PASSENGERS, PATIENTS AND PARENTS V PRIVATISATION
Nick Wright  

Tony Blair’s troubles multiply. Near a million public service workers, encouraged by a spring tide of public support, are to repeat their stunningly successful 17 July national strike with a repeat outing on 14 August. That is unless local government employers improve on their offer of a 3 per cent increase. The strikers, many on pay little above the minimum wage, are demanding 6 per cent or £1,750 a year, whichever is the greater. 20 per cent earn less than £5 an hour, while two thirds earn less than £13,000 a year.

The action – one of the largest strikes by women workers ever – is given added impetus by the widening pay gap between women in local government and men. The labour market inflexibilities which arise from new Labour’s dogmatic adherence to ‘market’ economics are creating a political crisis. While government spokesmen stress that their second term objective is better delivery of public services the low pay levels and rampant privatisation culture leads to growing numbers of local government staff abandoning their jobs to earn more elsewhere.

A raft of public opinion polls show between 75 per cent and 85 per cent public support for the strikers. The employers, a confederation of mostly Labour local authorities, are beginning to fragment. Attempts to portray the workers as ‘greedy’ have collapsed in the face of the widespread public support.

Underlying the mood change is a growing recognition that the privatisation strategy pursued by Tony Blair and his finance minister Gordon Brown cannot deliver quality public services. Pay rates in local government, in the health service and in public utilities are driven down by New Labour’s sotto voce advocacy of entry into the European single currency and the ‘austerity’ policies which this entails. And New Labour’s enthusiasm for deregulated labour markets – what might be termed Blair’s ‘common programme’ with Aznar and Berlosconi – has produced profound structural problems. In sectors of the economy where a combination of privatisation, unemployment and restrictive labour laws has combined to reduce the power of organised labour wage rates are depressingly low.

But ‘iron chancellor’ Gordon Brown responded to the strike with a warmed- over version of the 19th century ‘iron law of wages’ warning striking public sector workers that inflation busting pay awards would be at the cost of investment in public services.

Mr Brown told parliament’s Treasury select committee that Britain had to make a choice about how to spend the £60bn cash mountain built up over five years of austerity.

‘If money were to be used in public sector pay, which couldn’t then be used to recruit new people or improve services, that would be a loss to the country as a whole,’ he told the committee

But in labour-intensive services, like health, education and social services workers are the key resource. And millions are unwilling to tolerate poverty pay any longer. The situation is exacerbated in London and the South East by a boom in housing prices fuelled precisely by the ‘casino economy’ dominated by City banks and financial institutions which hold new Labour in such thrall.

Public service workers simply cannot buy into a housing market where prices exceed annual incomes by a factor of eight. Publicly owned or ‘social’ housing is in desperately short supply after years of council house sales. And the situation is made worse by New Labour’s dogmatic insistence on transferring the ownership and management of council housing, traditionally a key asset for working class communities, to the private sector.

Where this controversial policy is implemented the government is obliged to ballot tenants on the transfer of their estates to the new owners. In Britain’s second city, Birmingham, they flatly refused. In South London’s massive public housing projects the government scheme was rejected (and Labour candidates in the local elections faced a credible threat from dissident Labour party members standing as tenant advocates.)

Only in Glasgow, where public housing is notoriously badly maintained and managed, did Labour manage to blackmail the tenants into a grudging acceptance by making transfer conditional on a refurbishment programme.

The choice was simple. Continue to live in a slum – or accept the transfer

A piquant aspect to Britain’s fetish with home ownership is the rising middle class revolt against the run down in publicly provided care services for the elderly. Two centuries of unplanned capitalist reorganisation of production have so fragmented family and community that many elderly people cannot expect to be cared for in extended family networks but rather look forward to a state-provided cushion of welfare services including residential care.

But in the market economy these things must be provided for – not out of public funds - but by the sale of homes, bought at usurious rates of interest, and intended as a cushion against poverty or an asset to pass on to children. Instead they are sold-off to pay for labour-intensive care in the private sector.

Despite the fact that over 80 per cent of local authority funds derive from central government Blair is keen to keep his distance from the council workers dispute. But the growing disunity among the employers means his government will be compelled to put pressure on the council bosses to return to negotiations.

Dave Prentice, the diffident but determined leader of UNISON, the biggest public sector union said, “The employers side are clearly in turmoil and the split that existed on their side has depended.”

“They must come together and recognise that rat the only way to prevent further service strikes is to get back into talks with an improved offer.”

This is a chorography of industrial relations which has been absent from local government for near a generation. Behind the scenes pressure by the government will inevitably result in a compromise – probably a two or three-year deal. The illusion that the employers are independent of the government will be maintained for a while.

In a delicious irony the strikers heard Jack Dromey, public services officer of the Transport and General Workers Union demand a change in government policy. It was Dromey, married to a minister in Blair’s government, who carried the Blairite standard in the last elections for leader of his union. An election he lost to a left-backed candidate. Ever hopeful of high office he is seen as potential challenger when the job next comes up. But the tide is running against social partnership and the Third Way. To be elected to leadership in the trade union movement it is necessary to at least give the impression of militancy.

Among the speakers at the strikers’ London rally, wildly cheered by the crowd of care assistants, school meals assistants maintenance staff, drivers and refuse collectors was the militant new railway workers leader, Bob Crow. Pilloried in the newspapers, condemned by government ministers, the victim of a campaign of denigration organised from within the TUC bureaucracy – and elected by a handsome majority over his Blairite opponent – he told his audience that the following day London’s underground railway workers would be on strike over fears that the network’s privatisation presents a safety threat.

This is a real issue. After a series of railway disasters both passengers and rail workers see the free-for-all fragmentation of the network as the underlying cause of danger.

Bob Crow’s rail, maritime and transport union point to an inquest which showed that a young student, killed on his first night as a casual worker for a maintenance sub-contractor had received no training and had worked an 18-hour shift days before the tragedy.

A civil servant working as an employment counsellor in the devastated South Yorkshire coal field says that ‘track safety certificates’, essential to get work on the privatised rail network, are bought and sold in pubs by unemployed workers desperate to supplement their meagre dole or supplement their minimum wage incomes with some additional night work.

Reporting the new strike wave the right wing tabloid press have been quick to mobilise images of the so-called 1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’ – a wave of public sector disputes – which undermined the credibility of the right-wing ‘Old” Labour government and was followed by Thatcher’s election. In right wing social democratic mythology it was workers’ resistance to the IMF-dictated austerity policies of the seventies Labour government which led to Thatcher’s victory rather than the policies themselves.

New Labour is finding – with themselves the preferred party of big business and the Tories a feeble parliamentary opposition – that the contradiction between government policy and popular opinion is increasingly expressed as solidarity between service providers and service users. Between public service unions and parents, patients and passengers.

This new dynamic dispels the defensiveness of the left and is creating a new moral and ideological climate in which the rampant individualism and crass materialism of the Thatcher years is on the decline.

Within the organised labour movement the banalities of social partnership which came to routinely dominate the discourse of party and union is giving way to a more robust approach.

Dave Prentice again at the weekend put into words the feeling that trade union action is an avenue open to people to challenge the government’s big business agenda. “The public gave Labour a mandate to invest and improve public services, not to privatise them”.

The strikes and the left shift in the unions is giving greater coherence to the more traditional left in the labour movement. The new metal workers’ leader Derek Simpson is clear that his union should stay affiliated to the Labour Party. The Communist Party and the Morning Star daily newspaper strongly back the campaign to strengthen the links between the unions and the Labour Party. Indeed, the Morning Star is enjoying a striking revival in its fortunes with increasing daily sales and a flood of union advertising revenue. In addition to the usual fare of union leaders its editorial columns are filled with feature articles by Labour luminaries including Tony Benn and figures like the London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Green MEPs.

The railway workers, postal workers and public servants will switch their money from direct donations to Labour to campaigning for their preferred causes but the largely trotskyite-led campaign to break the union labour link is faltering.

The main conduit for this campaign, Britain’s ‘Socialist Alliance’ achieved some modest electoral successes and attracted some refugees from the Labour Party but remains an uneasy amalgam of Britain’s notoriously fissiparous ultra left sects. Hope springs eternal and there are some signs that the dominant trotskyite groups are abandoning their traditional sectarianism – particularly in the growing anti-war movement – but its early promise (or perhaps threat) remains unfulfilled.

Interestingly by the arch modernisers’ in New Labour’s inner circle of advisors, backed by media pundits and business circles are also keen to weaken or break the link. The latest device, fuelled by a £6 million deficit in Labour Party finances, is to introduce state funding for political parties.

This would go a long way to achieving long-standing goal in finally breaking the link between the trade unions and party and end labour’s dependency on the unions.

Blair’s week of misery descended further into despondency when his favourite trade union leader, Sir Ken Jackson of the massive engineering and electrical workers union, lost his position to a supposedly ‘no-hoper’ left winger.

His opponent, the newly elected metal workers’ general secretary Derek Simpson – a former Communist Party factory militant – celebrated the defeat of the doyen of Downing Street by joining a raft of other ‘awkward squad’ union leaders at a conference to reclaim the Labour Party from ‘New’ Labour.

Thus the week ended with left and centre union leaders joining academics, MPs and Labour Party activists to hammer out a new economic and political strategy for the labour movement in a packed conference at the TUC headquarters.

This conference, organised by the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs under the title ‘After New Labour’, was backed by both left wing and more centre ground union leaders.

In a reference to the decision of trade unions a century ago to found the Labour Party John McDonnell MP said” We are coming together in the same way as those before us did – this time not to create the party but to save it.”

He then went on to welcome Chancellor Brown’s extra cash for public services … and condemn him for making it conditional on further privatisation.

The next public service workers strike takes place when Blair is on holiday. From his Tuscan retreat he can reflect on the uncomfortable fact, demonstrated both in Italy and Britain, that social democratic parties cannot serve two masters and stay in office.