NOVANEWS
Industrial Report to CC, 11th May 2013
Trading workers’ rights for shares
A new attack on workers’ rights is signalled by a recently announced government scheme allowing companies to issue contracts to their employees which, in exchange for a bundle of company shares of doubtful value, will strip away key elements of their employment rights. Those rights include those relating to unfair dismissal, redundancy and the right to request flexible working and time off for training. The new contract also doubles the notice required from women returning from maternity leave from eight to sixteen weeks. In short, workers have to be as flexible as Houdini whilst employers can make it up as they go along. If you already work for a company that decides to opt into this devil’s bargain, you can (in theory at least) ignore your promotion prospects and decline the new contract. New hires, though, will have no choice in the matter, and will have to sign away their rights if they want the job.
Posties on strike
Sevcral thousand Post Office staff struck on 7th May in a fourth round of industrial action against plans to close 20% of the post office network. These strike actions continue to be led in a rearguard, defensive spirit as creeping privatisation continues and the CWU remains wedded to Labour.
TUC to coordinate General Strike?!
The prison officers’ union POA, a mainstay of the National Shop Stewards’ Network (NSSN), tabled a resolution at last September’s TUC conference urging unions to consider the “practicalities of a general strike”. This no-strings statement of intent was sufficiently vague to be nodded through without demur. Wearily the TUC has now invited unions to submit their opinions, with particular emphasis on how such a token one day stoppage could be engineered without falling foul of any of the many and varied union-bashing laws originated by the Tories, preserved by Labour and currently implemented by the ConDems. Former SLP legal eagle John Hendy has been wheeled in to carefully explain how a strike against austerity might be legally achievable. Meanwhile the NSSN suggests its own winding road through the minefield, advising that “every union has an issue that they could ballot their members on – redundancies, pay freeze and cuts, pensions, privatisation etc which could be co-ordinated like the N30 2011 pensions strike.”
This will fool nobody, least of all the bought-and-paid-for judicial functionaries tasked with disrupting and undermining every rearguard defence mounted by organised labour. Sooner or later a genuine movement of resistance against the cuts will need to break with Labour and break unjust laws. Such a movement will never be led by the labour aristocracy ruling the roost in the trade union movement, however insistently the demand is made for the TUC to “name the day”.
Bin the Greens
Unions would do better to learn from the recent example set by the bin men of Brighton. Faced with pay cuts amounting to £4,000 a year threatened by the local Green Party run council, they simply stopped work, occupied the staff canteen for two days and mounted a demonstration outside council offices, demanding the head of the council leader. This spirited action has now stirred the GMB into organising a ballot (a two week long process). It remains to be seen whether their assistance will prove to be a help or a hindrance.
The refuse workers’ bld step has also already usefully demoralised and divided the forces of eco-reformism, with Green councillors blaming it all on Green council leader Jason Kitcat for delegating responsibility for the pay cuts to unelected council officials, and local Green MP Caroline Lucas publicly pledging to support picketing workers if they decide on further strike action.
Bangladeshi workers under attack
In Greece, where unemployment has hit 27%, the fascist Golden Dawn party is helping to divert popular anger against capitalism into divisive xenophobic hatred of “foreigners stealing our jobs”. When about two hundred migrant agricultural labourers, mostly from Bangladesh, came to demand unpaid wages going back six months or more, at least 28 of them were shot and injured by gun-wielding thugs. Three of the foremen at the strawberry plantation in Nea Manolada where they worked are being blamed for the assault. This racist violence is just the most recent in a string of similar attacks against Asian and African workers.
And as if to clarify what might drive Bangladeshis to leave their homes and expose themselves to such racist poison in the first place, the true face of imperialist super-exploitation was on shameful display in Bangladesh itself with the death of over 300 textile workers, mostly women, when the Rana Plaza complex in which they worked collapsed. Some three thousand were estimated to be working there at the time of collapse, despite the fact that only days earlier cracks had been detected and reported. Back in November similar disregard by factory owners for the lives of their workers had been shown in the Tazreen factory fire. On that occasion workers were told it was a false alarm and ordered back to work, then when they tried to escape were blocked by a locked fire door. That fire claimed 112 lives.
The grim conclusion is that whether Bangladeshi workers stay at home or travel abroad, the end result is the same: super-exploitation at best, and at worst an early grave. The immediate owners of the collapsed factory may be justly pilloried, as may the thugs in Greece who shot the strawberry-pickers. It is however certain that in neither case will the real criminal be called to account – capitalism itself. Whatever happens to the local factory bosses, we can be sure that the monopoly capitalists running Primark and Matalan will not be required to answer for the lives of those who died stitching their garments – not yet.
