice of financial ruin or dragging themselves into work, spreading the virus, sickness, even death.

Even where unions have conquered some form of occupational sickness benefit, it is frequently less than normal wages, accumulates sick absence penalty points, and excludes workers from a single penny company sick benefit if their absence points are too high.

And right across the board, employers are busily hacking away at occupational sick benefits, under cover of the Coronavirus crisis. That includes companies whose profits rocket beyond £millions to £billions. 

With household debts at record highs, savings at record lows, and job insecurity looming like a train charging down the track towards millions of workers, they are stressed to breaking point, but have nothing to fall back on; work makes many sick, but they can’t afford to take time off to recover. 

A new volcano of both physical and mental ill-health is set to explode, after months of home-working, cramped housing, and social isolation.

Sickness Unaffordable 

Mine might be the first case of a shop steward in Scotland losing his/her job in a dispute with an employer over workers’ health and safety during the Coronavirus, but it throws a harsh spotlight on the broader, deeper crime in society: sick workers can’t afford to be sick – and that makes them even sicker!

Sick pay in the UK is not only a national, but an international scandal.

Statutory Sick Pay of £95.85 a week is appallingly miserly even by the inadequate standards of Britain’s capitalist competitors.

The European average equivalent is £245 a week.

A worker taken sick in this country is only guaranteed 20% of average wages, whereas across Europe it’s 65%. 

Belgium guarantees sick workers their full salary for 30 days. Germany pays their full salary for 6 weeks and 70% of a worker’s wage for the remainder of sick leave. Norway pays up to 52 weeks full salary if a worker has a long-term illness.

Britain is the worst in the whole of Europe, with the single exception of Malta.

Sick Pay Exclusion Zones 

And it gets worse. The word ‘statutory’ implies everybody is guaranteed that amount. Far from it!

Anyone on less than the Lower Earnings Threshold of £120 a week is disqualified from SSP.  That constitutes a mass army of 1.8 to 2 million workers excluded from even that derisory £95. 

That includes a third of all those on zero-hour contracts; one in 10 women workers; 20% of 16-24-year olds; and over a quarter of those working beyond the age of 65 - in part because of the pathetic state pension.

The UK is one of only four countries which totally excludes the self-employed; a growing proportion of workers. 

And most migrant workers are excluded from even this paltry benefit, relying on literally zero income if they fall sick; many hired by the most unscrupulous profiteers, who habitually ignore health and safety regulations, let alone offer any kind of company sick benefit. 

Britain truly is the sick man of Europe, making working class men and women sick, but depriving them of adequate sick pay.

Greencore Northampton - lack of union makes you sick! 

Fatal Consequences 

The consequences are horrendous at the best of times, but fatal during the pandemic.

A new rash of COVID-19 clusters has erupted in poultry and meat plants, sweatshop garment factories, and at several food production workplaces.

Greencore, who produce Marks and Spencer’s sandwiches, have been at the heart of a scandal at their Northampton branch where 324 of its 834-workforce tested positive for COVID-19.

As Sarah Woolley, the new general secretary of the Bakers union (BFAWU) explained at a recent online rally I was invited to speak at - alongside other workers, Sarah and John McDonnell MP - it’s significant Greencore’s Northampton branch does not recognise the Union. They refused to close as cases multiplied, ignoring workers' concerns. 

When the government eventually forced temporary closure, self-isolating workers were expected to exist on £95. As Sarah explained, many were forced to use food banks, and with many multiple family members working there, entire household incomes vanished overnight. “Hearing people who work for a company that makes £55million in pure profit talking about how their income dropped from £240 to £95 is just horrific. How the hell are they supposed to pay the bills?”

Throughout the lockdown we warned Scotland's care homes were incubators for COVID-19. In part, due to decades of refusal to invest in NHS staff and equipment leading to 1,200 elderly patients being transferred out of hospital wards into care homes to clear bed space, without being tested, or worse still, despite testing positive.

This criminal carnage was added to by care home workers, almost universally denied any occupational sick benefit, being terrified of self-isolating, with their already-low incomes slashed to £95 SSP. 

Bakers' Union at TUC 

The Bakers’ Union initiated a Motion at the TUC congress calling for full wages for sick workers for 6 weeks, paid directly by the employer, and increased Statutory Sick Pay thereafter. 

Alongside the struggle for a vastly enhanced minimum wage for all over 16 - at least £12 an hour - the battle for full 100% average wages for all sick workers - whether with COVID-19 or anything else - is critical. Central to a future that puts workers’ health and lives miles ahead of the wealth and privileges of profiteering capitalist employers and their hired enforcers in the boardrooms and senior management. 

Workers' Control of H&S 

The lived experiences of millions during the pandemic has also reinforced the urgency of the Scottish Socialist Party's demand for workers’ control of health and safety, through elected committees of union health and safety reps and shop stewards.

Many of the hazards at work, physical and mental, could be removed and prevented by workers’ representatives whose everyday experiences put them far more in tune with workplace risks than the depleted, downgraded Health and Safety Executive Inspectors, whose numbers have been halved. And who are now to be replaced by undertrained substitutes, with less powers, from privatised outsourcing companies. 

No wonder only 38% of workers reported in this week's BritainThinks Survey that their employers carried out a COVID-secure risk assessment, and only a similar 42% have been given adequate PPE.

A system run for private profit will always cast workers' health to the back of the queue, and when capitalist profiteering triggers illness through stress, insecurity, poverty and shoddy safety standards, sick workers are tossed aside like squeezed lemons. 

The potential power of the organised trade union movement needs to be urgently mobilised to put workers’ health before capitalists' wealth. 

Full, 100% average wages for all sick workers, and control of workplace safety by elected union representatives, are two of the measures which must be pursued by our side with the same determination as bosses chase after shortcuts to profit. 

Workers’ lives before profit must be turned from a phrase into a fight. 

..........................

This blog has also been published in the online Scottish Socialist Voice. 

I would encourage you to take out a subscription for this excellent fortnightly online publication, which covers key issues at home and abroad from a working class and socialist perspective. 

For only £10 you get 12 separate issues directly to your email Inbox. 

The link to subscribe is:  https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions/

IMAGINE HOW TO FIGHT THE SLAUGHTER OF JOBS & WAGES!

“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.