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发信人: Christy (绿叶~~捣鼓六仙捣毁仙), 信区: English
标题: A Piece everyday
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (2002年07月19日20:07:41 星期五), 站内信件

From the bottom up

When the low paid go on strike, people sympathise. This must be channelled i
nto political support for fair pay

Polly Toynbee
Friday July 19, 2002
The Guardian

On the municipal day of action the dustmen came to empty my bins as usual. "
Why aren't you on strike?" I asked the man who has been doing my bins for ye
ars. "Ah," he said, "we would be if we dared but we're afraid we'd be sacked
. Council workers are badly off but it's worse for us contracted-out."
He pointed to his four-man crew and explained. He was an old ex-council work
er still employed by law at council rates. Two of the others were hired by t
he contractor, Serviceteam, on a much lower rate: he fears a new contractor
about to take over might pay new employees even less. The last man was from
an agency and paid just ￡3.60 an hour, an adult paid below the minimum wage
. How? He shrugged and said the agency just takes the money off the top. So
there were three rates of pay for men on the same job. "If we went on strike
, they'd sack us and employ all agency."
This is Lambeth, once the byword for overbearing red union rule. This counci
l used to be run by and for union baronies, forget the public. From extreme
to extreme, public service in the borough has now swung from a corrupt sovie
t to a US cowboy market. Go into school kitchens and there the contracted-ou
t workers are downsized and worked to the bone. Agencies are pouring in temp
s employed at two removes with no chance of creating a public ethos. Yet the
government is resisting an EU directive to give agency workers the same rig
hts as other workers. Some of what goes on out there in the low-pay wild wes
t eludes their grasp.
Today local authority employers gather to ponder this week's strike. There w
as no doubt it was a success, not just getting out hundreds of thousands of
workers but in a wave of public sympathy. Sky TV polled 75% support, local p
hone-ins were swamped, people honked their horns at the pickets. Who would n
ot be touched by armies of women cleaners, carers and dinner ladies earning
less than ￡5 an hour?
The employers will probably decide today to go back to the negotiating table
. It is hard to forge agreement among councils not only politically diverse,
but with quite different employment problems. It is the northern old Labour
strongholds that have been holding out, in areas where any council job ad i
s swamped with applications. Southern councils with trouble recruiting are m
ore relaxed about pay. But both councils and unions want to keep national pa
y bargaining.
Meanwhile "gathering storm" and "union floodgates" imagery fills an eager To
ry press praying for a summer of discontent, noting how leftwing leaders are
being elected to one union after another. What matters now is that there is
no general panic and the government and unions themselves distinguish betwe
en justified disputes and those caused by leaders with their own agendas ind
ulging in political grandstanding. On the one hand low-paid women cleaners a
nd carers deserve a fair settlement. On the other, it was necessary to see o
ff the deservedly failed strike called by the new leftwing civil service uni
on leader against the clearly improved working conditions in new Job Centre
Plus offices.
Yesterday London ground to halt as the RMT struck the tube. It was a classic
case of destructive trade unionism of the old school Although the cause its
elf - the expensive part-privatisation of the tube - was potentially popular
, these political strikes were never going to be the way to win. The tube PP
P was strongly opposed by Londoners in the mayoral election, opposed by most
London MPs and GLA members with almost every expert and economist against.
But the clever way to alienate all that support is to make the public's life
such hell that they are cunningly reminded of privatisation's good points i
n dealing with trade union militancy. Instead there should have been a serie
s of friendly, inclusive demonstrations encouraging Londoners to side with t
he unions as part of a powerful popular protest.
This might not seem the best week for the TUC to demand more trade union rig
hts, but new rights are needed to help the weak and make it easier to organi
se the downtrodden, the contracted out, the McWorkers, agency temps and all
drudges on very low pay.
Only 19% of private-sector workers belong to unions: those who do earn on av
erage 10% more. Asked about low pay, Gordon Brown prefers every other way bu
t raising the minimum wage: give them top-up benefits, more skills, more chi
ldcare, more flexibility so they can navigate the labour market better, he s
ays. Indeed those are essential, though it is never clear who will do the lo
w-paid cleaning and caring when everyone has moved up. He also says the low
paid should join unions, but organising shift workers and part-timers with h
ostile employers requires new access to workplaces to let people know their
rights to join. Ignorance of trade unions is profound and so is fear of the
sack.
Naturally, local authorities feel aggrieved that the problem of endemic low
pay and gross inequality in Britain has landed on their doorstep. One of the
ir negotiators says plaintively: "It is not reasonable to expect us as emplo
yers to be social engineers when we are supposed to operate in the market as
efficiently as we can." And he is right. The burden of creating a national
policy on low pay should not fall on them alone. The government needs a stru
ctured long-term plan for making pay fairer from the bottom right up to the
fat-cat top, instead of ducking out of sight in this dispute.
In the US, the Living Wage campaign is gathering pace. It began in Baltimore
where the city agreed to pay not only its own workers but all its contracto
rs' workers a living wage well above the minimum wage. Now 85 more cities an
d counties have followed suit. The fear of lifting the minimum wage is alway
s that jobs might be shed in marginal businesses. But by creating a public s
ector minimum that danger is avoided, while pulling up prevailing wage rates
. It costs money: taxes had to rise to pay for it but after a broad public d
ebate in these US cities, it had strong public support - even in that tax-av
erse nation - and it saved more in poverty than it threatened jobs.
Adair Turner, new head of the low pay commission that fixes the minimum wage
, says there is no iron law that decrees how many jobs are lost at any parti
cular level of pay, it's a matter of balance: he points to countries like th
e Netherlands with full employment (and much fairer pay distribution) who ge
t the balance right.
Popular support is the key and unions which forget it will fail. There was a
groundswell of sympathy for the municipal workers on Wednesday (which might
not last if services were seriously disrupted). One of the employers negoti
ators put it succinctly: "People honked to support the dinner ladies on pick
et lines but will they still honk to support their taxes going up?" Only if
that gut popular empathy is channelled into political support for a well-arg
ued national strategy for fairer rewards.

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