LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, March 29, 2012

A short history of privatization in the UK posted by Richard Seymour

My latest in The Guardian explains the course of privatization over the last thirty years or so:

Royal Mail is being auctioned, and not necessarily to the highest bidder (and stamp prices are going up). The London fire brigade is outsourcing 999 calls to a firm called Capita, at the behest of the oleaginous chair of the capital's fire authority, Brian Coleman. Multinationals are circling hungrily around NHS hospitals. Schools are already beginning to turn a profit. In the technocratic nomenclature of the IMF, this would be called a "structural adjustment programme", but that doesn't really capture the sweeping scale of the transformation. We can see this through a potted history of privatisation in the UK...

Labels: accumulation-by-dispossession, austerity, capitalism, education, fire brigade, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, public services, royal mail, tories

Monday, January 03, 2011

Less than mutual posted by Richard Seymour

This is just a quick note to acknowledge and give kudos to those who took up the debate about mutualism on Twitter, Facebook and the blogs, and to UK Uncut and Aaron Peters who listened. The event celebrating John Lewis and mutualism has been cancelled. Yes, I am very happy about it. And to Aaron, who I'm sorry to say I actually provoked into threatening to "knock him out when i meet him", I'm sorry for suggesting that you were a Blairite running dog. It was only a joke.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, democracy, john lewis, mutualism, neoliberalism, privatisation, protest, royal mail, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, tories, uk uncut

Friday, February 12, 2010

Gone postal posted by Richard Seymour

'Roy Mayall', the pseudonymous postie who has been justly laying into an atrocious C4 Dispatches documentary, has a very interesting article in this week's Socialist Worker. You might recall him for some of his acuminous prose during the recent strikes, and he now runs a blog called - well, you could guess couldn't you? - Going Postal. He has been a wonderful guide to the machinations of Royal Mail management, and the consequent breakdown of industrial relations within the postal system. The article concerns his popular new book, Dear Granny Smith, which is an attack on the 'modernisation' procedures being driven through by management, and by the government, and the ensuing culture of overwork, bullying, stress, casualisation and poorer performance that results. I think the issue is something that every working person is confronted with. Consider this passage, for example:

Thirty years ago being a postman was one of the best jobs in the world. You were up at the crack of dawn, out in the fresh air, someone that everyone knew and recognised, serving a responsible role within the community, not only as the carrier of mail, but as a kind of watchman for the health of the community too. Someone who always knew what was going on.

These days the job is all relentless pressure, to work harder and faster, to do more duties, to carry more weight. No one has time for community values any more.

A new breed of bullying manager has entered the workplace, arbitrary and aggressive, imposing the new work rates with sadistic pleasure.

All of the joy has gone out of the job.

Though most workers are probably unable to look back to such Halcyon days, the trend of increasing regimentation, bullying, bigger workloads and absolutely despicable, overbearing managers is something everyone faces. A few years ago, I worked for a call centre that was suffering from low returns that was in large part due to poor equipment. Poor equipment meant fewer successful calls, and more chances of failing to deliver on a contract. It meant losing business. The company attempted to get to grips with the situation not by investing in equipment, which would have been costly, but by regimenting work more thoroughly, which promised to raise more money by - in the marxist lexicon - intensifying the rate of exploitation. The company put in place a number of managers at various levels to do this. They did their best to come up with things that workers commonly did that they believed hindered productivity, and drew up a list of rules, including the following:

If you are more than five minutes late for your shift without calling then you will be sent home ... [Employees] who are constantly late as well as those who cancel and no show regularly will no longer be booked for work ... [Employees] should not be leaving their station unless it is break time. If for any reason you do need to get up from your terminal please let your Supervisor know the reason you need to leave your desk [note - this meant you had to ask to go the toilet] ... Mobile Phones must be switched off while you are working. If your phone rings while you are working you will be sent home and not paid for the rest of the shift ... eating is not permitted while you are working, if you are caught eating then you will be sent home and not paid for the rest of the shift.... Please make sure you sit in the seat that has been allocated to you. This is on the shift plan. If you need to move for any reason please check this with your Supervisor first.... You must not chat to other Interviewers between calls. You should be concentrating on the next call you make and not distracting yourself and others talking to other people....

And so, predictably, on. I have seen similar documents in almost every company I've worked in, though in most cases the new dispensation was successfully resisted. The people who actually came up with this shit, I should point out, were largely self-important supervisors who earned only slightly more than those making calls, but whose relative autonomy and authority gave them an exaggerated sense of their importance. They were selected for such qualities, because management systematically weeded out those they regarded as being too 'soft' from managerial roles. At any rate, this sort of thing was possible because call centres are like most private sector companies in being unorganised, and like many service sector companies in relying disproportionately on young, temporary and casual staff. Ideally, such companies would seek the discipline and performance of a full-time crew, with the flexibility and pay structure of a temp crew. This is a model of working that has spread through substantial sectors of private sector employment, and it is taking hold in parts of the public sector, as the instance of the Royal Mail demonstrates, and it is being accomplished through a series of set-piece battles with organised labour.

This is part of a conjunctural process that needs to be understood. There used to reasonable amount of research done into the capitalist work cycle. We have a legacy of classic texts such as Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital, and Richard Pfeffer's Working for Capitalism, the latter building on the insights of the former. They investigated the rhythms of the working day; the de-skilling of workers and the way in which they are carefully denied an understanding of how their role fits into the broader production process; the narrow margin for controlling what one does and how one does it; the Sisyphean repetitiveness of the work; the minor moments of accomplishment puncuating the daily grind; the micro-aggressions of managers; the openly racist way in which jobs are allocated, etc.. I could be wrong, but I think all we've had lately is the anecdotal musings of a rich, middlebrow philosopher named Alain de Botton. We hear an awful lot about consumption, but next to nothing serious about labour. This is an accomplishment of neoliberal ideology, and it is perverse. We live in an era in which work has been intensified, and management are all the more arbitrary and abusive because those are the qualities that the bosses need. We have a situation where workers are constantly refusing to take sick leave because of the well-grounded fear that they will be penalised for it. We have management regularly driving staff to suicide - this happens quite a lot in Royal Mail, by the way. France Telecom isn't necessarily the outlier that people might assume it to be. The process of de-skilling labour, breaking it up into isolated and repetitive tasks, has been advanced into new terrains. We have young people working for free on government initiative, in the hope that this will lead to paid work. We surely need now more than ever to have detailed, reliable studies of working under capitalism, the activity that most of humanity spends most of its waking life doing.

Labels: dead labour, labour, royal mail, work, working class, zombie labour

Friday, November 06, 2009

The CWU is wrong to 'postpone' industrial action posted by Keith Shilson

What lies behind the postal workers' union's decision to call off the strikes that were planned for tomorrow and Monday and begin a 'period of calm'? Well judging from the CWU website and what Dave Ward has to say about the 'interim' agreement it seems like another shoddy deal.

What do Royal Mail get out of the deal? A guarantee of no strikes until after Christmas.

What do postal workers get? A promise from Royal Mail to negotiate changes with the union.

Royal Mail always make promises to negotiate with the union, like they did in the deal they agreed in 2007, and then they ignore them and impose 'executive action'. They lie. By agreeing to postpone industrial action until next year, the union are throwing away all the momentum built up through the sacrifices postal workers have made up to now, especially those involved in local disputes in London and elsewhere, as well as throwing away the best chance of making strike action effective by doing it at the busiest time of the year.

Postponing the strikes without getting most of our demands met would have been bad enough, but with this deal it feels as though the union have thrown away all our efforts for absolutely nothing. If, as seems likely, Royal Mail drag their feet and go back on their demands, it will be much harder, if not impossible, to get postal workers to go out on strike again in January.This deal has the stench of betrayal about it.

The postal workers' Communication Workers' Union (CWU) had decided to announce 'all-out' strike action for today and the next Monday. By all-out they meant all functions out together rather than seperately as they have been. So mail centre staff, MDEC staff (people who key addresses that the sorting machinery cannot read into a computer) and delivery and collection staff (the postie on the street) would all have beeen out on the same days.

This is the action we should be going ahead with. Why?

There are a number of reasons. First there is the tactical issue of when and how to strike. I can see the sense in different functions striking on different days. It may, in theory cause more disruption, which is of course the whole point in order to put more pressure on the management to do a deal. It also keeps the issue in the news for longer. But the trouble is it raises all sorts of difficulties for certain workers. Should lorry drivers deliver mail to delivery offices that are on strike when they are not on strike that day. Similarly should collection staff deliver mail into a striking mail centre when they are not themselves striking. Most staff would refuse to cross a picket line, but would it be legal? All postal workers striking on the same day cuts out all of this confusion. It also cuts out confusion for the public. I have been criticised by members of the public for not being on strike until I have explained that I am not on strike until the next day.

Second, striking for two days would have been an escalation from the previous strikes, even if those strikes were spread over more days. This is important because it is quite clear that Royal Mail are not taking these negotiations seriously. Many postal workers I have spoken to have been concerned for some time that the CWU would do what they did in 2007 and accept a shoddy deal that Royal Mail has no intention of sticking to and we will have to do this all over again in another year or two. Far better to escalate the strike, show Royal Mail we are serious and force them to think again.

Third and most importantly, it is right because the strike action is in a just cause. So what is the dispute all about?

Let us be clear, we only have the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement because the postal workers went on strike then. Before that Royal Mail were making changes sometimes with local agreement but usually without any agreement. The 2007 Agreement was supposed to be a framework for introducing change in four phases. In each phase there was supposed to be further negotiation with the CWU. Again, this has happened in places but increasingly it was done through 'executive action'. This is where Royal Mail impose changes regardless of the union's position. It is Royal Mail's equivalent of industrial action. This predates the local strike action in London and other places. My unit (office) was not in local dispute at all and yet we were served with executive action at the start of the year because we did not accept their plans for the year. So it is Royal Mail that have broken the Agreement, contrary to what I have heard in the media, and it is Royal Mail that, at the risk of sounding childish, started it.

So what are Royal Mail's plans? There is much talk of modernisation. This does not mean, again as I have heard in the media, that postal workers are opposing the introduction of new 'walksort' machines that will speed up the sorting process, even though this may result in the loss of jobs. Royal Mail is using this as an excuse to casualise an increasingly part-time workforce, on less pay and with less good conditions and job security. They call it 'flexibility'. In the past year around ten full-time postal workers (40 hours a week) have left my office. They have all been replaced with workers on part-time contracts (22.5 hours a week). None of these workers can do the Inward Primary Sorting (IPS), or sorting the office's mail into each round or 'walk', which still needs to be done, nor do they sort their own round. The full-timers that are left must do the IPS, sort and tie up their own round and sort and tie up the round for at least one of the part-timers. So while the part-time workers do not get enough work to be able to earn enough to support themselves and their families, the full-timers are made to do more and more work for no extra money. And of course management tries to set the two groups of workers against each other so they are not standing up to them together. Meanwhile both groups are frequently going over their hours but are bullied and harrassed by management to both do the work AND not claim for overtime.

They call this process 'taking hours out of the office'. On at least two occasions we have been told that hours have to be taken out of the office but that once it has been done, we will not be expected to have any more hours taken out. And each time they came back to us again demanding more hours. Last time it was 176 hours. Even the manager said it couldn't be done. So he was moved to another office and a different manager was brought in who did think it could be done. And it was. From January 2010 they want another 144 hours. This is typically done by 'collapsing' a walk. This is where a walk is divided up into small chunks and a bit is added to each of the other walks, thus depriving a postie of his or her walk and making everyone else do more work for no extra pay. This was initially introduced for the quiet period during the summer and was known as 'summer savings'. But now we are expected to do it throughout the year only now it is called Phase 3 savings.

These are just some of the issues around modernisation, there are many more (for example, Royal Mail want us to deliver MORE junk mail and no longer be paid extra for doing so). Royal Mail's 'reason' for making these changes that are trotted out at the end of every news report is that mail volumes are falling due competition from other mail services since deregulation was introduced and increasing use of the internet. But is this actually the case? Postal worker Roy Mayall (possibly not his real name) has written a brilliant article explaining how Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures to make it appear that mail volumes are down when our experience and back aches tell a different story.

So the dispute is about working practices or modernisation but it is also about pay, pensions and privatisation. Although pay is not a big issue in this dispute it is galling that Royal Mail managers are getting between £2000 and £9000 bonuses, depending on their seniority, while we are getting a pay freeze. In order to get these bonuses managers have to ram through these changes in their office(s).

The pensions issue is not actually part of our dispute with Royal Mail but it is connected with it. The Government, as sole shareholder of Royal Mail is supposed to pay the employer contribution of postal worker's pensions. We have been paying in our contributions but the government decided not to, taking a 'pension holiday' for over ten years! Now, not surprisingly, the pension fund is in deficit and the government is using this as an excuse to (part) privatise Royal Mail. They say the 'business' is in crisis and so they need to raise money from the private sector and to make it more profitable. But the two things are not connected. That is money the government owe us and they should pay it immediately. Pensions are not a bonus, they are deferred wages and not to pay it would effectively be fraud. Without the pensions deficit that the government should by rights make up the Royal Mail is actually in pretty good shape. Last year Royal Mail made £321 million profit.

So what this dispute is really all about is Royal Mail, backed up by the government, running down a much-loved service so they can try to get the public to accept privatisation. The Tories have already said if they are elected they will fully privatise Royal Mail. This will undoubtedly be disastrous as has been demonstrated by all the other utilities that have been sold off. We need to win this dispute to prevent privatisation and defend this public service.

As the leaked Royal Mail document shows it is also about smashing the CWU. The government wants ordinary working people to pay for the financial crisis. Therefore it needs to smash union power in order to get working people to accept a lower standard of living and so the rich can carry on making huge profits. By taking on a big, militant union and winning it will make it harder for other groups of workers to fight back.

Postal workers are leading the fightback against the government. If we win, every other group of workers will be strengthened in their fight. Please support us.

left turn

Labels: agreement, cwu, deal, post strike, royal mail

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Royal Mail's scabbing depots posted by Richard Seymour

Never mind the non-revelations in The Guardian's 'undercover' shock-horror expose of casual workers listening to music under their hoodies, and so on. Yes, Britain's number one liberal newspaper, scourge of corrupt MPs and multinationals, sent their reporter into a scab sorting office and he found out precisely fuck all. Socialist Worker, by contrast, accompanied a score of activists down to a Dartford sorting office, which Royal Mail says is being used to clear up early Christmas mail. They hoked through the bins, and established that Royal Mail is using the place as a sorting office for regular mail from all over the world. The casual workers are being employed at the minimum wage of £5.80 an hour on the basis that they are covering the Christmas surplus, whereas in fact they are being used as scabs. This, as SW also reports, is breaking the law. The temp agencies supplying these workers, Reed, Manpower and others, are not allowed to supply temporary workers for that purpose.

The news reports a breakdown in talks last night, saying that both sides blame one another for the fall-out (oh, they do? quelle reportage!). In assessing these claims, bear in mind that the CWU did make a serious offer aimed at establishing a period of calm yesterday, and that Royal Mail management is committed to the one-sided imposition of its preferred settlement. And bear in mind that Royal Mail management are circumventing the law in order to keep the mail moving, and thus break the strike rather than negotiate. And finally bear in mind that the TUC's role in this is not to support the strikers, but to operate as an independent facilitator of negotiations. The CWU leadership doesn't have a problem with this, though some posties do. But the point is that the major forces of the organised labour movement are pushing for a negotiated settlement, including the CWU leadership itself. The workforce has signalled through acceptance of previous deals, which shed tens of thousands of jobs, that it is willing to negotiate even to its disadvantage. The only intransigent force here is management. That's the bottom line.

Labels: cwu, new labour, public sector pay, royal mail, strike, working class

Monday, October 19, 2009

Myths of the Royal Mail strike posted by Richard Seymour

As a certain amount of contrived hysteria over the coming national postal strike circulates, there are two questions of absolute importance to bear in mind. What does Royal Mail's management want? And what does the government want? One part of the answer to these questions was furnished by BBC Newsnight last week (see report here), after an internal Royal Mail document was leaked to the programme. Entitled 'Dispute: Strategic Overview', the document lays out the plan for forcing the union to accept Royal Mail's terms for 'modernisation'. If the union did not accept Royal Mail's terms, management would just proceed to implement them regardless. The upshot of a complete success by Royal Mail management in this dispute would be the effective de-recognition of the union: forcing through major changes without negotiation with the workforce is exactly what companies without union representation are able to at liberty. This strategy, the document reveals, had the government's approval.

So, this is the first point: when you hear government ministers urge the CWU to 'return to the negotiating table', the reality is that Royal Mail management are the ones refusing to negotiate, with government backing. The business secretary and prince of the Brighton prom, Lord Mandelson, has already tacitly acknowledged the existence of the document, and ruled out the use of ACAS to arbitrate the dispute. The CWU has made repeated overtures, which have been rebuffed. This tendency on the part of Royal Mail's management to ignore conciliation and adopt bullying tactics is one reason why the vote for strike action was so overwhelming: 76% voted 'yes' for strike action.

In this connection, bear in mind what a future in Royal Mail without strong union representation would mean for a postal worker. It has been announced that Royal Mail has scrapped its anti-bullying week. The reason why this measure, among others, was introduced in the first place was because Royal Mail's management culture is one of the most retrograde in the whole of UK industry. Not only is the use of bully-boy management typical of the way Royal Mail handles disputes. It has long been part of the culture of management at sorting offices and depots across the country.

In 2001, an inquiry into Royal Mail's industrial relations by Lord Sawyer, Nicholas Underhill QC, and Ian Borkett of the TUC, was initiated by both the CWU and Royal Mail management to find ways to reduce the frequency of conflict (you can read the full pdf document here). This was after a series of unofficial actions brought sections of Royal Mail to a standstill - 95% of work days lost in 2000-1 were due to unofficial strikes beginning locally and then spreading through wildcat action. The report started from the assumption that workers' militancy was the problem to be averted, expressed disapproval of excessive worker involvement in managerial tasks, and was sympathetic to Royal Mail's 'modernisation' project. Yet, its findings highlighted an abysmal "authoritarian" culture in Royal Mail management, with managers insisting that workers ask for permission just to go for a slash or get a drink of water. Management knew how to apply punitive measures, even where they were inappropriate, but not much else. More senior managers, they found, were of a similar mentality. They refused to punish or confront "unacceptable behaviour" by frontline managers, evidently because they didn't find such behaviour to be "unacceptable".

What kind of behaviour might be hinted at in this cool terminology? Well, in 2003, it was disclosed that some 20% of staff had suffered bullying in the form of physical and mental abuse. Sometimes the abuse has taken on racist dimensions. In 2002, management had to make an unprecedented pay out of £100,000 to the family of a black postal worker who was driven to suicide after racist bullying by a group of managers. In another significant case, Mahmood Siddiqi was awarded almost £180,000 after it was revealed that he had been the subject of racist bullying for years that was condoned by managers on at least ten occasions when they might have acted to prevent it. Consider what might happen, with that sort of management culture operating without the constraints of a strong union. And think about that whenever you hear about 'union bullies', as you surely will.

Another part of the picture is that management want to reduce the cost of labour, to enhance the company's capacity as a profit-making institution. The inquiry led by Lord Sawyer acknowleged that aside from working in an unpleasant environment, postal workers traditionally suffer from low pay. The CWU points out that the average pay for a postal worker is much less than the average for skilled workers, even though managers enjoy lavish pay settlements with bonuses rivalling some of those bestowed on the oligarchs of the City. Royal Mail management would like to reduce workers' pay even further if they can, with proposed pay caps costing some workers £180 a week. This issue has been fuelling strikes across the country recently. (Royal Mail managers have responded to the strikes by scabbing). So, aside from job cuts, Royal Mail's current strategy involves forcing through a pay freeze, which is a de facto pay cut, while insisting on compulsory - but free! - overtime.

The next part of the story has to do with what the government intends to do with the postal service. Had Mandelson had his way, part of the Royal Mail would already be privatised. That had to be shelved last year, in part because of opposition from the backbenches. The major source of opposition to the privatization programme, though, is the organised Royal Mail workforce itself. So, in preparation for a renewed privatization drive, the government wants to decisively beat the union. Now, Mandelson has been very clear that this part-privatization proposal is just the first step toward full privatization. As Blair's secretary for trade and industry, he had always wanted Royal Mail "to be progressively private, even if if initially part of the company stayed in the Government's hands".

Already, the introduction of private competition has allowed companies like TNT and Citypost to bid for Royal Mail's more profitable contracts, while still using the Royal Mail's socialised infrastructure to actually deliver the mail. That has clearly been done in such a way as to make Royal Mail uncompetitive, and to blackmail its workforce into accepting changes that may not be for either their good or that of customers. Thus, in respect of the current strikes, The Guardian has reported - falsely, as it turned out - that the Royal Mail had lost a major postal contract for Amazon. The moral is clear, and cited by government ministers everywhere: strike, and people will just find other ways to get their mail delivered. Royal Mail managers have also claimed that the amount of mail being handled has declined, and that this in itself justifies substantial job losses in adaptation to a changing market. But postal workers have spotted the ruse behind this:

Mail is delivered to the offices in standard-size grey boxes. In the past, the volume was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There was an estimate for the number of letters in each box, decided by national agreement between management and the union: 208. So the volume of mail passing through each office was worked out: 208 letters per box, multiplied by the number of boxes. But in the past year, Royal Mail has arbitrarily reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box from 208 to 150.
Doubting the accuracy of this number, the union ordered a random manual count. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain 150 items actually carry 267. This manipulation explains how the Royal Mail can say figures are down when every postman knows that volume is up.

These myths - about union intransigence, about the economic necessity of job losses, about the superior efficiency of private competitors, etc. - are being deployed for the purposes of turning a low-cost public service provider into a marketplace of competing providers in accordance with the extraordinarily resilient neoliberal orthodoxy. This brings with it the usual problems - soaring costs, as companies seek to make a profit, duplication of capacity as they fight for market share, and poorer service as low paid, casualised and de-unionised workers are less committed to the job, and less likely to have the time and training necessary to develop their skills. Royal Mail, for all its faults, is one of the last bargains in town. Less than forty pence for a first class letter to anywhere in the UK is nothing. What else would you spend that money on? You couldn't even buy a pint of milk or a Mars bar with that money. Additionally, as much as businesses might whine when there is a strike on, capital makes a big efficiency gain with Royal Mail, especially if they use the metered mail service which gives them a further discount. Admittedly, the Royal Mail is not as cheap as America's socialised mail service, where a first class letter can cost as little as $0.44 (£0.27). But we can't all be as communistic as the yanks.

Labels: class struggle, cwu, neoliberalism, new labour, postal workers, public sector pay, royal mail, strike, tories

Monday, May 04, 2009

Labour's crisis is quite useful posted by Richard Seymour

The weakness of the Labour leadership, with its associated faction-fight, turns out to be quite useful:

Doubts about the political viability of Lord Mandelson’s plans to part-privatise Royal Mail are spreading through government, as the recent bout of Labour indiscipline underlines the political risks of confronting backbenchers.
The business secretary’s team are “proceeding as planned” with the core proposal to sell a 30 per cent stake in the state-owned postal operator to a foreign rival, which MPs are due to vote on before the summer.
But Gordon Brown’s recent Commons defeat over Gurkhas and the part-climbdown over MPs’ expenses has intensified concerns about the Royal Mail stand-off, convincing some senior ministers the government must give way.
Lord Mandelson believes the reforms are essential. He wants the chance to press his case to Labour backbenchers in the Commons, after seeing the positive effect that a “convincing argument” has recently made in the Lords. He still has the backing of Mr Brown, who remains convinced the reforms are urgently required.
But Lord Mandelson is not expected to take it to the wire if opponents were to win their case to delay or to redraw the plan because of the inability or unwillingness of whips to bring round rebels.
The call for a rethink by figures closely involved in pushing the Royal Mail bill reflects fears it will be impossible to pass the proposals without the support of scores of Tory MPs, which will be a heavy blow to Mr Brown’s authority.

Labels: gordon brown, new labour, peter mandelson, privatisation, royal mail, trade unions

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The more things change, the more New Labour stays the same posted by Richard Seymour

The government, you will be heartened to learn, has something else on its mind aside from prominently displaying its mean streak toward the disabled and single mothers. The cabinet has been sick with worry about your welfare in this recession. For this reason, the nationalised bank Northern Rock, having slashed jobs and shed mortgages from its books for months on end, is now offering some first-time buyers mortgages on 10% deposits. And the government has also persuaded Lloyds to expand its lending to consumers and small businesses, on pain of full nationalisation. Wonderful. Orgasmically peachy. The trouble is that in the current climate, no one wants to borrow, given the real knowledge that they won't be able to pay it back. Who would be a first-time buyer today, when 1.2m households are in negative equity? Who would borrow money for an expensive consumer item that didn't have to? As for small businesses, forget it. Business investment has shrunk by 7.7% across the economy over the last year. Demand is plummetting, there is tons of spare capacity, and businesses are more likely to sell assets and cut jobs than borrow more to invest more.

But before you go drawing the conclusion that senior ministers think in terms of amusing demographoids such as ‘Vauxhall Man’ and ‘Bognor Regis Woman’, and designs policies on the basis of flattering said specimens’ alleged ‘aspirational’ propensities, please consider the stimulus. Because, after all, a giant middle finger aimed in your direction can be quite stimulating. Aside from the fact that the supposed spending increases comprise cash that was already in the pipeline, brought forward a couple of years, don't forget that the Chancellor is still intending to cut public spending by £5bn this year. Schools and hospitals, the latter already suffering from the burden of soaring PFI costs, are expected to fare the worst. There’s your stimulus – do you feel that? So, with unemployment expected to reach 3 million next year, and with the government pushing through cuts in public services and welfare, where are these millions of confident, spendy consumers going to come from to bail out the economy and get investment flowing again? It seems that the government is essentially committed to restoring the City of London and the housing market to their prior importance after the recession. They still think they can rely on the financial sector to generate jobs, and a strong housing market to give people collateral to borrow against. This is the only explanation that I can think of as to why they are still committed to keeping even the worst banks alive as profitable enterprises while refusing to do anything substantial about the massive housing crisis that the country faces.

And even as the government rushes to repeatedly inject billions into the financial system and (temporarily) nationalises failing banks, the rush to privatise existing (and comparatively well-functioning) public services continues. 30% of Royal Mail is to be sold off, following up on the pre-Xmas orders of the latte-moustached Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson. This is ostensibly to help recoup sufficient funds to make up for the pensions deficit and introduce modernising measures. The trouble is, the government has already pledged to fund the deficit, and all it is doing is handing over a profitable part of the enterprise to a private company. Taxpayer still gets milked, private capital gets the cream. It has absolutely nothing to do with pensions. This is a move that the government is by no means obliged to undertake. It is not politically popular, it will split the Labour Party, and it has galvanised serious opposition even among ordinarily spineless backbenchers. 125 Labour MPs have signed motions against the policy, and even that former left cheek of Blairism John Prescott is opposed to the plans. The government will have to rely on Tory votes to push the policy through. So, the government's slogan come election 2010 will be: "If you value it, vote for it; then we'll smash it up and sell the parts."

Still, at least you can rely on the government, having alienated voters on the left, to pander to voters on the right who are going to vote Tory anyway. Thus, even as the flow of migrant workers decreases sharply under the impact of recession, the Home Secretary still wants to ban thousands of them. That 'British jobs for British workers' bollocks has a lot to answer for. Meanwhile, Hazel Blears, having been taken to pieces by George Monbiot, is preparing her comeback as an archnemesis of political-correctness-gone-mad, in a madcap re-enactment of Margaret Hodge's campaign to give half of her constituency over to the BNP. When this bizarre mix of haughtiness, arrogance, elitism and pseudo-populism leads to electoral annihilation, Blears will be the first one to blame it on the government's refusal to use her purloined Jimmy Carr jokes in the campaign.

Labels: bankers, banks, financial sector, new labour, postal workers, privatisation, royal mail

Monday, October 15, 2007

Postal Workers "deal" posted by Richard Seymour

We aren't told officially what is in this 'deal' that union leaders have negotiated with Royal Mail, but the unofficial exposition appears to include Billy Hayes falling on both knees, opening his mouth wide and receiving a gurgling stream of Crozier's piss. All reports seem to indicate that the leadership has given in on pay, pensions and working conditions. Now, of course, that could be bollocks that Royal Mail is putting out to reduce expectations, or it could bad reporting. But the fact that the Business and Enterprise Secretary, who openly supports Royal Mail's management, is lauding the deal as "sensible" suggests that it is at best seriously flawed. I would be tempted to assume that Hayes' negotiating team was intimidated by the court's decision to declare next week's strike illegal on a spurious technicality - however, as the CWU notes, this doesn't affect any ensuing strike action. Furthermore, with wildcat strikes breaking out up and down the country, there is really no excuse for caving on the main issues. If the union executive is any good, it will tell Hayes to crumple it up, take it back to Royal Mail and wedge it tightly between Crozier's iron-hard buttocks. If they prove to be made of the usual rubbery substance, it will be referred to the workers who I hope will reject it overwhelmingly

Labels: cwu, postal workers, royal mail, strike

Friday, October 12, 2007

Up the Posties. posted by Richard Seymour

Wildcat strikes double, causing the Telegraph "mail misery". Socialist Worker has a concise description of the issues behind the official strikes, and interviews one of the wildcat strikers:

“This is clearly not just about start times,” said the worker. “It is about the future of the union and Royal Mail, and it is a fight to the death.

“The only way for the union to win is to take the gloves off, and get the whole of London out, followed by the whole of the country. Then we must stay out until we win.”

Well, the wildcats are already having enough impact to galvanise cross-party support for government intervention into the strike, beyond simply demanding that the strikers get back to work. The government is already involved, so all it has to do is stop trying to impose wage cuts and instruct the management of Royal Mail to stick to previous agreements with the union about working practises. No one-sided flexibility, no pay cuts, and no sackings. Simple as that. It's intriguing to note that many right-wing commentators have taken a pseudo-balanced approach to this dispute: they point out that the posties aren't really to blame, and that the management are taking massive salaries. And then they say, "why don't we privatise it so that we can have an astonishing success like Deutsche Post [which now owns DHL]?" That's always the example that comes up, and it's telling since DP has actually been making some incursions into the UK thanks to the 'liberalisation' measures already introduced (although like Business Post and UK Mail and others, it relies on the Royal Mail's delivery force to bring the mail to the doorstep). Since privatisation won't solve the problems of the postal workers (except possibly by destroying their conditions and reducing them to casualised, de-unionised, low-wage serfs), and since there's no evidence that it will actually improve the service for customers, the only plausible meaning of success is that it made a lot of money. And it is true: DP shareholders have made a frigging fortune. Most of its money doesn't even come from mail delivery, of course, but who gives a shit? There's money being made, and that is officially a success story. The total UK postal market is supposedly worth £5.8bn: who wouldn't want a cut of that? Isn't it wonderful that the very same commentators who constantly blither about the demise of social solidarity, mutual respect and so on, wish to subordinate every last crack and corner of daily life to the cash nexus?

Labels: postal workers, royal mail, strike

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Postal workers vote for national strike action posted by Richard Seymour

Socialist Worker's reporter at the CWU conference in Bournemouth reports:

Some 77 percent of postal workers who voted backed strike action in their dispute with Royal Mail over the company's 2.5 percent pay offer. The turnout was 67 percent.

The vote was so overwhelming that the majority of workers at every Royal Mail branch in the country voted to strike.

Delegates at the CWU union conference in Bournemouth exploded with cheers and applause when the ballot result was announced to a packed hall.

CWU leaders made clear that they will return to the employers seeking further talks. But they also made clear that unless there is an acceptable settlement, the first national postal strike for over a decade is very much on the cards.

Outgoing chair of the CWU postal executive Pat O'Hara condemned Royal Mail boss Allan Leighton for saying that the envisaged strike would be "bloody" and comparing it to the miners' strike of 1984-5.

O'Hara said that such comments would be unacceptable from any government – but were particularly outrageous from a Labour government.

The potential now exists for combined strikes between postal and other workers against Gordon Brown's imposition of pay limits on public sector workers. His below inflation wage freeze means an effective cut in wages for millions across Britain.

Postal workers are strong on their own – but they will be much more powerful if they strike alongside others.

Labels: gordon brown, postal workers, royal mail, strike