While the recent media spin is suggesting that we're 'on our way out of recession', the reality on the ground is that workers are still facing attacks across sectors in the forms of job cuts and community provisions. Education has been one of the sectors worst hit in this period, with £65m slashed from higher-education (HE) budgets, schools closing left, right and centre, and jobs to go at approximately 100 of the 150 HE institutions in the UK . The situation is as bleak as ever.

In August, around 250 members of teaching staff at Tower Hamlets College (THC), East London went on indefinite strike over threats of compulsory redundancies, and cuts in provision of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses. We spoke to Rachel, a member of the striking staff, about the background of the dispute, the issues at hand, and the feelings after the strike came to an end in late September.

We began by discussing the background to the strike, going back to June of this year, – “There was new management, a new principal, new senior managers … and in June they issued a document 'Securing the Future'.” The nature of this document turned out to be a plan for “very brutal cuts in provision and jobs, and on June 5 there was a 30 day notice for consultation”, with the projection in June being that “40-60 jobs in THC would be cut, while approximately 50% of ESOL course places would also be lost, and some in A-level teaching.”

Prior to the attack on jobs and provision, Rachel said that she had experienced “good working conditions with a strong union … we were comfortable”. But that all changed, and with a suddenness typical of many disputes, the plans to cut jobs and ESOL provision were an aggressive assault on the workers and students. Management were strategic in their timing – “proposing to do it all at once, and at the end of term so it was hard to do anything about it… coming up to exams, most of teaching finished for the summer” – indeed the choice of timing had put the workers in a more difficult position to fight back, but they had no choice.

Campaign against cuts

“A campaign started against the cuts, they were talking about 60 people being made redundant but they offered voluntary redundancy and a lot of people took that – which was unfortunate but meant fewer compulsory redundancies”. The campaign began right away, and on 27th June in Bethnal Green, a demonstration of workers, students, and supporters marched to Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel. In addition, staff and students were writing letters in anger at the proposed job and course cuts, but it was clear that direct action would be the only way of fighting back if the workers were to have any hope of defending themselves.

In early July, the attempts to formalise the redundancies had become more concrete. Rachel told us of a “letter sent by courier at night” which targeted 19 people at that stage for compulsory redundancy, which had made a ballot for indefinite strike action all the more vital. In the meantime, over the summer weeks, some people accepted voluntary redundancies, and some appeals had continued between July and August.

Strike ballot

The teaching staff, who were members of the University and Colleges Union (UCU), decided to step-up the fight-back. “We balloted for strike action in late-June and we had a series of one-day strikes toward the end of term”. While feeling that in and of themselves they were ineffective in combating the cuts, Rachel says this was a useful process; “it was a way for people from the different sites to meet and discuss things… we then had an unofficial union action – we refused to take part in a staff development event that we had been required to do- this brought people together”. The same day, staff voted for indefinite strike in September.

The strike was due to start on 27th, August, before students began to enrol for the new academic year – “were we going to be able to carry it out from first day of term?...we had a union meeting first day of term” and they affirmed the strike from then on. Rachel described some of the debates and internal dynamics involved – “some people thought we shouldn't do it during enrolment because of students, since the college has competition from other 6th forms, but we decided to do it anyway”.

Student support

From the beginning of the campaign students were on-board with the staff action – “students did show support…at Poplar [another THC site] students respected the picket line and on the adult sites they mostly didn't cross the picket line. We took great pains to make sure they could understand. The students knew us and they knew what it was about.” The initial demands of the strike at that point were solely around the issue of compulsory redundancies. “We were down to 13 compulsory redundancies because others had won appeals or taken voluntary redundancy under pressure. Other things were dropped… saving some of the jobs did save some course provision.”

The strike

During the strike Rachel says feelings of solidarity were high - “morale was fantastic… there were so many on picket-lines and doing other things and people feeling good… busking, collecting, daily meetings, not much problem with scabs”. The busking and collecting helped the strikers to support themselves financially during the month they were out. “We got strike pay from national union (UCU), but we don't quite know how much for full-time staff. There were 250 people on strike; we were able to collect a lot of money, about £20-25k, through colleges and workplaces, especially FE colleges, and places like local fire station. There was a hardship fund and any striker can say 'I need this much money' on the basis of trust and solidarity.”

Mixed results

“In the end officially there were no compulsory redundancies, but in a few cases I saw them as compulsory because certain people were selected through a scoring process, put through a meat-grinder, going over summer, in the end offered redeployment/demotion or voluntary redundancy.” Basically some had been forced into taking "voluntary" redundancies.

“Six teachers got their jobs back… seven people I believe took voluntary redundancy. Nothing else was included in negotiations about what happens next.” Rachel was very honest about the shortcomings, but she does feel that the gains that had been made, which were mostly in confidence terms, are worth building on. Despite the feeling that they could have achieved more, she says, “we are strong going back, heading to more of a shop-steward model. If we keep that going where we can meet and continue the feeling of strength.

“I think people thought we couldn't stay out too much longer. If we carried on we'd be divided. I think people want to feel good about it and we did accomplish a lot. It could have been much worse without our action.”

So was it a ‘victory’?

In the immediate aftermath of the vote, Rachel had written on the class struggle website libcom.org that “this deal was sold through with the most outrageous manipulation of the mass meeting where discussion was suppressed before and during the meeting as far as possible, with members being shouted down by union officials.

“In the short time there was for debate, many people spoke against accepting the deal but in the end there were 24 votes against, many abstentions and the clear majority voting to accept and go back to work. (though the meeting was of course smaller than our usual weekly meetings).” Having had a few days to reflect on the outcome by the time we spoke, Rachel was acknowledging that there were positive elements in the outcome. While compulsory redundancies were defeated, and this would also mean some ESOL provision would be saved (though not nearly as much as the 1,000 places under threat), Rachel and many of her fellow strikers are not getting carried away in the euphoria expressed by some on the left and higher up in the UCU.

“It was quite a bittersweet thing. A lot of people don't wanna talk about it as a victory – we could have done more heading back to work , but we feel great about what we did… I think at Poplar you've got an SWP branch, they were the ones that kind of ended it when it ended. They wanted that result and got it in the mass vote – 'This is a great victory lets go down to the Brighton Labour party conference.' But cracks have started to appear very quickly in those celebrations.

“People feel it's a mixed bag. It's not just me – 24 of us voted against going back. I didn't think we could stay much longer, but the vote wasn't done in the spirit that other meetings had been done.”

The action by teaching staff has had a ripple-effect in terms of other staff – “the Unison people were promised no compulsory redundancies because we were on strike.” So despite the mixed feeling concerning the outcome, the are definite positives that should not be under-emphasised.

Rachel made clear that while she felt the THC workers could have held out for more, it was only through taking their action against the bosses that they were able to make the gains they did. A feeling among many of the THC staff that were on strike is that they learned the value of fighting back and standing side-by-side in solidarity with each other – had they allowed these attacks to go unchallenged, they'd certainly have been in a considerably worse position.

While there are many lesson to be learned from the strike, Rachel felt that many of her colleagues gained a sense of confidence in what they could achieve when they took collective action, and in times when indefinite strikes are almost unheard of, the THC workers have set an example for workers everywhere.

The fight-back in education is on, and there have been glimmers of hope. From THC to the victorious parent-led occupation at Lewisham Bridge Primary School (see page 3 of Catalyst # 22, Winter 2009) winning an education for their children, examples are being set for workplaces and communities under attack: the only way we can defend our interests is to fight for them. One of the lessons learned has been that it was not the union that 'won' this 'victory' for the Tower Hamlets strikers; it was the collective action and solidarity of the workers themselves.

In a support leaflet for the strike, the London Education Workers' Group said, “The Tower Hamlets strikers have set a fantastic example for the rest of us in education to follow. Through their direct action and solidarity they have shown [principal] Michael Farley and all those seeking to make cuts in education that we will not go down without a fight.”

Rachel has been very honest about the shortcomings after the strike, but the most important thing coming out was the sense of confidence and solidarity they felt going back to work, and no-one can take that away from the Tower Hamlets College workers.

Choccy

This article originally appeared in Catalyst # 22

Higher education is at the forefront of sweeping public sector cuts as the government looks to pass the costs of the economic crisis on to students and workers. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills which now oversees education have already confirmed at least £500m in cuts. Lord Mandleson, who heads the department has gone on record as saying that “much of the rest of the public sector will face similar constraints this year or soon after.”

But for now, education is the battleground. With the rich-poor divide now greater than the 1970s, many sense that the cuts are driven as much by pre-existing schemes for restructuring that simply use the recession as their pretext. Certainly, the absorption of education into Mandleson’s business-oriented super department suggests this, as does the fact that at several universities the restructuring plans predate the economic crisis they’re supposedly responding to.

But the cuts, restructuring and the very idea that the costs of the crisis should be borne by those who bear no responsibility for causing it are not going uncontested. While Mandleson and managements are planning year-on-year cutbacks, there is growing resistance from students and workers across the country…

Sussex University on the front line

Late last year management announced 115 redundancies at Sussex University as part of plans to cut £3m from this years budget and £5m from next years. Students and staff reacted with occupations and strike action and by the end of the Spring term there was a burgeoning mass movement on campus openly defying both university management and the High Court, who had granted an injunction banning “occupational protest”.

The first signs of student-worker unity were seen last December when a mass meeting of students and staff drew 300 people to listen to students and trade unionists talking about the cuts. After Christmas a student-led anti-cuts campaign began holding regular demonstrations. In February, one such demonstration led to a 24-hour occupation of a conference facility on campus that management use to generate income from external clients. The following month students further upped the stakes, occupying the Sussex House offices of the Vice Chancellor’s Executive Group responsible for the cuts. During the occupation, word came through that a record 81% turnout for a UCU ballot, university staff had voted 76% in favour of strike action.

Sussex House was supposedly made impenetrable with two layers of security doors after previous student occupations. Management’s reaction was immediate. The University Registrar and Secretary John Duffy fabricated a hostage situation, providing the pretext for a heavy police presence equipped with dogs and riot gear. Police were caught on film carrying out unprovoked assaults on some of the 200 supporters who had gathered outside the occupation.

Seeing the escalating situation, the occupiers elected to leave on their own terms. However management weren’t finished. The Vice Chancellor personally singled out six students involved in the occupation and used a little-known executive power under University rules to suspend them immediately “without giving a reason.” They became known as the ‘Sussex Six’.

It also transpired that while the occupation was in progress, management were presenting a pack of lies to the High Court in order to get an injunction granted prohibiting “occupational protest.” Two of the more glaring fictions were John Duffy’s claims that the occupiers were “holding key members of the University’s staff hostage” and “causing significant damage to the University’s property.”

The actions of the police and management drew condemnation from staff and students. The UCU union unanimously passed a motion expressing “deep concern at the disproportionate response of management to the occupation of Sussex House” and calling for the lifting of the suspensions. Students responded by calling a mass demonstration that drew around 500 students and staff – double the size of recent demonstrations.

It was explained to the crowd that any occupation was now contempt of court and could lead to imprisonment. Hundreds of students then sprinted across campus ahead of security and occupied a large lecture theatre adjacent to the central library square. The demand of the occupation was a simple one: unconditional reinstatement of the Sussex Six.

Management continued to ignore the demands and over the course of 8 days students arranged a program of teach-ins, lectured, seminars, music and poetry. Many academic and support staff came and spoke to each other and to students. It is estimated at least 1000 people passed through the occupation during the week, all breaking the High Court injunction. There was not a police officer in sight.

On the eve of UCU’s one-day strike, students called an Emergency General Meeting of the Students Union to pass a motion of no confidence in University management. 850 students packed into the hall, with up to a hundred more turned away. The EGM voted near-unanimously in favour of the motion. Later that day the University Senate also called for the re-instatement of the suspended students.

The following day students joined UCU picket lines from 7am. In the early afternoon, it was confirmed that management had backed down and unconditionally re-instated the Sussex Six. The occupation ended - victorious.

Students and staff at Sussex have shown the power of direct action – in this case occupations and strikes – to pressure management into embarrassing u-turns. In itself, this is an example for students and education workers everywhere.

Having claimed victory in the opening skirmishes, the real battle to stop the cuts looms on the horizon. With students vowing to continue their campaign of occupations and more industrial action expected from staff, the student-worker movement is growing in power and confidence, and suddenly the ‘inevitable’ cuts at Sussex are looking far more beatable.

Catalyst spoke to education workers across all grades throughout the country. In some instances the particular institution is not mentioned to protect the identity of the workers involved.

A clerical support worker
Voluntary redundancies are being sought in the School of Life Sciences, School of Social and International Studies, and Corporate Services. Vacant posts are not being filled and existing staff are expected to work harder. People are obviously afraid for their jobs. We are demoralised and angry, although there is no talk of resistance from the unions, who are just representing affected members on an individual basis rather than balloting members for industrial action.

A postgraduate research student
The pressure lecturers are under in face of coming cuts, especially with regards getting publications for the Research Assessment Exercise and its new version the Research Excellence Framework has meant that they are willing to cut corners to tick boxes, just to keep their jobs. In my own experience, they’ll attach their names to work they’ve not written an inch of if it’s by postgrad students, or even knowingly plagiarise work by their own students. Given the pressure the structures in place put them under, it definitely puts these practices in context. The coming cuts can only exacerbate this. The whole structure of HE and the fear workers are under threatens to undermine the integrity of academia altogether.’

A porter
At the University of Manchester management are preparing the ground for future cuts. “Team Briefing” are being circulated which hammer home the message that money is short and that there will be cutbacks. Vacancies have been frozen which means that already overworked staff have to take on extra duties. Among the manual grades, management have started to cut overtime and other enhancements. Basically, they are starting to cover out of hours work with private contractors. This means a massive cut in wages for manual workers who have traditionally depended on overtime to boost pay. And we know this is only the start. Unless action is taken to defend jobs, increasing numbers of manual jobs will be farmed out to the private sector.

A Lecturer
In Leeds, the UCU has voted to suspend the proposed 3 days of strike action. The decision was taken after management lifted any immediate threats of cuts and agreed that in future they would go through agreed procedures before implementing cuts. They have also guaranteed that there will be no compulsory redundancies until 2011. It is disappointing that the strike was called off as the threats of cuts and redundancies has only been lifted with no guarantees that management will not attempt to implement them at a future date. On the plus the campaign has radicalised workers at Leeds and it has also strengthened workplace organisation. This may prove a decisive factor in opposing any future attempts by management to impose cuts at the university.

A support worker
We look after the audio-visual equipment in well over a hundred teaching rooms across campus. We barely have enough staff to cover the rooms at present, but one out of our group will be made redundant. Recently our administrator did a comparison with other universities’ A/V depts and we were very near the bottom of the staff/room ratio. A major part of our job is to fix problems as they occur in lecture theatres and seminar rooms with a very fast turnaround. If our team is cut, teaching may suffer if we do not have enough trained technicians to deal with problems immediately. A senior manager has come to us several times to ask what services we can drop. This seems to us to be a pretty disgusting way of using us to justify getting rid of one of us, so we constantly refuse to do it.

A research scientist
My contract is coming to an end soon and I’m waiting to hear if my boss gets his research grant renewed – but competition for funding is now worse than ever. The budget cuts in the next few years are going to be brutal: the elite labs, with the help of the ‘old boys network’ will make sure they keep most of the funding, the least competitive labs don’t stand a chance, and everybody in between will have to engage in a brutal struggle for survival. Of course the lab heads pass on all this pressure to us, who need to produce the scientific results for publications and grant proposals.

A lecturer
At Liverpool Hope people in one department were made to re-apply for their own jobs recently. Staff cuts followed. The union response was ineffectual - a lunch-time pavement protest (wouldn’t want to generate any real pressure to defend jobs, would we?).

Support staff
At Salford, cuts have already been implemented as part of ‘Project Headroom’. A lot of posts were lost, but without official compulsory redundancies. There has also been substantial restructuring of central units in recent years (‘Deciding the Future/Realising Our Vision’) when all staff had to apply for new posts; this process is still not completed. As part of both processes staff ‘retired’ or took voluntary redundancy when it became clear there was no position for them - payouts were better for those who jumped. The offical line is ‘no future cuts’, but we await to see how evenly the government share out the announced cuts in teaching funding mechanism. As previously money for research will be distributed by a system not announced, using criteria that are not decided. Also it being an election year, medium term planning in HE is about guessing who will win and what they will do rather than what they say they will do.

Article taken from the Spring 2010 edition of Catalyst, the Solidarity Federation's free newspaper.

It’s election season again. It’s a time of photo-ops and promises, manifestos and controversies. But behind the endless announcements, allegations and denials, is anything really at stake? After 13 years of Labour government, many people want a change. The economy on which Gordon Brown staked his reputation as Chancellor has nosedived on his watch as Prime Minister.

It’s true that Labour can’t be singled out for blame for the recession. Its underlying causes stem from the very nature of capitalist economies and their tendency to boom and bust. However having boasted of ‘no more boom and bust’, Brown certainly has egg on his face.

Labour’s only serious rivals are David Cameron’s Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats largely exist to persuade voters the British system offers more meaningful choice than the US two-party system, while fringe parties like the Greens and the BNP function as a protest vote for left and right respectively. So what do the Tories have to offer?

Many commentators have remarked that David Cameron seems to have modelled himself on a young Tony Blair, and much like Blair’s New Labour project the Tories are like all opposition parties promoting themselves as the party of change. However on the face of it there is little between the two main parties.

Gone are the days when there was at least a semblance of ideological difference between parties. We now have ‘post-political politics’, where parties compete how best to manage the society which is taken as the natural order of things. Consequently, an economic crisis stemming from a very specific growth-driven, profit-led system and deregulated banking has been treated as a natural disaster.

Thus the main spats between Labour and Conservatives have centred on the technicalities of when and not if to take the axe to public services, impose pay freezes and cut benefits for the unemployed and vulnerable. Groups of economists have publicly lined up behind each party, and so the election becomes a ‘choice’ between whether we want massive cuts or… massive cuts, a few months later.

Labour’s position is that the cuts must be gradual but severe, with public expenditure cut by up to 13% over three years. This they argue is necessary so that the supposed economic recovery can continue. However the Tories say this is too slow. While agreeing on the extent of the cuts, they say government spending must be slashed sooner so as to avoid a Greek-style debt crisis.

But what is taken for granted by both parties is more revealing than where they differ. Both parties assert that the economy is recovering. But while bankers' bonuses have already returned in all their six-figure glory, most those workers thrown out of work by the recession are still scraping by on £64/week dole and home repossessions have reached record levels.

Both parties assert that cuts to public services, wages and benefits are inevitable. But it’s conveniently forgotten that the rich-poor divide has been growing for decades and that in Britain today the richest 5% of the population own 60% of the wealth. The real choices are those we won’t be allowed to make at the ballot box. Whoever gets in, the result is already in: ordinary people will be made to pay for a crisis we didn’t create.

With so little real choice on offer at the ballot box, is it any surprise that election turnout continues to fall? The independent Power Inquiry notes “widely shared concern over declining electoral turnout” and seeks “to reverse the trend.” But workers have already been bypassing the political process altogether. A string of strikes and occupations have successfully fought pay cuts and improved redundancy terms, and there looks to be more of the same on the horizon.

Judging by Labour’s remarkable achievement of creating over 4,000 new laws in their time in office, perhaps there’s truth in the cynic’s saying that ‘if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.’

Article taken from the Spring 2010 issue of Catalyst, the free newspaper of the Solidarity Federation.

The Education Secretary Michael Gove has now added Ofsted-graded “outstanding” schools to the hit-list. His plans promise even more Academies; over 150 schools have already applied for Academy status, with hundreds more enquiring for further information or registering an interest. The Academies scheme allows non-state bodies, including religious groups, businesses and voluntary groups to take control of schools in exchange for a nominal amount of funding for new facilities.

Academies were the previous government’s answer to perceived “low standards” in too many secondary schools, even though the whole idea of standards did not take into account the social backgrounds of the students going to the schools – problems created not by schools themselves but government policies and wider social problems. Under the scheme a private sponsor can take over a state school and be given control of the entire budget direct from the government. They are able to influence admissions criteria – taking the brightest students from other local schools - and appoint the governing body – which is meant to be a voice for local stakeholders.

The measures are being billed as giving more ‘freedom’ to schools. But the National Union of Teachers (NUT) comments that “these ‘freedoms’ are however a mask for a structural shift in who controls schools (…) Billions of pounds of assets in the form of school land and buildings will be transferred to Academy proprietors.” Wealthy individuals and partisan groups taking over schools have also had a notorious effect on prejudicing teaching. For example a whistle-blowing teacher was awarded £70,000 for unfair dismissal against the King Fahad Academy in Acton. He had refused to use books likening Jews and Christians to “monkeys” and “pigs”. While the school is fee-paying, the Academies system stresses such groups are allowed autonomy for their religious projects.

The scheme is also ripe for cronyism. For example Brighton & Hove’s Falmer School is to be reopened in September as the Aldridge Community Academy after local “entrepreneur” Rod Aldridge. Aldridge’s background has been in making millions out of government IT contracts as the head of Capita Business Services. Naturally, getting rich from successful bids for funding - after secretly lending the Labour Party £1m - is not the same as running a complex institution like a school.

Despite there being no requirement for private sponsors to have any expertise, let alone experience, in education they will have the power to decide on the curriculum in most subjects. Academies can also set their own terms and conditions for staff new to the school. Although they often promise to keep to national pay scales, once the budget crisis hits them, this will be a likely area to cut. The NUT has warned that “there could be a free for all in terms of pay and conditions and a greater role for bullying head teachers.”

As of August 2010, 34 schools had already begun TUPE consultations – the legal process for transferring terms and conditions of staff over to a new employer, in this case the Academy. While TUPE legislation protects the terms and conditions of existing staff, it offers no such protection to new employees. This often results in the creation of a two-tier workforce, with new staff on inferior conditions gradually replacing the previous workforce.

Catalyst spoke to a high school English teacher who said such measures will “create division in the workforce, lower morale and raise staff turnover – all things that harm the continuity of young people’s educational experience. All this haste to increase the number of Academies begins to feel like a bad idea, when you consider that there has been little or no research into the impact of this programme on the effectiveness of schools. Academies put resources into private hands and create a two-tier ‘public’ education system.”

Taken from Catalyst #24 - Summer 2010.

Rapid industrialisation over the past few decades has created massive internal migration from the countryside to the cities on an unprecedented scale, dwarfing Britain’s industrial revolution two centuries ago. Now, this new urban working class has begun to flex its muscles, disrupting production in order to assert their demands.

The high-profile suicides at Foxconn, who make iPhones for Apple, were merely the tip of the iceberg. There, angry workers rioted over sweatshop conditions, chanting “capitalists kill people” and brandishing pictures of the CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou. The company quickly offered improved wages and conditions in an attempt to quell the storm. However these headline-grabbing measures were quickly eaten up by reductions in overtime and speed-ups on production lines.

Elsewhere, 1,000 workers at the Denso car parts plant in the southern province of Guangdong won a two-day strike over poor breakfasts. China’s factories are vast – some the size of whole cities. Some employ tens of thousands of workers at a single site. Coupled with long working hours, this means workers often don’t leave work to eat meals, and the quality of those meals has proved a flashpoint. Workers ignored the pleas of the official union to return to work, and forced company bosses to improve meal provision.

For nearly three decades, corporations have increasingly relocated manufacturing to China to take advantage of a vast supply of cheap labour and lax regulation. The consequences of that lax regulation have also provoked social conflicts. 1,000 villagers in Jingxi county, Guangxi province, near the border with Vietnam recently protested against pollution from an aluminium plant owned by one of the country’s largest aluminium producers. Villagers blocked the gates to the plant and damaged production facilities, and one local government official was taken to hospital after being hit by stones.

In the past two months workers have walked out at three Honda plants, a Toyota supplier, a Hyundai factory in Beijing, a rubber products manufacturer in Shanghai and a Carlsberg brewery. Recently, workers at Japanese electronics firm Tianjin Mitsumi crippled output with a sit-in, complaining they were being asked to work extra hours for no extra pay.

The rising assertiveness of Chinese workers is causing some corporate investors to look elsewhere. However, industrial unrest is a pattern repeated across the region. In Cambodia, workers staged a three-day strike in July in a dispute over the minimum wage, while in Vietnam thousands of workers at a shoe factory staged a strike demanding higher salaries. While wages in Vietnam and Cambodia are still a fraction of those won by Chinese workers, increasing militancy is rapidly closing the gap.

Beverly Silver is a Professor of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and an expert on workers and globalisation. She is not surprised by the latest developments, stating that “corporations have been chasing the mirage of cheap and disciplined labour around the world, only to find themselves continuously recreating new militant labour movements in the new locations.”

Taken from Catalyst #24 - Summer 2010.

In the emergency budget, one group of people who will be hit the hardest is welfare claimants.
Benefits are not just for the unemployed. They supplement low pay and give those with disabilities or caring responsibilities a means by which to survive, as well as providing income to those who cannot find unemployment. With around 2.5 million people claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA), 2.9 million receiving Disability Living Allowance (DLA), around 5 million reeceiving working tax credits and further claimants on other tax credit schemes and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), more than one-in-three of Britain’s 30 million strong workforce are receiving some form of state welfare.

But welfare also traps people in poverty. Both housing benefit and tax credits, for example, are a massive subsidy to employers and landlords. On the surface they help people on low incomes to afford housing and to keep their household running, but they also allow landlords to charge higher rents and the employers to pay lower wages, both making more profit in the process.
Meanwhile, those claiming the benefits remain on the breadline, and working more in fact leaves them with less money. For example, working more than 16 hours counts as being ‘in work’ for JSA, but you need to work 30 hours to claim Working Tax Credits. Working more can mean earning less as your benefits are reduced faster than your income rises.

In order to get around this, people often turn to the black economy. You don’t pay tax on cash-in-hand jobs and it doesn’t affect your benefits. Hence, there are more people working in domestic service than in Edwardian times, and single parents in particular are amongst those often forced to work “illegally.”

For its part, the state is happy with this situation as it drives down wages overall, keeping the labour market ‘competitive’ and ‘flexible’. It also gives them a stick to beat the poor with; the fact that their policies have forced so many people onto the black economy making their propaganda about benefit “cheats” a much easier sell to those workers who don’t claim welfare.

Indeed, benefits ‘fraud’ accounts for around £3 billion a year, while estimates put the amount of benefits left unclaimed at between £4bn and £8bn. In other words, if all ‘fraud’ stopped, but everyone eligible for benefits received them, the government would be worse off. Dwarfing these figures, the total gap of uncollected taxes, mostly from the wealthy employing methods of tax avoidance and evasion is £120 billion. However, pound-for-pound the government spends 624 times more on adverts demonising ‘benefits cheats’ than rich tax dodgers – a sure sign that their priority is propaganda and not a genuine desire to balance the books.

The fact that so many people are forced to work “illegally” in order to survive is not an indictment of them, or of the idea of social welfare. It is an indictment of the capitalist system in which the state engineers just this situation in order to inflate private profit.

This is the context of the so-called ‘welfare reforms’, which are aimed at making the unemployed, single parents, the sick and the disabled compete for scarce and badly paid jobs on the labour market, in order to push a ‘flexible’, insecure, low-wage economy. This regime is not in the interest of those who are in work. At a time when employers, under the pressure of the crisis are attempting to make us work harder for less money, these ‘welfare reforms’ aim to force those who don’t have a job to accept even worse wages and conditions.

The emergency budget outlines plans to cut £11 billion from the welfare budget. One big cut comes from linking all benefits apart from the state pension to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) measure of inflation rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI) one. CPI is typically lower as it excludes housing costs. Over the past 20 years it has been higher than the RPI on just three occasions. The August CPI is 3.4% while the RPI is 5.1%.

Since inflation is the measure of rising prices, by pegging benefits to the lower measure the government is ensuring benefits will fail to keep up with the cost of living – effectively cutting benefits year-on-year. And this doesn’t capture the whole picture. According to the BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders, “Research has tended to show that the cost of the basket of goods bought by poorer households often rises faster than the basket of goods included in the CPI.” That means that the year-on-year cut to benefits is even greater than the headline figures suggest.

There is also an increasing drive to turn welfare into workfare (see ‘hello workfare’ bellow), where private companies pocket public cash to link benefits to compulsory work placements. For a standard 40-hour week this can mean working for just £1.60,/hour less than a third of the minimum wage. This doesn’t create jobs, it just undermines the wages of those still in work.

The criteria for ‘the sick’, Employment and Support Allowance or ESA, are also being tightened up (see below). This has already led to tragedy, with one person in Scotland suffering from severe depression committing suicide after being forced back to work. Tax Credits for middle-income families will also be cut back, deepening the poverty trap as low income workers who do manage to earn more will simply have it taken away again through reduced tax credits.

The upshot is that the situation for claimants looks bleak. However, they are not all taking it lying down. The ‘no to welfare abolition’ network (defendwelfare.org) is “a grassroots network to extend and defend welfare rights”, incorporating local claimants groups who have been picketing agencies involved in the Flexible New Deal as well as offering support to striking job centre workers. Claimants, like the wider working class certainly have a fight on their hands to defend their living standards.

Fixing the sick - welfare reform style
Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) is the sickness benefit introduced in October 2008, which will eventually replace Incapacity Benefit. Its new test is extremely difficult to pass and almost nobody is exempted from the test.

A serious problem for sickness claimants today is that their medical assessment is made through the use of a computer program, the ‘Logic Integrated Medical Assessment’ (LiMA). This programme was introduced by DWP’s contractor Atos Origin in 2005 to assess claimants for the old sickness benefit (Incapacity Benefit). Already in December 2005, advice charity Child Poverty Action Group complained of serious problems with Atos’s computer-aided medical assessments in an article entitled ‘The computer says no’.

During the examination, the doctor asks the claimant a list of questions, which the computer shows on the screen. While the claimant speaks, the doctor builds, through the use of a windows system and drop-down menus, a combination of words and numbers which resembles what the claimant says.

The result is an often surreal computer-generated ‘Medical Report’, based on a collection of mechanically-constructed brief sentences. More than one Social Security judge has noticed with alarm that automated reports did not reflect what the claimants had actually said and contained ‘nonsensical statements’.

After aiding the doctor to construct brief phrases, the computer automatically derives implications from these phrases. These implications are often overstretched, or even totally wrong, and options for investigation of these implications are blocked by the computer system. For example, if a claimant cannot cook but tells the doctor that he makes himself snacks or tea, this ‘ability’ is used by the computer as ‘evidence’ of a very large range of physical and mental capacities.

Furthermore, the handbook for Atos’s doctors tells them to apply the harshest possible interpretation to the test. For example, the handbook says that if a claimant’s memory is not so bad that he forgets to get dressed in the morning, he cannot really score anything at all for memory problems.
Many sick people, although unable to work, do wish to attend courses, and they don’t because they are afraid of losing their benefit. Any mention of having done any activity whatsoever will be used to disqualify a claimant from his sickness benefit. An extreme example from the Citizens Advice Bureau: a claimant was found ‘fit to work’ because he attended a compulsory ‘Work Focused Interview’! The automated medical report said: ‘the client is actively seeking work through Jobcentre Plus’ .

The ‘Brighton Benefits Campaign’ has been fighting for claimants and low waged workers since the recession began. They say that “a fight for a more humane medical assessment is also a fight for the abolition of Atos’ mechanised methods – for the dismissal of Atos and the return to a professional medical service, publicly run, and run not for profits.” The antagonism between private profit and claimants’ needs only looks set to deepen as the welfare cuts begin to bite.

Hello workfare
One of the latest reforms is the introduction of the ‘Flexible New Deal’, which began in October 2009. The year-long scheme is not run directly by the government, but is contracted out to a number of private companies who stand to receive millions in public money to bully the unemployed into accepting any job at rock bottom wages. This won’t create any new jobs – it will just force the unemployed to compete desperately with each other for the few jobs that are available. The effect of this on the labour market will be to push down wages and reduce job security even further.

After six months on the FND claimants are forced to work for their benefits (workfare) for one month: 40 hours work a week for 4 weeks in order to receive a meagre £64.30 a week (or even less for couples or the under 25s). Even for those on the ‘higher’ rate, this is just £1.60 an hour! The scheme benefits employers and nobody else. Why take on workers at minimum wage or higher when you can get them at £1.60 an hour? Those who lose their jobs due to the recession may one day find themselves forced to work their old job for benefit levels. This will only exacerbate the ‘race to the bottom’ in wages and conditions which is fast becoming the norm in the ‘modern economy’.

Taken from Catalyst #24 - Summer 2010.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) describes the budget as signalling the “longest, deepest, sustained period of cuts to public services spending at least since WWII”. Chancellor George Osborne claims austerity is “unavoidable” in order to reduce Britain’s deficit, and business leaders have sounded their approval for the plans. However, trade unions warned of hundreds of thousands of job losses, accusing the government of “declaring war on public services”.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times Richlist reveals that the richest 1,000 people in Britain added 30% to their wealth despite the recession. Now a new report has rubbished the claim that the budget is “fair”. ‘Don’t forget the spending cuts’, commissioned by the Trade Union Congress and the public sector union Unison, looked at the impact of the budget on different income groups. Because for example, richer people can afford private alternatives they are less reliant on public services. Likewise, the less well off people are, the more likely they are to be receiving benefits. The report modelled this and found that cuts to public services and welfare are likely to disproportionately impact the less well off.

The authors write that “The impact of these cuts will be deeply regressive. All households are hit considerably, but the poorest households are hit the hardest.” Specifically, they found that “the average annual cut in public spending on the poorest tenth of households is £1,344, equivalent to 20.5% of their household income, whereas the average annual cut in public spending on the richest tenth of households is £1,135, equivalent to just 1.6% of their household income.”
This finding was echoed by IFS director Robert Chote, who explained the cuts “are likely to hit poorer households significantly harder than richer households”. Particularly he cited the decision to link benefits payments to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI). CPI is typically lower than RPI (which includes housing costs), which means the cuts will become cumulatively worse in real terms for benefits recipients, as prices rise faster than their benefits payments.

Separately, the Fawcett Society has launched a legal challenge to the budget, describing it as “blatantly unfair”. They claim that of £8bn cuts, £5.8bn will affect women, and are seeking a judicial review in the High Court, claiming the government failed to carry out an equality assessment when deciding the austerity measures. Fawcett Society solicitor Samantha Mangwana stated that “George Osborne expects women to pay three times more than men to accelerate deficit cuts, even though women still earn and own far less.”

The headline measures in the budget is an unprecedented £113bn cut budget squeeze by 2014-15. This will involve 25% cuts to virtually all government departments (with some protection for the NHS and International Development), £8bn from net tax rises (mostly from VAT increasing to 20%)and £11bn in welfare cuts (see our special feature on the left of this page). On a closer look, it becomes clear just how regressive these measures are. While corporate taxes have been reduced, VAT – a regressive tax – has been increased. As already noted, benefits and public service cuts also disproportionately impact the less well off. Effectively this is a budget to punish ordinary workers for an economic crisis we were not responsible for.

Major banks have already returned to profit. Northern Rock, RBS and Lloyds banking group, all saved by state bailouts, announced they had returned to profit in July 2010. HSBC also recently announced its profits had doubled to £7bn for the first 6 months of 2010. The return of 6-figure bankers bonuses has also been widely reported. Elsewhere in the corporate world, the recession is also already a thing of the past. BP Chief Executive Tony Haywood will collect a massive £600,000-a-year pension when he retires in October, despite taking much criticism for his role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

So are the austerity measures really “unavoidable”? That depends on your point of view. For the politicians, bankers and business leaders, absolutely. The £850bn bank bailout that prevented the financial crisis turning into an all-out capitalist collapse dwarfs the savings from austerity. But having staved off collapse, the masters of the economy find themselves between a rock and a hard place, and as ever their solution is to give us a good squeeze in their place.

Their dilemma is this: cut too much, and consumer spending will inevitably fall, raising fears of a ‘double-dip’ recession. A double-dip recession would be bad for the economy and bad for corporate profits, and would probably lead to yet more cuts to public services, jobs, wages and benefits. But cut too little, and the cost of the recession will be borne by businesses and the rich. That too is bad news for them, for obvious reasons. Essentially they are gambling that they can cut our incomes without much knock-on effect on our spending.

If that doesn’t make much sense, that’s because it really is a gamble. The ‘boom’ was sustained by cheap credit. Wages failed to keep up with rising prices, but the combination of rising house prices and easy credit meant consumer spending could grow and grow. But it was always a bubble, one that burst spectacularly when the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US sent shockwaves around the world’s financial system. Collapse was only averted by massive bailouts. So a repeat of that strategy so soon after its disastrous effects is unlikely. What options that leaves is unclear.

What is clear is that capitalism has always been a crisis-prone system since its very beginnings - runs on the bank are not a new thing - and that the solution to every crisis has been to squeeze the working class until profits can be restored at an acceptable rate. In response, we can only say that we’re not all in this together. During the ‘boom’, there were no politicians, bankers and business leaders lining up to insist we all share the wealth, and in the bust we should reciprocate. Their system, their problem.

The only way to impose our needs is to stand up for ourselves – widespread strike action will make them think twice about the cuts, and in the face of industrial action they may well decide to shoulder more of the costs of the crisis. Certainly if we let them get their way, we will be paying for it for years to come, while their profits, bonuses and pensions have already returned to multi-million pound levels.

Taken from Catalyst #24 - Summer 2010.

It soon emerged however that compulsory redundancies had been transformed into ‘voluntary’ ones and the number of job losses remained at over 100, with a similarly severe impact on many courses and workloads expected.

One student mocked the management statement: “We are pleased to announce that the 100 have jumped, and were not pushed. The knives to their backs were unrelated.” A lecturer also commented that “I, among many, have been made ‘voluntarily’ redundant, after being selected for compulsory redundancy. The University seems to have got rid of everyone it wanted by forcing us to accept a ‘voluntary’ settlement.”

The other unions at Sussex, Unite and Unison, representing support staff such as porters, cleaners, IT and workshop technicians, did not even enter in dispute with the University. But like UCU, both Unite and Unison aimed at reducing compulsory redundancies and improving voluntary redundancy packages.

Whilst committee members continued the consultation process, some of the rank and file members argued that the starting point of the unions was wrong, and they should be opposing cuts altogether. None of the three campus unions had rejected university bosses’ line that savings needed to come from staff costs - despite ongoing multi-million pound building projects, and the Vice-Chancellor behind the cuts granting himself a 43% pay increase to £227,000 a year.

“Our area rep came to a special Unite meeting, arguing to give them two more weeks consultation with management,” said Tony, a Unite member and IT worker. “If there was no significant movement during this time, the area rep said she would bring the ballot papers to the next meeting. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that she didn’t even turn up to the next meeting, let alone bring ballot papers!”

Frustrated with their union’s unwillingness to fight, a group of workers set up the Support Staff Forum (SSF), involving workers from all three campus unions, non-unionised workers as well as several students. Paul, a worker involved in the group, said “one of the good things we have been doing is making both us in the SSF and the wider campus community aware of the cuts and changes in working conditions in the different sectors, as although we all work on the same campus each department can be quite insular.” The SSF also had some success in building solidarity among education workers, such as by encouraging non-UCU members to honour UCU picket lines.

Despite several strike days, widespread support and solidarity, and a vibrant student campaign leading to a week-long occupation in which many hundreds of students and education workers took part, the UCU’s suspension of industrial action marks the end of the dispute. As one would-be striker commented, “Though UCU exec worked tirelessly to achieve the best outcome possible, I feel that once they accepted the need for cuts, they could only negotiate a defeat. Higher Education bosses are using the budget crisis to push through long-term restructuring that will destroy education as we know it. So instead of focusing only on compulsory redundancies, we should have stopped them wrecking our university by opposing all staff reduction. However it looks like UCU nationally are more interested in being involved in restructuring than in stopping it.”

UCU held a ballot for an academic boycott against Sussex, demanding an Avoidance of Redundancy committee which Sussex bosses had rejected out of hand. Earlier in the year at Leeds University UCU had called off industrial action against 700 redundancies after reaching a “groundbreaking” settlement that included setting up an all-union redundancy avoidance committee and postponing any compulsory redundancies until completion of a review in January 2011. However, it later emerged that 400 staff had volunteered for redundancy. With large cuts to higher education budgets, UCU estimates that 22,500 redundancies are in the pipeline in higher education, on top of 34,000 job losses in further education.

Taken from Catalyst #24 - Summer 2010.

The supposed ‘solution’ to the economic crisis is premised on cutting costs. It is therefore important to highlight the role that women’s subordinate position in the economy plays, as this will allow - and is allowing - for many activities to continue on an unpaid basis.
History has already shown how women are used differently at different economic junctures.

Whereas the war economy of the 1920s and 1930s put women to work, it sacked them in the 1940s to give their posts to the soldiers coming home from the front. The ‘marriage bar’, that is, the prohibition of married women to enter certain better-qualified professions, which was in place in some industries until the 1960s, kept women in low paid jobs. According to Maria Angeles Durán, 2/3 of the total working hours today are unpaid caring-type of activities - done almost entirely by women.

In this process, men remain the rightful workers and economy managers whereas women’s involvement in the labour market is dependent on their caring-burdens and market needs. A 2007 research paper by Aguiar and Hurst shows that in industrialised countries full-time working women spend an average of 23 hours per week in unpaid housework and between 6 and 12 hours in unpaid childcare, this latter being between 2 to 4 times more than what men do.1 In the UK, this can be up to 60% of the total activities women do.2

According to the latest data on occupation by gender in the UK 69.4% of the cleaners, 81.5% of the social workers, and 87.7% of the nurses, are women. But women only make up 6.8% of engineering professionals.3 Women overall earn about £90 less per week than men. As such, women do the bulk of unpaid caring activities, they represent the biggest percentage of care-type jobs, and of the lower-paid professions.

Keeping care as an unpaid or poorly paid activity not only allows for huge savings to the economy, but also it creates an economy based on competition, the market and growth, rather than on need and affection. More importantly, these parameters allow “the economy” to be defined quite apart from many activities relevant to our lives, such as childcare. This tends to assign responsibilities and value through constructed social hierarchies, ultimately giving privileges and control to heterosexual white rich men.

Looking at the economy of care brings up that ‘caring’ is not so much something that women do because they are born to do so, but because of very precise and at times coercive economic measures. It is on these bases that our feminism needs not to aspire to the privileges men have but to attack and subvert the social hierarchies that sustain capitalism.

Taken from Catalyst #29

• 1Aguiar, Mark and Erik Hurst. 2007. ‘‘Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades.’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(3): 969–1006.
• 2Office for National Statistics. 2006. The Time Use Survey, 2005. How We Spend our Time, London: HMSO. Table 4.4
• 3Office for National Statistics. 2011. Emp16: All in Employment by status, occupation and sex. Quarter 2 (Apr - Jun). http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-215723