UCS: STILL AN INSPIRATION, 50 YEARS ON

UCS WORK-IN BANNER 

On a hot 30 July 1971, the shop stewards in Clydebank’s John Brown shipyard took control of the yard gates as the historic UCS work-in began. 

Jimmy Reid declared to the mass meeting inside: “There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us.”

Thus began one of the most momentous showdowns by working people since the 1926 general strike.

UCS had been formed in 1968, comprising the yards in Govan, Linthouse, Scotstoun and Clydebank. The naked greed of shipbuilding dynasties had meant a refusal to invest and modernise, causing Britain's world share of shipbuilding to plummet from 80% during WWI to 5% in 1970. Mergers and mass redundancies in the 1960s ran alongside increased productivity by the workers. The 1964-70 Labour government refused to nationalise the industry, instead merging the UCS yards, with a 17% government share. 

In 1969, the notorious Tory, Nicholas Ridley, held a one-hour meeting on the Clyde with his pal Sir Eric Yarrow, owner of Yarrow’s shipyard and Scottish Tory Party treasurer. ‘Old Nick’ subsequently drafted his Ridley Memo: “We could appoint a government butcher to cut up UCS, hive off Yarrow’s and sell (cheaply) the remainder of UCS to private industry.” (December 1969)

Jimmy Reid addressing mass meeting 

Tory Spirit of Butchery 

Ted Heath’s 1970-74 Tory government proceeded in this spirit of butchery, consciously confronting workers and their rights, deliberately decimating industry and speeding up monopoly ownership of what remained. Tory Minister of Trade and Industry, John Davies, spelt it out with his infamous ‘lame ducks’ speech, declaring an end to state subsidies to industries in crisis, especially targeting Rolls Royce and UCS. 

In June 1971 the Tory government triggered the liquidation of UCS by refusing management’s modest demand for £6million to sustain it. They instead conceded £3million to keep UCS afloat until August, whilst conducting a bogus review by ‘The Four Wise Men’, comprising mostly merchant bankers. Their subsequent Report smeared shipyard workers and recommended the slaughter of 6,500 of the 8,500 jobs, with closure of Clydebank and Scotstoun, only keeping Govan and Linthouse on the basis of decimated conditions and halving of the workforce. 

The baying mob of Tory MPs who cheered these announcements badly underestimated the response of the UCS workers and hundreds of thousands who came to their side in a 14-month battle that engulfed society in Scotland and beyond. 

50,000 march in Glasgow on 23 June 1971 

Work-In, not Walk-Out 

In June 1971, the Union shop stewards from the four yards decided that instead of walking out to the Labour Exchanges (JobCentres) or being declared redundant they would occupy the yards and continue production of ships; a work-in. Their opening demands were “Not a man down the road - the right to work - not a yard will close.”

They sent delegations to the government, only to be ‘slung a deafie’. The fight was on. They called a West of Scotland conference of shop stewards, 800 strong, which announced a general strike and demonstration on 23 June. About 150,000 took solidarity strike action and 50,000 marched through Glasgow. Placards carried slogans like ‘Launch UCS - Sink Heath’ and ‘Nationalise not Paralyse - we shall not be moved’. The STUC at first called for nationalisation of the yards. 

When on 29 July the government tried to ride this storm and announced 6,500 job losses - with at least another 15-30,000 associated jobs to go - the working class of Scotland and beyond were inspired by the act of mass, militant defiance by the UCS workers. 

A conference of 1,200 shop stewards from Scotland and the North of England agreed financial support to sustain the work-in, and called a mass half-day strike and demo on 18 August. About 200,000 workers marched out of Scottish workplaces and joined the demo of 80-100,000 in George Square, the biggest since at least the days of Red Clydeside; some reckoned the largest since the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The themes of the right to work and the power of the working class in solidarity were combined with calls to kick out the Tory government. Industrial and political demands fused. 

John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave donation and solidarity

One of many Support Concerts 

Unprecedented Solidarity 

The UCS workers’ courageous defiance evoked unprecedented solidarity. Workplace collections and weekly levies came from across Scotland, Britain and as far afield as New Zealand. Combined with the 50p a week levy on the UCS workers themselves, this financial solidarity sustained the wages of the work-in and the campaigning costs. School students held jumble sales. Pensioners donated. A cleaner in Yorkshire sent a week's wages every month. 

Workers’ heads were raised because a group of trade unionists defied every law, every conservative norm, and waged the battle for the right to work from the stronghold of staying inside their own workplace. The occupied yards were their fortresses, with buses between the yards for mass meetings; a Coordinating Committee and several sub-committees, including ones for finance and publicity, and speaking tours of workplaces that trained hordes of orators. 

Even the middle layers of society were drawn to this mass workers’ movement, with virtually every local shopkeeper publicising the UCS struggle, and donations famously from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

Such was the ferment that Sir David MacNee, Glasgow's chief constable, phoned a Cabinet meeting to warn the government that the police couldn’t guarantee order in the city if the yards were closed. The government postponed the closure announcement by two weeks to allow them to bring troops back from Northern Ireland! 

General strikes developed against 1970s anti-union laws

Monumental Government U-turn

In the subsequent months the government tried manoeuvres to divide and conquer, especially by declaring a new Govan Shipbuilding Ltd, initially only embracing Govan and Linthouse. 

Eventually, by February 1972, they were forced into a monumental retreat. In contrast to their refusal to cough up £6million the previous June, the same John Davies told the House of Commons on 28 February 1972 that the Tory government would hand over £30million to Govan Shipbuilders Ltd, which would now also include the Scotstoun yard, and look favourably on subsidies to the impending buyer of Clydebank - the USA oil-rig giant, Marathon Manufacturing.

Months of negotiations did involve very substantial concessions by the unions, with loss of jobs and severe sacrifices of conditions, but the four yards remained and about 6,500 of the 8,500 jobs were saved. This was a massive victory compared to the wholesale butchery that any meek-and-mild response from their unions would have guaranteed. 

Perhaps the biggest significance of the UCS work-in was on the wider working class and political developments. It was part of a rising tide of industrial action engulfing the Heath government, but added impetus and confidence to it. A major factor in the February 1972 government U-turn on UCS was their bloody-nosed defeat just days prior by the miners, in their first national strike since 1926, which included the NUM's mass picket attracting 15,000 workers, which shut down the Saltley coke depot, near Birmingham. 

One of UCS worker Bobby Starrett's cartoons, a vital part of the publicity  

Wave of Workplace Occupations 

The UCS work-in inspired a wave of workplace occupations; one every fortnight at its peak! 

Many won unconditional victories, and mostly involved the even more radical tactic of sit-in strikes, rather than the continued production of the UCS work-in tactic. At Plessey’s in the Vale of Leven, the victorious sit-in included workers’ barricades!

The issue of a general strike was never far below the surface, particularly in the first half of 1972. This period included the government’s panic-stricken release of five jailed dockers' leaders from London's Pentonville prison - in the face of general strike action, organised from below despite the hesitancy of national union leaderships and the TUC. 

Young people were touched by the daring militancy of UCS, with school students staging strikes and demonstrations in the summer of 1972, over school conditions and job prospects.  

Ultimately, in a further showdown with the miners and an emboldened working class, Heath’s government was booted out in February 1974, and the incoming Labour government was obliged to nationalise at least most of the shipyards.  

Marching for the right to work 

Tony Benn amongst the marchers - driven to the left by UCS 

Mass Defiance Can Win 

The limitations of a work-in with continued production of ships – as compared with an occupation and strike - could be the subject of a whole separate article. This issue came to a head in January 1972, when the UCS Coordinating Committee reversed their earlier stance and agreed to launch one of the newly built ships (at the Govan yard) as ‘an act of good faith’, rather than a full-blown showdown with the government which had been their policy up until then. How many more jobs could have been saved and conditions protected if they had stuck to their original policy, combined with the battle for nationalisation of the yards, will never be known for certain. 

What was known at the time - by tens of thousands of working people - is that the mass defiance of occupying the yards built unprecedented workers’ unity and solidarity and forced a humiliating U-turn on a Tory government just as vicious in its desire to butcher jobs and conditions as the current Boris Johnson cabal. 

Over and beyond that, UCS demonstrated workers’ control in practice, and the managerial skills of working-class people - a glimpse of a socialist future where capitalist owners and their enforcers, in the form of senior management, would be redundant. 

Mass meeting in the occupied yards 

Lessons 50 Years On 

50 years on, as we exit the period of COVID-19 lockdowns, workers are confronted by closures, mass redundancies and systematic attacks on workplace rights, including the new capitalist pandemic of Fire and Rehire. Amongst the many lessons from UCS that need to be applied is that pleading with the bosses and their governments guarantees defeat for workers and their communities, whereas methods of mass collective struggle that brush aside the whole machinery of anti-trade union legislation can win victories. 

The brutal determination by Pladis multinational to close the McVitie's factory is a classic current example of where the methods of the UCS workforce would be required to reverse the butchery of jobs and livelihoods. 

As part of the crazed drive for short-term profiteering - through the conscious destruction of industry and the financialization of the economy - in the decades since UCS, the shipyards on the Clyde are barely a shadow of their former selves, and heavily dependent on production orders for war, rather than socially useful production. 

Socialism or Barbarism - a real and harsh choice today 

Socialism or Barbarism 

50 years on, the climate catastrophe and the capitalist economic crisis highlighted and exacerbated by COVID-19, both scream out for a green re-industrialisation of Scotland; a Socialist Green Recovery plan, embracing the skills and equipment of what remains of the shipyards. For example, to build the desperately needed fleet of ferries, and marine engineering equipment for the production of clean, green, affordable energy.

Everyone talks these days about ‘recovery’. But perhaps the most central recovery required is the working-class solidarity and fighting spirit epitomised by the UCS workers and their hundreds of thousands of allies 50 years ago. Without such a revival of collective action by organised workers and the solidarity which that would undoubtedly evoke, the capitalists and their hired governments will continue to wreak havoc and destruction on jobs, living standards, democratic rights and the very planet we live on. 

Socialism or barbarism is not empty rhetoric, but indeed the stark choice we face. And the lessons of UCS need to be studied and absorbed to help re-arm new generations of fighters, to make socialism the chosen future. 

NEW GOVERNMENT: THE CLASS STRUGGLE CONTINUES!

 

My father was fond of telling the story of the labourer breaking stones on the road, given the news by a passing horseman that they'd chosen a new King of Ireland.

“Aye,” said the labourer, “but I'll still be breaking stones tomorrow.”

So it will be with the newly (re-)elected Scottish Government, with their enhanced mandate. The struggle of workers to survive continues the day after the election circus moves on.

But the advantage to workers fighting to protect their pay, conditions, jobs and workplace rights is that the newly elected administration cannot deny it was in large measure put in office by voters on the basis of not being Boris Johnson, not being the Tories, being anti-Tory and of pledging to tackle recovery from the Coronavirus crisis.

Whilst precious little was said about the savage economic consequences of the pandemic to the livelihoods of workers by the SNP or Greens, the new government now needs to be put on the spot, called out to take sides in the savage clash of interests between profiteering or axe-wielding employers and the workers they want to punish for the cost of Covid, whether that be in the private or public sector.

The class struggle continues; if anything intensified, as economic gurus wax lyrical about predicted ‘bounce back’ in the economy – but fail to explain upon whose backs the restoration of profits will rest.

Public sector disputes are where the Scottish Government has the most direct responsibility for and power over the outcome – given that transport, education, and local government are all devolved to Edinburgh, even without the full leverage available under independence. And they’ve been given a mandate by the Scottish people to demand the necessary funding from a Tory regime that hasn’t won the popular vote in Scotland since 1955!

 

ScotRail Strikers for Equality Face Management Scabs 

ScotRail staff continue to fight for pay equality and fair treatment for all different grades when it comes to enhanced payments for working on their rest days - which they received prior to the pandemic but which was since removed, for all grades bar the drivers.

Ticket Examiners have now joined battle alongside conductors/guards, with engineering staff currently being balloted for action. The latter are responsible for train maintenance, so even a work-to-rule - let alone strike action - would have a huge impact, as trains are booked in at set times for repair and maintenance.

Those trains which still have conductors/guards cannot move without one of these safety-critical staff on board.

That's why the tactic of Abellio ScotRail bosses has been to cancel all services on Sundays and then viciously twist and spin propaganda to try and blame the conductors - striking on their rest days! - for the lack of services to the travelling public.

However, this underhand method has largely backfired, with furious responses on social media to the naked propaganda pumped out by Abellio bosses.

Free Lunches for ScotRail Scabs!

The situation with Ticket Examiners is substantially different.

Under what is called the Strathclyde Manning Agreement, for example, which was signed years ago, there ‘should’ be two staff on a train.

Strictly speaking, drivers can run the train without a second member of staff on board, but in an act of solidarity they have refused to do so.

This has led to ScotRail planning to use ill-trained managers to substitute for ticket examiners; to scab on the striking staff, in a way they couldn’t possibly be ‘trained’ to do with the conductors.

Conductors/guards require extensive training, for instance on route knowledge and enhanced safety duties, whereas (lower-paid) ticket examiners do not require safety training.

They are primarily deployed to collect revenue for the company, checking and selling tickets. Abellio ScotRail bosses are quite prepared to play Russian roulette with public safety by drafting in scab managers – albeit on drastically reduced train services.

Those managers who allow themselves to be used to prevent fairness and equality of treatment should hang their heads in shame, particularly when it's become known they've been given free lunch boxes for their filthy services; a cut-price version of thirty pieces of silver!

Voice readers should bombard both Abellio bosses and Transport Scotland - an arm of the Scottish Government - with demands to meet with the RMT union and negotiate pay equality for rest day work.

As one RMT representative told me, “This strike has dragged on for so long that the concern of staff is not so much the money as fury at the contempt we've been treated with, where Abellio ScotRail are refusing to even meet with the union, hiding behind Transport Scotland as an excuse.”

The stance of the outgoing SNP government on this has been a disgrace, where they conceded Abellio have permission to negotiate, but insisted they cannot come to any agreement incurring additional costs.

That can only mean one thing: if these workers get restoration of enhanced payments for working and providing a service on their rest days, then they're going to have to accept other cuts to pay, terms and conditions, maybe even jobs.

The new government needs to be confronted with widespread, systematic demands from all trade unionists and the travelling public to drop this scandalous stance and show that their talk about focusing on a Covid recovery isn't just empty, deceitful election rhetoric. Because any genuine recovery has to include fair pay for workers and an end to the austerity passed on from Westminster via Holyrood during the previous three periods of SNP government.

Unite NHS and Council Workers' Battles 

Similar issues arise in the struggles for decent pay for the vast workforces in Scotland's NHS and local authorities.

During the past 13 years of SNP rule about £3billion cuts to local government funding, originating from Westminster, has been devolved by the Edinburgh government, alongside which NHS staff have suffered average pay cuts of 20 per cent.

At the time of writing this, the result of the ballot of NHS union members over the last-minute, pre-election 4 per cent pay offer by the Scottish Government is still unknown.

This offer in itself was a big retreat by the SNP administration compared with just weeks before the May elections, when they were still saying there would be no settlement until the summer of 2021, after they had refused to even meet with the health trade unions for negotiations over the previous year.

NHS Workers for Fair Pay

It was the relentless, courageous persistence of rank-and-file NHS workers - under the banner of the NHS Workers for Fair Pay campaign (Scotland) - which in particular forced this climb-down, combined with a desire to win votes by appearing distinct from the Tories, who had offered an even more contemptuous 1 per cent pay rise.

But as I said when speaking on behalf of the SSP at the rain-drenched NHS workers' Protest Rally on 3 May:

“If the best the Scottish Government can boast is that they are ‘better than Boris’, then how can we take them seriously in combating poverty pay and the ills of society which blight the working class?”

Anyone satisfied with being ‘better than Boris’ seriously lacks any ambition to end the situation where nurses and other NHS workers have had to resort to loan sharks and food banks to survive - particularly after the year of unmitigated hell they’ve faced, striving to keep people alive from Covid, working typically 12-15 hour shifts under the most dreadful stress, leading to an epidemic of mental illness and burn-out amongst NHS workers themselves?

They unreservedly deserve 15 per cent, and the real shame is that the different health workers’ unions didn't combined forces and vigorously campaign for the past year for such a restorative pay increase - and have since been divided on what they recommended to each of their memberships in the ballot on the 4 per cent offer.

The GMB and RCN both recommended rejection – primarily as a result of the fiery opposition of their shop stewards. Unite made no recommendation to accept/reject, with the absurd explanation that all their members are on different grades! And the Unison leadership went from a similar cop-out neutrality to actually recommending acceptance of the 4 per cent offer.

The latter position is even less honourable when compared with the situation in local government, where the Unison leadership recommended rejection of their pay offer and helped to achieve an 88% majority against what was offered by COSLA, the employers’ umbrella body - with 74 per cent voting in favour of industrial action.

Yet the difference between the two offers in concrete terms for most workers is minor: £800 over the year for council workers compared with £1,009 for most NHS grades.

As Mark Sands, Unison steward in Glasgow City Council said at the latest meeting of the Scottish Workers’ Solidarity Network, “We should unite workers in local government and the NHS in the fight for decent pay, and if that requires coordinated strikes, then so be it.”

The Difference is Striking!

To use a pun made popular during the recent FE college lecturers’ struggle, “the difference is striking!”

As we explained in depth in the recent Voice Extra, well-prepared, well- organised ballots for collective action - with teams of trade unionists formed in each workplace to get the vote out - in itself can force employers to the negotiating table where previously they refused to talk.

More to the point, when in turn actual strike action occurs, with full involvement of the membership, regular systematic communication - and an elected leadership from within the ranks of the workforce itself acting as the negotiating team - then strikes can win.

Such a victory is made even more likely if systematic solidarity is built, as happened during the FE college national strike action - with the Scottish Workers’ Solidarity Network playing a substantial part in that solidarity campaign.

The outcome of the lecturers’ strike is a victory not just for EIS-FELA members but every trade unionist facing an onslaught by the employers and government, as they seek to sacrifice workers’ terms and conditions - often including jobs and pay - to recoup the costs of the pandemic. Once again, making workers pay the price of a crisis not of our making.

The lessons of the FE sector victory should not just be studied but applied accordingly to the battles in the health service and local government.

The Valley of Fire and Rehire

However, despite winning a national agreement that forced college bosses to accept that somebody who prepares lectures, delivers lectures and assesses the learning of students is indeed a lecturer and should be on a lecturer's pay, terms and conditions, nevertheless the college where this fight all started - Forth Valley College - is still embroiled in battle.

There the principal, Ken Thompson and his board of management are digging their heels in, refusing to honour the deal reached at national level between the union and the employers’ association, Colleges Scotland.

In human terms that means 27 lecturers who were removed from their roles by means of ‘fire and rehire’ have still not been reinstated, even though that is the essence of the national agreement reached at the end of the national strike.

These college workers have been obliged to sustain strike action, and plan for it to continue right into June, because they cannot trust Thompson and his board to reinstate the FVC27.

They are not striking for the fun of it; as good professionals, they are worried sick at the  impact on their students, often riddled with guilt.

It's Ken Thompson and his board of management who should be guilt-ridden and ashamed of the way they are damaging education - not just short-term but longer-term - by replacing qualified lecturers with instructor/assessors on £10,000 a year less and near zero preparation and marking time. That’s a perfect recipe for disaster, both in terms of the educational standards offered to mostly working-class students, and to the mental health of those who've been fired as lecturers and rehired on these drastically worse conditions.

The Forth Valley bosses should realise the reputational damage they are doing to the college they have the privilege and inflated salaries to manage, now they are increasingly recognised as the pioneers of the obnoxious fire and rehire weapon, certainly in the public sector.

Readers should step up the pressure on these bosses, demanding they reverse fire and rehire and reinstate the FVC 27 to their rightful positions as lecturers, with the wages and conditions to go with that.

Email Ken.Thompson@forthvalley.ac.uk

Whose Side Are You On?

The industrial temperature is rising, even if the Spring weather isn't.

With BT workers balloting for strikes, alongside the struggles already mentioned, and workers and communities start to resist a horrendous rash of closures to libraries, community centres and sports facilities by councils and their offshoots, such as Glasgow Life, there is increasingly no room to wriggle or dodge the question “Whose side are you on?”

For the Scottish Socialist Party there's no hesitation; it's a matter of principle that we combine with workers to defend or improve their living standards, as the one productive class in society. Which means we actively back them to the hilt when that inevitably leads to conflict with money-grabbing capitalist profiteers or axe-wielding, overpaid bosses at the tops of undemocratically-run public sector outfits.

The same challenge “Whose side are you on?” needs to be thrown down as a gauntlet at the feet of the newly elected Scottish Government. They are the people with the power to immediately defend or enhance the living standards of over 500,000 Scottish public sector workers directly, and vast numbers of others indirectly. For instance, as major contractors with the likes of BT (or British Gas), the Scottish government and local councils could use enormous leverage even on these privately-owned capitalist profiteers to end their vicious assaults on their workers.

Waiting for Nicola??

Workers cannot afford to ‘wait for independence’. We need action now, from a government mandated by the Scottish people to ‘lead us to recovery’, as Nicola Sturgeon endlessly promised during the elections.

In turn, workers and their communities cannot just ‘wait for Nicola’ to take the necessary action, judging by the experience of the previous three SNP governments. We need collective, coordinated action by workers, with fighting, determined leaderships, to force the Scottish government to provide the wherewithal to tackle poverty pay, mass underemployment and unemployment, threadbare public services and the obscene inequality that curses this rich nation. Otherwise, the labourer of my father’s story will still be breaking stones regardless of who is on the throne,

 

WORKERS' VOICES ON FRONTLINE STRUGGLES 

Melanie Gale, nurse, GMB union rep

“I ran a Covid Ward last year, one of the first. We had to put a brave face on it, not knowing what was coming through, trying to keep staff positivity up with Covid patients arriving.

We had ten patients with Covid, very bad Covid, where they couldn't breathe, didn't know where they were, frightened, scared, terrified. And they had no relatives or no way to even phone them or FaceTime them.

We had to watch our patients die. We were the ones holding their hands, sitting with them, comforting them, doing our best.

We had five staff members to care for 30 patients; disgraceful, disgusting.

But you know what? We still went to work, we still cared for patients and we still gave them the best care we could. We had the crappy PPE, the crappy masks. We went to work, not seeing our family members to care for other people’s family members and still we didn't have enough staff.

Management and governments don't give a shit about any NHS workers.

Experienced NHS staff don't want to be there anymore, we're burnt out, tired.

I've wanted to be a nurse since I was 10. I'm so proud of being a nurse, so proud of our NHS, but what I'm not proud of are the bigwigs and governments offering us this crappy 4 per cent.  Well, you can stick your 4% up your kilt! We're not accepting it. We deserve 15% and we're going to fight and get it.”

 

Brenda Eadie, nurse, NHS Workers for Fair Pay campaign

“We need to build up the NHS and this is not about a pay rise, it's about pay restoration. We've lost £6,000 through pay cuts in 11 years and then they offer to give us back £1,000 of it. That won't stop us having to work 60-hour weeks to make up the pay deficit. It won't stop staff having to use food banks.

And London Economics have done a report that even if we got 10% of our wages back, 81% of the cost of that would go straight back into the economy, through taxes and National Insurance.

It would increase staffing levels. It would reduce sickness and the use of costly agency staff. It would recruit and keep staff. Right now, our NHS is dying; we're losing it if we don't do something about it now.

If we need to strike, we need to strike. If we don't, the NHS would be gone in a couple of short years. I for one can't afford private healthcare. People won't be able to afford monthly life-saving medications. More people will die. If we have to strike, we should strike now.”

Anne-Marie Harley, Branch Convener EIS-FELA Forth Valley College and Vice-President of EIS-FELA

"The fight against 'fire and rehire' at Forth Valley College (a public sector organisation) continues. 

The EIS-FELA Union remain in dispute with College management where 27 members had their lecturing roles removed and they were given new contracts to do the same job on poorer terms and conditions. 

Despite offers from the union to suspend the strike action if they would reinstate the 27 members or agree to a joint review, management have failed to change their position. Instead, they will only agree to move the dispute into the hands of the National Bargaining Joint Secretaries as per protocol, when they have completed an internal review in mid-May. 

This dispute has gone on for over a year and we find these further delays unacceptable. 

With the full support of EIS-FELA nationally and the main body of the EIS, we will continue to fight to maintain our profession and the quality of education for our students."

Also published in the Scottish Socialist Voice.  SUBSCRIBE to the fortnightly Online edition here: https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STUFF YOUR PAY CUTS! FEED PEOPLE, NOT PROFITS!

It's enough to make you sick. 

Boris Johnson cynically stands on the front steps of 10 Downing Street clapping for NHS staff and other key workers, hailing them as heroes. 

Next thing, he imposes a public sector pay freeze and derisory 1% pay offer to the hospital workers who saved his life. 

It's gone from two-faced claps to a slap in the face. From being called heroes to being treated as zeros. 

Meantime round at the back door of number 10, every Tuesday for the past year, giant hampers of gourmet food - from what has been dubbed 'the poshest organic farm shop in Britain' - is smuggled in for Boris and his partner, Carrie. 

Nurses, and the very workers who produce, distribute and sell food in supermarkets, are amongst those forced to swallow their pride and turn to food banks. 

Johnston doesn't stoop to queuing outside the supermarket in all weathers, or resort to food parcels in desperation to prevent his kids going hungry. No, he's had £7,500 worth of gourmet takeaways and £5,000 of organic food supplies delivered round the back door to try and prevent taxpayers who pay his giant salary noticing. 

Feeding the Tories 

And as with all things Tory and capitalist, the Johnson household keep the wealth ‘in the family’. 

The suppliers of the sumptuous takeaways are Daylesford Farm Shop, owned by Lady Bamford, wife of JCB construction tycoon Lord Bamford, who donated £160,000 to Johnson’s political coffers in 2019 alone - and millions of pounds over the years to the Tory party. 

While the Tories set the scene with an insulting 1% offer to NHS workers, they have forked out £37billion of public funds to 22 private companies to run the utterly discredited, failed Test and Trace regime. 

A scheme which hires private consultants on £1,000-a-day, and which this week the Westminster Public Accounts Committee condemned as “treating taxpayers like an ATM machine” and scathingly described as “making no measurable difference to infection rates or the spread of the pandemic”. 

Covid Crony Capitalism 

One of the companies raking in a fortune from this sick profiteering at the cost of avoidable deaths is SERCO, whose chief executive is Winston Churchill's grandson, Rupert Soames. 

The latter Tory grandee has just awarded himself £4.9million for 2020, after SERCO's profits almost doubled during the year of the pandemic, and they openly boasted of a £400million boost to their revenues from COVID-19 work. SERCO has been propped up by government handouts for Test and Trace, but also for running Caledonian Sleepers. 

From this ill-gotten bounty they handed out £17million in dividends to shareholders last month. 

Yet the government tells us they can't afford the 15% pay claim for NHS staff to part-compensate for the 20% real loss of wages over the last decade. Even though it’s been shown that would cost far less, across the whole of the UK, than the £37billion meted out to the Tories' mates in Covid contracts. 

It makes your blood boil. 

Key Workers Insulted and Underpaid 

Supermarket workers certainly don't shop at Daylesford luxury farm shop, because the vast majority of them earn less than £10-an-hour and are mostly on short-hours contracts of 8,10 or 12 hours a week. They risk infection to feed the nation, and have suffered double the level of abuse they did a year ago. Many of them put food on the shelves but cannot afford to put food on their own family tables, turning to food banks. 

Cleansing workers face rampant rat infestation in Glasgow, as Scottish government cuts to council funds are passed on by the local administration, slashing bin collections to once every 3 weeks. These workers are certainly not ordering secret hampers of luxury food from Daylesford Farm Shop. 

Along with posties trudging through all weathers; utility workers risking their health to repair supplies even in houses with COVID-19 infection; transport workers keeping the show on the road; hordes of frontline local government service workers; Social Care staff who come face to face with the virus in their daily work... all these people help make up the army of 920,000 in Scotland alone who have been officially designated ‘key workers’ by the government. 

Poverty Pay Epidemic 

The one thing this wide array of occupations has in common is rampant low pay. One in three of them earns less than £10-an-hour. 

Many of them can't even afford to be off sick, as they don't have a company sickness benefit scheme, or earn too little to qualify for the pathetic £95 Statutory Sick Pay. 

It's time to take action to combat the criminal negligence by governments and employers towards the very people who make society function. 

Scottish Workers Solidarity Network 

That's why the multi-union Scottish Workers Solidarity Network has launched an online petition demanding Scotland's politicians cough up an immediate pay rise of at least £2-an-hour for all 920,000 key workers – underpinned by a £12 national minimum wage for all, regardless of age or employment sector. 

The call for a £2-an-hour rise for key workers was originally raised by the STUC exactly a year ago. It’s time for real action to fight for it. Now when the politicians and would-be MSPs are seeking our votes is timely to demand action, not just warm, soothing words. 

£2 Now and a £12 Minimum Wage! 

The demand that this immediate minimum step should be underpinned by an overall minimum wage of £12 is designed to match galloping inflation on food, gas, electricity and transport - but also to maximise unity within the working class. 

Why, for example, would the trade union movement call for a £2-an-hour rise for key workers such as those in supermarkets - which would raise their hourly rate to at least £11.50 - but then only call for a minimum of £10 for non-food retail staff? 

That would be a recipe for further division; the very weapon which the parasitic rich rely on to keep themselves in a position to gorge society's wealth whilst others starve or resort to free food handouts, after doing a week's work. 

While fully supporting the fight for 15% for all NHS workers, and the Fight for £15 for care workers, the Scottish Workers Solidarity Network has also put forward this unifying demand for £2now and a £12 minimum wage. 

No Hiding Place for Scottish Government 

There can be no hiding behind the excuse that this is a matter reserved to Westminster. Half of Scotland's 920,000 key workers are directly employed in Scotland's public sector and many more are funded by it. 

The Scottish government has the power to immediately combat the criminal levels of in-work poverty and also set the benchmark which would help trade unionists force private sector employers to match that pay rise. 

Sign the Online Petition today. Ask your trade union, stewards committee, Trades Union Council or students union to circulate it to all members, as for example Strathclyde UCU branch has done to its 800 members: http://chng.it/SZdLpVXwkB

Pile the pressure on the politicians as they plead for our votes. Take one small step to help end the sickening class divide between the engorged, parasitic rich and the rest of us.

Offshore workers' union leader Jake Molloy speaking at Voice Public Forum

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT THIS?

1. Please SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION TODAY - and then ask your union or students union or community group to circulate it and encourage others to SIGN it too - demanding ACTION from our MSPs - for an immediate £2-an-hour rise for ALL 920,000 key workers in Scotland, and a national minimum wage of at least £12: http://chng.it/SZdLpVXwkB

 

2. This article has been published in the Scottish Socialist Voice - a fortnightly Online publication that is always on the side of workers, giving those in struggle a voice, interviewing those on strike or fighting back. Please look at taking out a SUBSCRIPTION to the Voice: for a modest £10 you will get 12 issues in your Inbox: https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions/  

3. The Voice is holding a Public Forum on Thursday 25th March at 7pm, on Zoom. Entitled 'Covid, Climate Change & Workers' rights'. 

Speakers include nurses fighting for a restorative 15% pay settlement for all NHS staff; a striking Scottish Gas engineer; Jake Molloy, RMT union organiser of N Sea offshore workers, on the issues involved in a genuinely Just Transition to green energy that defends the livelihoods of workers in the fossil fuel sector; and myself. 

Get your FREE Eventbrite ticket today - attend this important and interesting event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/public-rally-covid-climate-change-workers-rights-tickets-145877095319?

Thanks for turning IDEAS and BELIEFS into ACTION.

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. 

For interviews with strikers, further analysis of the issues involved and discussion on how to beat the bosses, please SUBSCRIBE to the Online Voice - the only socialist paper written, edited, produced and published in Scotland. It's well worth £10 to get 12 issues delivered to your email Inbox!

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