Living in the Margins

Government cuts are having a disproportionate impact
on those services geared towards black communities.

Colleagues,

I spent a highly productive day today with a group of UNISON shop stewards at the union’s West Midlands Regional Centre focusing on the skills and knowledge needed to handle members’ cases which centre around race discrimination.

Part of the discussion focused on the relative paucity of the employer’s duty to undertake equality impact assessments as an aspect of the public sector equality duty under the Equality Act (2010).

Even the EHRC acknowledges that in the current era of austerity cuts are having a direct impact on equal treatment in the delivery of public sector services and the TUC, amongst many others, have been doing a good job of authoritatively evidencing the specific dire gender-specific impact of the cuts agenda: http://tinyurl.com/69693d2.

Thankfully the way forward for trade unionists, and the millions of people in the UK affected by Coalition policy, is being charted by people like Mark Serwotka who this week rightly announced that the British trade union movement should, in the context of Labour’s disastrous adoption of the Coalition’s cuts agenda, be considered as the de facto government opposition.
At long last a trade union leader in the UK accepts also that the best route to resistance and survival is through alliances with those organisations who find common cause in the context of austerity:

We understand the need to combine different forms of opposition. We have campaigned for tax justice for quite a few years but it was when UK Uncut sat on the floor in Topshop and shouted pay your tax that it became a front page story. You have got to have the alternative, you have got to stand up for people at work and union members, but you also need to embrace more direct methods of getting your case across. And I think that's the way that we see things going forward.
Read the full interview with Serwotka here: http://tinyurl.com/7otmk4w

The connection here with the original issue of equality impact assessment and the need for trade unions to reach out to allied organisations is sharply underlined by the on-going media campaign by the Afiya Trust on the impact of cuts on black communities and the services historically established to serve their needs.

The Living in the Margins analysis provides conclusive evidence (http://livinginthemargins.org/) that public sector organisations do not take their impact assessment duty seriously and also that black communities are suffering a disproportionate impact of the cuts agenda. There is a great piece in today’s Guardian which does justice to the Trust’s on-going campaign and I recommend that you read it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-care-network/2012/mar/05/cuts-black-ethnic-minority-carers-hardest

Suffice to say that what we have here and now in the UK is the perfect storm which should precipitate a more significant degree of collaboration between the trade union movement and that network of service users, providers, charities, protest group etc etc which could and should form the broad based alliance which is probably the best chance we have to forcefully challenge what the Coalition is doing.

Can it happen? We have no choice.

Yours in solidarity

Ian

The Worker & The Law: Bill Wedderburn

Colleagues, I am working away from home at the moment with that fine trade union and professional body the Association of Education Psychologists (AEP) at their base in Durham. I have just discovered however the passing away of one of those people who were central to my generation's understanding of the fundamental importance of free, independent trade unionism to the maintenance to essential liberties for the worker in liberal society.

Bill Wedderburn's textbooks on comparative  labour law set the understanding of our approach to analysing and understanding how trade unions should best apply statutory rights to secure their long-term future. Weddurburn was for me, and many trade unionists like me who became trade unionists under Thatcher, a beacon of rationality and perspective.

Read his obituary in the Guardian to get a grip of why many in the movement mourn his passing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/mar/12/lord-wedderburn-of-charlton

As you'll see Bill was central (amongst many other achievements) to the creation of the Institute of Employment Rights and I am proud to record the close association of one of my employers, the GFTU, to the Institute and of the contining importance of the Institute to providing  the UK trade union movement with a legal perspective on those issues of central importance.

Bill Wedderburn's legacy is phenomenal and I am particulalry keen to acknowledge his understanding that UK trade unionism did not fare well under New Labour. I would also say that students of labour and trade union studies should take the time to read his first publication, as I did as a student at Ruskin in the 80s, The Worker & The State, as he creates a deeply analytical and philosophical rationale for the central relevance of trade unions in free societies.

Bill was an influential figure during that critical phase during the 60s and 70s of trade union history and without whom trade unionism in the UK, despite its current beleagured state, would not be in a state of resilience and in a position to fight back against the coalition.

As Joe Hill said though, let us not mourn, and as Bill would have wanted, let us organise!

In Solidarity

Ian

Older Workers in the European Economy

Chris Ball (TAEN) addresses the FECCIA
conference on the outcomes of his
research

Colleagues,

I am just back from a critically important conference which focused on the one of the most pressing economic and social issue for governments, trade unions and employers, that of an ageing European workforce and the challenges that poses in the workplace and across the economy.

The conference was hosted by FECCIA in Prague 7-9 March. FECCIA is the European association of managers in the chemical industry, and was funded by the European Commisson as a partnership with ECEG, the European chemicals employers group and EMCEF, the European chemical and energy workers' union.

I attended the event with my colleague Judith Jackson (Head of Education at the GFTU) and we were there representing the GFTU's own project on the issue of the protection of the employment interests of older workers.



Details of the FECCIA project are here (http://www.feccia.org/new_index_en.htm) and information on the GFTU project I am managing are here (http://www.gftu.org/content/3/1/13/article/76/) and both take as their central focus how best to support the employment needs of older workers, particularly as they face the prospect of remaining in work past traditional retirement age.

Although the event explored what is understood as the big demographic issues posed, and Chris Ball of TAEN (http://www.taen.org.uk/) did an excellent of this - and of illustrating the issues specific to the chemicals industry - the event was more concerened to understand what specific action was needed.

The relatively new concept developed to explore this is couched in the terminology of age management and this particularly useful approach allows employers and trade unions to look at the central issue of job re-design, health and safety etc., as well as those allied issues of learning and personal fitness and health.

I was personally pleased to see both employers and trades unions come together to dispel the spurious notion that support for active ageing in the workplace is automatically to side with older workers against the interest of younger workers - a dangerous fallacy made worse during an era of austerity and high youth unemployment.

Ultimately however it is important that employers, working with trade unions, can ensure that there is a greater inter-play of the interests and needs of workers at different ends of the age spectrum and there were some excellent examples offered from companies like BASF.

Ultimately the conference was a showcase of the best of what trade unions and employers can achieve when working jointly - not always possible or easy - on an issue that is here to stay for some time.

Any questions or comments on this are very welcome.

In Solidarity

Ian

From Welfare to Workfare

Colleagues,

Great news being reported on the retreat by multi-nationals and UK corporations from the coalition's attempts to turn the unemployed into slave labour.

As reported in today's Guardian Tesco no less has decided that it has unilaterally changed the basis on which it will continue to engage with the 'work experience scheme' including the option of paid work at the end of the scheme.

The story's link is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/21/back-work-scheme-disarray-tesco.

Naturally the relevant Ministers are condemning those who are opposing the scheme. Nick Clegg commented to the BBC that the schemes "is not slave labour. It is not compulsory. It is entirely voluntary." But then of course a scheme which penalises with the sanction of benefits withdrawal if the person opts out of the 'voluntary' scheme' is highly questionable.

Moving away from the coaliton's attempts to claw back some credibility from this appaling attempt to disguise era-defiing unemployment figures it is important to locate the coalition's position based on a tradition which is in-part a New Labour legacy.

To get sense of how we got to where we are I can recommend an article (available freely in PDF) by Bob Jessop at Lancaster University: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/jessop-from-thatcherism-to-new-labour.pdf

In this he charts the ascendancy of New Labour's 'third way, but unpicks the extent to which New Labour offered a variant of the neo-liberalism of Thatcher - what he refers to as 'consolidated Thatcherism'. Here are some useful extracts which illustrate the thesis:

The Thatcher-Major years witnessed a growing turn to neo-liberal workfarism with Major himself being the first to float the idea of 'workfare' to replace welfare before he became Prime Minister. The shift towards 'soft' workfare can be dated from the introduction in 1986 of the Restart Programme (itself modelled on US experience) which invited the unemployed to search for work and accept job or training opportunities in return for benefits.

Having pioneered Keynesian demand management under Attlee, the Labour Party under Blair now advocates full employability achieved through micro-government rather than full employment achieved through macro-economic management; and, having set up the post-war welfare state, it now sees welfare dependency and welfare statism as problems to be eliminated through a mandatory neo-liberal programme of workfarism and the introduction of market forces and business practices into delivery of income support and public services.

This means in turn that the appropriate response to unemployment should no longer be short-term job creation until demand management reflates the economy but, rather, policies to force the unemployed into work (with employers subsidized by the state and/or their employees receiving top-up social security benefits as necessary) in order to reinforce the work ethicr educe welfare dependency, and generate social security savings and/or tax revenues that can be applied to more worthwhile social ends.

Even if we ignore the hard-edged academic analysis what is interesting about the vernacular of New Labour and Labour under Milliband is the way in which it derides the unemployed and the working poor. For example, Milliband's dominant policy focus is the 'squeezed middle' and Brown consistently championed 'hard working families' - the language of inclusion?

How we move forward on the issue of welfare and the treatment of the unemployed under the coalition will be interesting to monitor - what should also be under the spotlight though is Labour's response also.

In Solidarity.

Ian

Young Workers United

Colleagues,

The last post focused on the output of the Recomposition website and more specifically what is meant by solidarity unionism as practised by the IWW.

Interestingly, as I finished typing that piece I came across news on the site that the Sheffield local of the IWW has unionised a branch of Pizza Hut. This is very interesting news given the new inpenetrability of the fast food sector in the UK. What is it that the IWW has that UK trade unions do not - I think many of us could hazard a guess?

Hot on the heels of this development came contact from a colleague at the Labor Studies centre at Univ. Coll. Berkeley in the US.

In an innovative partnership with a fledgling youth-based labour organisation the Center had helped to create a video-based course 'Eye's on the Fries'. More details of the course are here: http://www.youngworkersunited.org/article.php?id=38

The group, Young Workers United, are based predominantly in California and monitor the activity of the fast food and restaurant sector. One of the interesting areas of activity is a booklet that YWU produces rating a wide range of local eateries based on social justice factors and carrying (or not) a quote from an employee.

The activity of the group (http://www.youngworkersunited.org) is well worth reviewing, and you can donate online.

Whilst the hard work of the UK trade union movement needs to be applauded in maintaining a vigorous approach to engaging with and organising young workers, something radical is missing in its approach.

Part of the answers lays outside of the UK and can be seen, as discussed in prior posts, in countries in Latin America and the US.

A significant answer to the conundrum is relatively simple, or not in the case of the UK, in that youth-based labour movements are organised by young workers for young workers and is able to resist an inherent bureacracy which manifestly hinders and plagues Western trade unionism.

In addition, these movements appear able to appear and grow in the face of austerity and in sectors where any form of worker organisation is prone to attack. On that basis these developments need our support and are worthy of monitoring for evidence of what works and what can be transferred.

Any comments on this post are very welcome.

In Solidarity.

Ian

An alternative unionism

Colleagues,

The major benefit of working amongst the highly talented trade unionists who comprise the current crop of students on the labour studies MA that I run at Ruskin is the opportunity to develop my own understanding of how labour movements can continue to reshape and grow in the face of external and internal threats to our existence.

It is in this context that I have a great interest in the work of Dek Keenan, an MA student who, under the theme of 'an alternative unionism' is exploring the phenomenon of solidarity, minority and direct trade unionism. The primary proponents and actvists of these models are our fine sisters and brothers in the IWW. And, we have evidence of this method in action via the process of the IWW unionisation of Starbucks - surely one of the most painstaking, breathtaking unionisation successes of recent years.

YouTube has many excellent clips of young Baristas holding forth on the values of the techniques and of the benefits of union membership - they are well worth watching.

You can track these amongst the phenomenal content of the Starbucks Workers Union website (http://www.starbucksunion.org/) and get a good sense of what it takes to build and grow a union from nothing and without the need for a bureaucracy and officer structure - and built on worker solidarity.

The IWW success at Starbucks has been written up into a first rate account by Daniel Gross and Joe Tessone (An IWW Story at Starbucks, Counterpunch 2006). In the book they document the roots of solidarity unionism in a phrase used by Staughton Lynd

“Solidarity unionism is a term coined by the great labor activist and author, Staughton Lynd, to describe a rank and file organization of workers who fight directly to win demands without resorting to government certification or union bureaucracy…A solidarity union is simply a group of workers uniting with each other and other workers in the community and (with the internet) around the world, to apply direct pressure around issues of concern at work.”

Lynd wrote a book with this title in 1992 - well worth a read to get a sense of tthe historical basis for the proposition of the concept and, if you are a UK trade unionist, a consideration of what it would take to apply the lessons learned here.

It is arguably the case the we have forms of solidarity unionism in the UK and the case if the Indian Workers Association (IWA) come to mind. The examples however, tend to more historical and ad hoc and nothing on the scale of the unionisation of Starbucks in the US. Despite that, I do think that the UK remains fertile ground for the a transfer of IWW approaches - what is their to lose?

A blog that is well worth following if you are interested in what Dek is researching for his dissertation is one he has just pointed me toward (and from where the graphic below has been lifted) http://recompositionblog.wordpress.com

Please take a look and reply with your thoughts on the blog and what I have posted here. Am I, for example, just being a moist eyed about opportunities outside of our grasp in the UK or, is there indeed an alternative unionism available to us here also?

I look forward to hearing from you.

In Solidarity

Ian

Older workers in an age of austerity

Colleagues,

On 29-30th January the GFTU is launching its two-year European project aimed at supporting the employment needs of older workers facing workplace vulnerability.

The project (supporting the needs of older, vulnerable employees) brings together a partnership of organisations (trade unions, academic and employer) from France, Finland, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Embedded here is a short clip (largely show it can be shown at the launch event) of the fund that the project is backed by.

Further details of the project can be seen at: http://www.gftu.org/content/3/1/13/article/77/