Red Pepper » Heather Wakefield

N30 and after: was that it? A debate on the public sector strikes

admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:40:34 +0000

30 November in Lancashire. Photo: Andy O’Donnell
Was that it? Well, maybe. While France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have been rocked by numerous general and public sector-wide strikes over the past few years, in Britain we have had just the two one-day strikes over pensions reform, on 30 June and 30 November last year.
Apart from these, large-scale resistance to job losses, pay freezes and cuts in services has been notable by its absence. Slogans such as ‘We won’t pay for their crisis’ ring hollow; the reality is that ‘we’ are paying for their crisis and ‘they’ are getting away with it.
Punching above its weight
All of this may be true, but it is also the case that N30 packed a punch well in excess of its weight as a one-day strike. In this sense, it was far more of a protest than an orthodox strike – and not just because it was only a day long. Any strike in the public sector is necessarily more of a political action because the government is the ultimate employer and it responds to political pressure, as opposed to the pressure of a strike as an economic action against a profit-seeking organisation in the private sector.
In the run-up to N30, especially once the ballot results came in, the media was dominated by the prospect of the day itself. This cleverly built up pressure on the government as the first truly mass and coordinated strike in decades loomed large. Indeed, all the significant concessions – in terms of the raised threshold for paying more in contributions and the moratorium on changes affecting those retiring within ten years – came as a result of the threat of the strike.
The concessions were a validation of the unions’ recognition that the best way to strengthen one’s hand at the bargaining table is to threaten action – even if that came late in the day, given that negotiations began in March 2011. But it was also government ineptitude that helped 30 unions to not only sing from the same hymn sheet but coordinate their action on the same day.
Even after the concessions, however, most public sector workers will pay more, work longer and get less when they retire. Moreover, the stomach for further action looks to have been severely weakened and inter-union unity fractured as it becomes clear what different unions are prepared to settle for.
Strengths and weaknesses
The logic of the bargaining process so far is that the only way to get more concessions is to threaten to strike again (and do so if necessary). Yet the strike’s central dynamic is most clearly revealed in Unison and the GMB where – despite grassroots activist pressure – the action was instigated and controlled by the national leaderships.
This may have been less true in other unions, such as PCS or Unite, and there may have been cases where national leaders and activists worked more closely and on an equal basis. Nonetheless, N30 was in essence a mass bureaucratic strike (I use the term sociologically). This is most clearly shown in that the date was set by national leaders and made only a one‑day affair without any subsequent other days lined up. The only discussion on subsequent action concerned ‘smart striking’, which ran counter to the demands expressed by many in the organised grassroots.
The bureaucratic nature of the strike produced particular strengths and weaknesses. Its primary strength was that, in the context of the widespread atrophy of active workplace unionism, N30 was driven and controlled by national leaderships. For example, many Unison branches have poor steward organisation and have been unable even to get quorate meetings recently, but the majority of their members struck on the day. In many cases, the national leaderships – along with their full-time officers – made up (temporarily) for much of this atrophy.
Yet a major weakness is that because some national leaderships now seem to be willing to accept insufficient concessions and disregard their previous statements of not allowing members to ‘pay for a crisis not of their making’, grassroots activists are unable to enforce their will – or the leaders’ earlier statements.
The unravelling of the N30 unity and action also reveals a number of strategic weaknesses, concerning both national leaderships and the grassroots.
No movement?
First, it is questionable whether the unions in the public sector (or the economy as whole) do constitute a ‘movement’ as such. It is common to talk about the union ‘movement’ but there is little sense of the unions pulling together in terms of policy and action. This was evident before the autumn, with the ATL, NUT, PCS and UCU striking on their own on 30 June, and Unison saying striking then was premature as negotiation had not been exhausted.
It is better to see the union ‘movement’ as a spectrum, ranging between the ‘militant’ PCS and the ‘moderate’ Unison, GMB and many small professional unions. What they have in common is currently outweighed by their differences, which are being highlighted now that the government is effectively practicing ‘divide and rule’ tactics. While there are material differences between the pension schemes, the idea of fair pensions for all is being lost.
Indeed, Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, has lambasted what he sees as ‘fatalism’ on the part of many other unions in this fight. By this, he means leaders of the GMB and Unison in particular do not seem to think they can win because they have become so psychologically inured to years of defeat since the 1980s.
Second, the ballot results for N30 raise the question of how much appetite there is for continued action. This would mean either upping the ante with more national one-day strikes or continuing the action in some form of ‘smart’ strike – selective (regional, sectoral) rolling action.
But of the 30-plus union ballots, only three secured the backing for action of more than half of those entitled to vote. With so many members either not voting or voting against, along with the large numbers of non-members, it would be a major challenge to transform any further strike from a one-off protest into an ongoing action that shuts down public services. Yet this is an important way to exert more pressure on the government and is what the unions must face up to.
Public opinion
The third strategic weakness is public opinion. Polls showed strike support climbed from being evenly split in late October to clear support (60 to 40 per cent) as N30 approached. This resulted from a combination of effective union campaigning and government ineptitude. But it was only a case of ‘so far so good’, because while public support is critical to not undermining a strike (especially in the public sector), it is not sufficient to winning one.
Despite occasional strikes in the private sector over pensions (such as the one at Unilever), there is a lack of any widespread organic connection between private and public sector workers, with many private sector workers believing public sector pensions are ‘gold-plated’ or seeing nothing wrong with public sector pensions being brought down to the level of their own.
This chasm between public and private has been reinforced by the union movement not taking the necessary steps to create widespread and deep-seated alliances of users and producers of public services, where the interests of both are cemented in the common interest of more jobs with better rewarded staff providing a better service.
The union movement in Britain is far behind its counterparts in, for example, Australia and the US in this regard. Union movements in these countries approximate much more to social movement unionism, whereas in Britain the sole locus of the workplace remains much more dominant.
Just how telling the disconnection will be depends on whether there is more action and to what extent the general public feels inconvenienced by it. The longer any action goes on, the more likely public feeling will move towards the government.
Thus, quick, sharp action is needed to win and keep the public on side. The unions could blunt any public hostility by mobilising citizens again in a show of generalised anger against cuts – with pensions as part of it – as they did on 26 March 2011.
Finally, if unions really do wish to stop workers working longer and paying more but getting less, then they must address the issue of where and when to knock out public services. In Greece last September, civil servants occupied their workplaces so that the audit team could not do its work of assessing revenues and liabilities for another bailout. Would UK unions be willing to target the tax system itself, which will be responsible for implementing the increased pension contributions come 1 April 2012?
This necessity of creating strategic levers of power also faces the other major ongoing battle of the moment. Electricians at seven major companies face a ‘sign or be sacked’ ultimatum. Their campaign since August last year has highlighted that they need to stop the construction sites, rather than just protest outside them.
It looks as if 2011 was just a warm up as these struggles are yet to be concluded. Unions face crunch time. Their actions so far could point the way to victory but that is very far from assured. To gain those victories, they must address their shortfalls in terms of acting strategically, as a movement and in alliance with the wider citizenship.
Gregor Gall is professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire.

Response: An amazing day

By striking if we have to, by negotiation if we can. Heather Wakefield responds that working this way is not a ‘weakness’
Midnight, N30. Unison’s president, Eleanor Smith – a nurse – leads workers at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital out on strike. So began a day that saw more than a million public service workers on strike for pension justice.
N30 wasn’t just the biggest strike since 1926 and the biggest public sector strike ever, it was also the UK’s biggest women’s strike. An amazing day, with substantial public support, union recruitment at high levels and a mushrooming of new activists, many young, giving the lie to the view that public sector unionism is being dismantled, like the services our members represent.
Those who did not take part also merit a mention, not least because their absence was felt on N30 and because their abstention from any future action would leave big holes in any strategy underpinned solely by strike action. In the NHS, the BMA, the Royal Colleges of Nursing and Midwives were noticeable for not having balloted, as were some smaller ‘professional’ unions in the NHS. That left the lowest paid and vulnerable fighting for the highest paid with power. The firefighters’ FBU also decided not to ballot, in the light of evident progress in negotiations.
So far, so good. But did the strike achieve its objectives? What happens next? Why has there been no further action? And where does it leave public sector trade unionism?
It’s easy to forget that the government’s initial objective was to do away altogether with defined benefit schemes and replace them with defined contribution schemes – in which your retirement income is only as good as your investments and the market at the time you retire.
The ‘independent’ Hutton report made it clear that he wanted to reduce the level of pensions to the low ‘income replacement’ levels of the earlier Turner report, and the rate at which pensions accrue – generally from 1/60 of salary each year to 1/100. Hutton also wanted to keep workers outsourced from the public sector to private companies and voluntary organisations out of public sector pension schemes altogether.
Dogged negotiation
Dogged negotiation by the TUC team representing all the unions had begun to knock the rough edges off some of the coalition’s plans for these ‘big ticket’ items before the threat of N30 – let alone the actuality. But there is no doubt that the strike threat focused the minds of Francis Maude and Danny Alexander – Cabinet Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury – who have led for the government on overall pension policy and negotiations.
Shortly after the announcement of Unison’s ballot results – and before some of the more surprising ‘yes’ votes – they produced a new ‘offer’, which included full protection for those within ten years of retirement and beyond, retention of the 1/60 accrual rate and ‘cost ceilings’ that provide scope for serious negotiation. Most workers transferred to the private or voluntary sectors will retain their right to stay in public sector pension schemes.
Those who retort that workers will still have to work longer and receive less are in some senses correct, in others not.
The switch from RPI to CPI indexation was imposed earlier on and the offer includes linkage to the rising state pension age. The former is currently the subject of legal appeal by a number of unions and the nature of the link to state pension age remains an issue in the negotiations.
What also needs to be said is that each scheme currently under review is different and it was inevitable that negotiation within sectoral bargaining groups would follow action – as it would also have to follow any further action, unless HM Government keeled over completely. This is an unlikely scenario, given the low density in many workplaces, lack of organisation in outsourced providers and the non-participation of some big-hitting unions.
The agreements currently under further negotiation and consideration by most unions in the NHS, civil service and schools are detailed ‘heads of agreement’, dealing with contribution increases alongside proposals for new schemes from 2015. The situation in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), which also covers support staff in police, probation, schools, further and higher education, the Environment Agency, transport and the voluntary sector, is different.
The LGPS, uniquely, is ‘funded’ to the tune of more than £140 billion, and has a membership that is much lower paid than other schemes – 70 per cent earn less than £21,000 per year. Here we have agreed some principles for negotiation, which provide the potential for no change until 2014, no contribution increases for most members, retention of ‘admitted body status’ for transferees to the private or voluntary sectors and choice over retirement age and contributions. The retirement age has been 65 for some time.
Get to grips
Those who argue that unions wanting to negotiate – the majority – have ‘sold out’ and undermined trade union solidarity need to get to grips with the complexities of public sector pensions, serious areas of weakness in membership density and organisation, sectoral bargaining arrangements in the public sector. Only when they have done that should they decide whether there is a route to getting everything we want through industrial action.
They need also to consider the other issues facing our members and the public – cuts in services, privatisation, reorganisations, redundancies, casualisation and cuts to pay and conditions. Unions need to strike, campaign and negotiate on these issues too – placing ourselves firmly alongside service users and communities – as well as fighting on our unique industrial challenges like pensions.
In the meantime, our dispute with the coalition remains, our ballot is ‘live’ and we will consult our members over further action if negotiations fail to deliver. In that event, industrial action will need to last longer and include unions hitherto not participating. That will be a challenge. But it’s worth looking for a resolution through negotiation first.
Heather Wakefield is the head of local government at Unison.

All together now

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:28:50 +0000

Public services and public service trade unionism are under attack from an alliance of forces building on the right – and nowhere more so than in local government, where 750,000 of Unison’s 1.4 million members are employed. In the space of just seven days this October, Unison’s local government group had to respond swiftly to a series of threats.

First came Essex County Council’s announcement that it intends to ‘save’ £300 million over the next three years, allegedly with no cuts to front-line services. Then came the revelation that the Daily Telegraph has sent a Freedom of Information request to 200 councils in England, seeking detailed information on the cost of trade union representatives with paid facility time. No prize for guessing their game.

This was followed by the announcement that, under heavy pressure from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Essex is going to pre-empt the outcome of the Telegraph’s foraging and ‘review’ facility time for trade union duties. While this was going on, Unison’s Northumberland branch was battling against the proposed redundancies of almost 200 home care workers and the closures of much-needed day centres in a large, rural county, having recently survived the headache of local government reorganisation.

In Norfolk, the Unison branch was campaigning for recognition and a better deal for poorly treated home care workers transferred to a new agency following the failure of a large, privatised home care contract. Enough? As Red Pepper went to press, refuse collectors in Leeds were well into their third month of strike action over pay cuts of up to £6,000 a year.

Blueprint for the Tory future

Despite the recent escalation of these struggles, the left seems to have long abandoned any real interest in local government as the potential focus for revived radical left politics, understandably disillusioned with New Labour’s track record in town halls. However, we ignore it at our peril.

Many of the most important universal public services are run by councils. What’s more, Osborne and Cameron have both cited local government as providing the ‘blueprint’ for their future public service agenda. The ideas being applied in Essex will find their way into the NHS and elsewhere if the Conservatives win the election.

Older Red Pepper readers will remember Thatcher’s lowest-bid compulsory competitive tendering and her environment minister Nicholas Ridley’s vision of ‘enabling’ councils, which would meet just once a year to hand out the contracts to multinationals. Younger readers should note that this is no longer a distant fear. Councils, police authorities and others are coming together within so-called ‘partnerships’, such as ‘South West One’ in Somerset, and handing over control of local services to the likes of IBM – that acknowledged fount of public service expertise.

Besides the cutbacks, there will be curbs on the power of trade unions. We are also already seeing attacks on unions’ ability to recruit and organise in Tory councils, with Lancashire and Nottinghamshire – once Labour strongholds – leading the charge. Unison has been described as ‘too powerful’ by Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne. Could it be lined up as David Cameron’s NUM?

Cameron’s councils in England are now confident enough to boast of having made 50 per cent more ‘efficiency’ savings than required by central government in the past four years. Additionally, while council reserves are rising, they are slyly using the recession as an excuse for council tax cuts – the real cause of many redundancies and cutbacks in local services. The orchestrated campaign by the shadow cabinet Tories, Cameron’s councils, the CBI, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and their friends on the right is close to convincing many. Trade unions and the left need to act together swiftly to counter their propaganda and defend the welfare state.

This is a defining moment for unions – and the left in general – to show that there is an alternative to the demise and privatisation of public services. For those of us in Unison and the other public service unions, the challenges are clear. How do we maintain and build our membership and our bargaining power? How do we protect services and provide the quality we want for users when many are already in the grip of neoliberal councils? How do we build effective coalitions with local communities, the left and with other campaign groups to protect services and local economies? And how, just how, do we keep our heads and intervene to do all this when all around are losing theirs?

Sadly, these questions have to be answered against a backdrop of general decline in trade union strength and influence, within and beyond public services. Last year, trade union membership continued its long-term decline, with a drop of almost two per cent to just 6.9 million members. Just 29 per cent of women workers and 26 per cent of men are now union members, and fewer than 50 per cent of all workers are employed in a unionised workplace. Unison is still growing and public service trade unionism is holding up, but according to government statistics, just 57 per cent of public sector workers are now in a trade union.

Compared to a scary 15.5 per cent in the private sector, this doesn’t sound bad, but when most public service employers still recognise and accept us, it should be better. The impact of privatisation can be seen most clearly in the utilities, where union density has declined by 15 per cent since 1998. Nonetheless, public sector unions are still a force to be reckoned with, with resources and influence beyond our numbers, which should prove crucial in contributing to an effective resistance to the current attack on public services.

An attack on women

Any attack on the public sector such as this is also specifically an attack on women. Women make up 60 per cent of all public service workers and 75 per cent of those who work in local government, education and the NHS. Those figures are reflected in Unison’s membership too.

And in many households women will also have to fill the gap left by dismantled services. In the post-war period, the ‘caring’ public services were consciously built upon skills learnt through unpaid domestic labour, transferred, expanded and exploited in an undervalued public sector labour market. Without women’s emotional commitment to care, good health and education, our welfare state could not have thrived. A recent Unison survey of 10,000 of our members in local government showed that teaching assistants, social workers and care workers regularly work up to 15 per cent unpaid overtime just to get their jobs done. This is hardly the image of the ‘protectionist’ task-and-finish public sector worker, blamed, overlooked and undervalued by New Labour in its drive for modernisation.

There has undoubtedly been serious investment by Labour in staff and resources in the NHS, schools and policing. However, Blair and Brown Inc has also privatised around £150 billion worth of public services in the name of ‘modernisation’ and ‘improvement’, including 80 per cent of home care services and most residential homes. Using so-called ‘Best Value’ as their guiding principle, they have required councils to create markets where clearly none existed and ‘compare’, ‘challenge’ and ‘compete’ in homage to market principles.

The most obvious results of New Labour’s adherence to the market model have been little noticeable improvement in the quality of many services despite the funding increases, any number of major disasters with central government IT contracts, alienation of the workforce and the undermining of trade unions. Accountability to users and taxpayers has been eroded too, despite the new rhetoric of public empowerment. Our members’ pay and conditions have suffered, with feeble protection for those transferred to, or starting work on privatised contracts.

New Labour’s mistake

Arguably New Labour’s greatest mistake was to embark on its programme of ‘modernisation’ in the misguided belief that the workforce and trade unions were the main problem – not part of the solution. This assumed self-interest on the part of public service workers is without foundation.

Well-respected research demonstrates that engaging the workforce in reform produces the best results – whether in manufacturing or services, private or public. So, rather than take a sober look at the real problems undermining public services, Blair and Brown turned to the market to provide solutions. The language of new public management invaded every corner of our public service landscape as league tables, performance indicators, regulation and privatisation took over.

Newcastle Unison has demonstrated the sad error of those ways and has shown what can be achieved through greater democracy in the workplace. The story is told in the book, Public Service Reform… but not as we know it, by Hilary Wainwright and Mathew Little. Threatened with the outsourcing of so-called ‘back office’ services to BT, Kenny Bell and his Unison colleagues at Newcastle had ideas of their own. First they called the council to account through industrial action to oppose the proposal, then they showed the power of public service trade unionism at its best by engaging everyone from managers to frontline staff in an exercise of collective problem-solving. They kept the services in-house and improved them. Staff morale soared and services benefited.

The Newcastle experience threw a spotlight on a key issue – the need for innovative, genuine public service management – which we in trade unions, and the left in general, have often found uncomfortable. Somewhere in the trade union psyche, management is still something to be opposed. Yet when asked to choose from options that would most help them improve local services, the majority of 10,000 of Unison’s local government members surveyed last year opted for ‘Feeling valued’ and ‘Better management’. The first answer might not be surprising. The second more so.

One big challenge for Unison, then, is how to overcome the workplace hierarchy reflected within the union, and focus the expertise of our manager members on public solutions to service improvement. This will not be easy in a climate that has grown increasingly hostile to alternatives to privatisation, and rewarded no-one for seeking them out. We need to use the union to bring managers together with members working on the front line and the ‘back office’ to formulate ideas for keeping jobs and decent working conditions.

That’s not the only challenge of course. A united front to protect the public sphere is needed now more than ever. But building alliances always seems hard for unions as we vie for members and public profile, while the historic ties to the Labour Party and hostility to the ‘far left’ seems to make affiliation to many broad-based campaigns impossible. Unions generally want to lead, even when we don’t always know where we’re going!

For those on the radical left outside the trade union movement, the ongoing adherence of some unions to New Labour seems to close down opportunities for alliances, while our ‘male, pale and stale’ image does not symbolise the sort of modern, progressive force we want to be.

So what is to be done? The re-branding of the crisis by the right has to be publicly challenged by every means possible. The truth needs to be made plain. Unions – along with publications such as Red Pepper – have a key role to play in this. Campaigns such as Unison’s ‘Million Voices’ can help focus evident public anger on the right targets too. Unions’ resources need to be used to facilitate much more discussion and debate about the public services of the future, as well as how to defend the ones we have now.

We, in turn, need the left to help us recruit and organise, for without unions there is little hope of mobilising on the scale likely to be necessary if Cameron and co form the next government. What none of us can do is to stand and wait. Time is running out.

Heather Wakefield is the head of local government at Unison