All out for pensions on 23 March!
The Government has announced its intention that the pension retirement age for public sector workers should be 65.
On top of that they want to replace “final salary” schemes by “career average” schemes.
They flagged up these intentions a long time ago — the change to the pension age was announced in a Green Paper more than two years ago — yet only in the last few months has the trade union movement really started to react.
The civil service union, PCS, has urged a co-ordinated response. That work is now paying off.
As we go to press all local government workers represented by Unison, T&G and UCATT are due to be balloted for a one-day strike on 23 March.
The Northern Ireland public sector union, NIPSA, has agreed to join in.
PCS itself is expected to decide to ballot members for a 23 March strike at an emergency Executives meeting on 3 February.
Efforts to move the strike date a bit earlier, out of the school holidays, so that workers in education could also join in, failed. There is now talk of a second strike day later, with NUT, NATFHE and, possibly, council workers organised by GMB taking part.
NUT has decided to ballot its members for strike action area by area.
The first task now is to win the ballots and get as many people as possible out on 23 March.
The day of action called by the TUC on Friday 18 February will be a good opportunity to build the campaign. In some areas local public sector union branches are already getting together to plan for it.
We also need to start talking about action after 23 March.
Possibly PCS, Unison, etc., will produce joint material for the ballot and strike. Such unity should be built both at national and at local level.
There should be a common negotiating position from all the unions, and a call to the Government for joint bargaining.
Behind all the proposed changes is the Government.
The unions should go to the people who make the decisions, rather than be fobbed off with piecemeal negotiations with their intermediaries, be they council chiefs or top civil servants.
We should insist on more joint campaigning material and meetings after 23 March.
We have to be honest. A one-day strike, no matter how well supported, will not be enough. More industrial action will be needed, and we have to raise the politics of the pension struggle.
Why do the state and companies react to increased longevity by making workers work longer?
We have to contrast the needs of the workers to those of the boss class.
Alongside the official structures doing joint work, having a common negotiating position, etc., the rank and file must get organised as well.
Leeds NUT has launched an initiative to get local branches to band together. That work should be intensified.
A branch-based campaign could act as a counterweight to the often sluggish tendencies of the high officials of the unions.
The labour movement has to act together on this. Now is the time to make solidarity work!
- See our leaflet, “Pensions fight needs working-class politics”
- Action on 18 February
by a civil servant
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Why Workers are Being Asked To Work Longer
There are basically two ways bosses can screw surplus-value out of workers - they can do it by making workers work longer, or they can do it by making them work harder. For most of the last century they did it by the latter method. New techniques such as Fordism, and Taylorism, and then "After Japan", and of course increasing use of technology that increased productivity whilst tying the worker ever more tightly to the machine that came to dominate them.
During this time the foodstuffs, and raw materials were being imported on the cheap from Imperialist dominated developing nations. This suited capitalism. During the 1930's the crisis in the system had led to concern of the danger of revolution amongst the capitalists. A new Modus Vivendi was established between Capital and Labour. The New Deal in the US was followed after the War by adoption of Kenesian demand-management, Buttskellism etc. And of course as part of this new Modus Vivendi which was aimed at buying off workers whilst tying them ever more tightly to the system there developed consumerism.
But things began to break down during the 1970's. The contradictions of capitalism could not be contained. Thatcher and Reagan began the assault on workers organisations during the 1980's. And of course the other factor which restricted the freedom of capital to operate globally - the Soviet Union - disappeared too. During the 1990's the apparent prosperity in Britain, and the US was a mirage reflected on a bubble of debt, financed on the back of a bubble in financial assets much as Marx describes as occurring prior to major crises in the 19th century, but this time much bigger.
Freed from the constrictions on its actions imposed by the existence of the Soviet Union and strong workers organisations capital has now adopted its logical course - globalisation. And the irony is that the major beneficiary is Stalinist China. China now occupies the position of workshop of the world, and on the back of its earnings from trade it keeps the value of its currency low against the dollar by financing the US debt, buying dollars and selling remnimbi to do so. But China is not alone. Countries whose role had once been assigned by imperialism as being suppliers of cheap materials now supply cheap manufactured goods, and in the case of India increasingly services too.
As they do so using the latest machinery and techniques western capital no longer has the ability to use this method of screwing additional surplus from western workers compared to workers in developing countries. The only other way is, therefore, to screw more work out through longer periods of work. The same attacks can be seen in Germany where Siemens went to its workforce and said agree to longer hours of work for no more money or we move operations to Poland, and the same is happening in France with the 35 hour week being abandoned.
The extension of the working week, and the extension of the retirment age both have the same cause the need for capital to extract more surplus value. This attack by capital is not one they are going into lightly. The US stands on the verge of financial disaster (if it were any country other than the US it would already have been dragged before the IMF as a basket case). At the same time workers organisations are at their weakest for a long time, and the political parties the working class has traditionally looked to like the Labour Party are at their most bankrupt. If China and Japan begin to stop financing the US (private investors have already abandoned the US Bond markets) the dollar will collapse, and most of the world's financial system with it.
The main danger here is that in the absence of adequate socialist organisations to help workers understand what is going on then as soon as things start to go pear shaped workers will be lured to the simple solutions offered by the BNP. "Its foreigners what done it."
The battle that ensues over this is not one affording half=hearted settlement. Capitalism will either reduce living standards in the developed world significantly and screw out more surplus from workers in order to regain competitiveness or it will migrate at an ever faster rate to places in the world where it can, and mass unemployment will result. In this workers will either win big or lose big. They will win big if they refuse to accept this renewed crisis of capitalism and recognise that the only alternative is a socialist transformation of society, or they will lose big through prolonged mass unemployment, the devastation of living standards, and the probable rise of fascist and authoritarian forces.
Never before has an international workers movement been more needed, never before has unity of the left been more needed.
Arthur Bough