We fight for socialism – resist service cuts !

Posted by Richie Venton on February 24, 2010. Filed under Public Spending Cuts,Workplace News. Posted with the tags:PCS, Scottish Service Tax, Trade Unions, Unison
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As the general election looms, the four major parties are doing their utmost to whip up a consensus, with devastating consequences, based on a huge lie; that savage cuts to the public sector are inevitable and necessary.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs in local government, the NHS, civil service, education, Royal Mail and the railways are threatened with an axe being sharpened in a grisly auction of livelihoods, conducted alike by the Tories, New Labour, Lib Dems and even the SNP.

Recent reports confirm that escalating numbers of workers are losing sleep through stress over their job insecurity – on top of being obliged to work longer hours in the vain hope it might save them from the chop.

Alongside the destruction of jobs, the mainstream parties try to out-bid each other on how swift, deep and wide the pay freeze and pay cuts across the public sector is to be – and form an harmonious chorus line of agreement over plans to slash redundancy terms (as in the civil service) so as to sack workers on the cheap, and to devastate the pension rights of people who have dedicated a lifetime to public services.

The big lie

Underlying these multiple attacks is the assumption – false to the core – that there is no alternative; that the budget deficit of £178billion just has to be cut, that the price of propping up the banks, their profits, and their bonuses to top bosses, is a scorched earth policy towards the public sector and its workforce.

This impacts on one in three Scottish workers directly, who work in the public sector – not to mention their families and communities whose services are being trashed.

With the aid of a media owned by big business and in hock to their advertising revenue, all the pro-big business political parties are trying to divide the working class between the public and private sectors, with lurid tales and lies of the gold-plated pensions, jobs-for-life, and downright idleness of public sector workers! Anyone who falls for that doesn’t know about the back-breaking work of hospital, council and postal workers, nor the miserly pensions ‘enjoyed’ by civil servants (46% of whom earn below £20,000). They are failing to recognise the stressed-out state of dedicated teachers, trying to cope in schools without the funding to buy pencils, jotters, books, or to heat the buildings properly over this winter – not to mention the rising class sizes that turn teachers into crowd controllers rather than educators.

Unite against council cuts

Councils across Scotland are responding to the economic crisis by slashing at least 3,000 jobs already (over 2,000 in Glasgow alone), at the very same time shutting down community centres, jacking up charges for use of public buildings, scrapping grants to voluntary and community groups that make life bearable to the most vulnerable. Labour councils are predictably vicious – whilst bleating it’s all because of a big bad boy called the SNP in Holyrood who under-funds them. But not a single Labour-run council has the spine to mobilise its own workforce and local communities to protest, march, lobby and strike to fight for funds off the SNP government.

SNP-run councils, such as West Dunbartonshire, are equally lashing out at working class communities and council workers to ‘balance the books’. They are imposing increased nursery and after-school fees, charging more for elderly care services, making pensioners pay £5 for a lift to Day Care centres and new charges for cutting the grass.

Anti-cuts campaigns

The trade unions in the councils are beginning to try and coordinate a fight-back, which is something the SSP has fought for within the unions long and hard. In West Dunbarton, one councillor is knee-deep in joint campaigning with the five unions and community groups against cuts – the SSP’s Jim Bollan.

Anti-cuts campaigns are up and running in several areas, seeking to unite workers with community groups. That is to be welcomed and built whole-heartedly. But in fighting back, some key issues arise. How can services be funded? How can the government be forced to provide funding? Is there an alternative to cuts?

UNISON Scotland has launched a ‘Stop the Cuts – Public Works’ campaign, under the pressure of activists in several branches who have already called meetings to unite with communities to defeat cuts. They plan a major rally in Scotland, probably on 10th April, which needs to be built into a mighty show of resistance to job losses and service cuts. But it also needs to demand taxation of the rich, both in local and national taxation, as a central means of funding public service. UNISON have rightly proposed a No-Cut budget that would generate an extra £74bn across the UK next year, through very modest measures like 50% tax on incomes above £100,000, measures against tax havens and tax on major financial transactions.

Scottish Service Tax – make the rich pay

Some in UNISON – including its Scottish Council – have called for an end to the Council Tax freeze in Scotland. That is a confused and counter-productive proposal in response to a feeble half-measure by the SNP government, who were elected on the promise of scrapping the council tax, reneged on that, and conjured up a freeze on Council Tax bills without replacing the lost revenues sufficiently to save jobs and services.

The Scottish Socialist Party pioneered the battle-cry to scrap the unfair, unequal, unwanted Council Tax – which the SNP opportunistically played with as an election-winner. But unlike the SNP, the SSP has championed a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax to replace it, which would raise more for local government funding and yet leave over 80% of people paying less, by making the rich minority pay a damned sight more. That is the essence of what UNISON and other local government unions need to pursue, rather than rightly criticising under-funding by the SNP government, but then calling for Council Tax bill increases that would hit precisely their own low-paid and middle-paid members hardest.

Why Should Our Children Pay?

The EIS is calling a major Scottish march and rally in Glasgow on 6th March, around the slogan ‘Why Should Our Children Pay?’ Why indeed! Why should kids in their most formative years, or older students trying to get a better education than their parents, have to pay for the bankers’ bailout – which ultimately is at the heart of the cuts agenda in education, as in all the public sector. Rising teacher unemployment; lack of supply cover for sickness absence; rising class sizes – all these feature alongside the fast-disappearing promises from the SNP that they would fund smaller class sizes and universal free school meals for Primary 1-3 kids.

The Scottish Socialist Party has been at the front line of Save Our Schools campaigns, demanding classes of 20 or less across all ages, to enhance the educational and emotional development of kids – and also create and secure teaching jobs. Again, the EIS leadership should highlight this policy, which has existed on paper as union policy for years – and crucially, demand taxation of the rich to fund it.

Job cuts on the cheap

To their credit, the civil service union PCS makes taxation of the rich a theme in their battle against even deeper jobs cuts than those already suffered in the past 5 years. They share the demand of the SSP for closure of the loopholes that allow big business and the stinking rich elite to have dodged paying £130billion tax last year – a sum that would go two-thirds the way to abolishing the national budget deficit without a single job loss or pay cut in any corner of the public sector.

PCS members are voting by huge majorities to strike – probably on 8-9th March initially – in a pre-General Election showdown with a government hell-bent on imposing savage cuts to redundancy terms – the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. Gordon Brown has openly declared their ambition is to save £500m, by cutting the compensation for losing their job by up to one-third. For instance, one woman we know who has worked in the civil service 32 years stands to lose £80,000!

They want to shed tens of thousands of jobs on the cheap – and Labour has the overt support of the Tories on this. Unless defeated, this would also make the service more lucrative and attractive to privatisation.

The PCS action is the first national challenge to government assaults on the public sector by a union, in action as opposed to fine words. They deserve unqualified solidarity, but have also shown the way that other unions should follow, with strikes on the eve of an election that threatens to usher in one or other government intent on making workers pay the horrendous price of capitalism in crisis.

Striking for safety on the trains

They may well be accompanied by a national rail strike. Scottish RMT members are already in action to guard safety from the wrecking tactics of profiteering First Scotrail. For the sake of £300,000, the company that handed out £18m of its heavily subsidised profits in dividends to shareholders last year wants to impose Driver Only trains on the Edinburgh-Glasgow via Bathgate/Airdrie route. RMT strikers know full well this is just the overture to a concerted removal of guards from all trains in the future – cutting costs but threatening lives and security.

They will soon be joined by maintenance workers and signallers on Network Rail, voting to strike back against savage cuts to jobs and safety standards.

Socialism a burning necessity

In this rising array of industrial action and campaigning against cuts, the unions have massive potential clout, but that is only hampered by the hesitation of some union leaderships to actually take industrial action, and by the absence of a coherent alternative to the cuts agenda that makes it plain there is plenty of money available if it was only seized from the grabbing hands of the rich, the banks and big business.

Socialism is not just a personal preference, a nice notion for speechifying on May Day marches; it is a burning necessity if we are to create a civilised existence for this and future generations.

The SSP will support every step the unions take towards united action and every call they make for closing the tax loopholes or increased taxation of the rich. But we are pro-actively fighting within unions for an extension of these demands for wealth re-distribution, through policies like restoration of the levels of Corporation Tax that existed before the arch-monetarist Thatcher arrived (52% then, 28% now!), and likewise restoration of pre-Thatcher levels of taxation of the very rich minority (which peaked at 85%). Coupled with these tax measures, we are campaigning for the unions to demand full-blooded public ownership of all the banks, big industries, services, N Sea oil – but with democratic working class control, not boards made up of the same old bankers and billionaires who have ruined the economy in pursuit of profit.

There IS an alternative to cuts in the public sector – its name is socialism!