A new report by the TUC, which is published today to coincide with the start of its annual Women’s Conference, indicates that women are likely to bear the brunt of any job losses resulting from early cuts in public services.

The report, Women and the Recession – One Year On, warns that early public spending cuts would hit female employment hardest because around four in ten women work in public sector occupations, compared to less than two in ten men.

Of particular concern here is the fact that those regions in which women are most likely to rely on the public sector for employment (Wales, the North East and Yorkshire and Humber) also have some of the highest male unemployment rates in the country, making it very likely that early spending cuts, of the kind favoured by the Tories, will result in a substantial rise in the number of families in which neither of the parents are in work.

The report also notes that job losses and other cuts in public expenditure will have a long-term impact on women by substantially reducing their retirement income.

Currently, the average income that women receive in retirement is a third less than the male average, a figure that would be far worse were it not for the superior record of the public sector in providing decent pensions for women and lower-paid staff. With women holding almost two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of defined benefit schemes in the public sector, any cuts in pension rights would disproportionately fall on them.

The report also estimates that women are currently subsidising the public sector to the tune of around £5billion a year in unpaid overtime.

Commenting on the report, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

“Slashing public spending may satisfy fiscal hawks and city traders but it would cause misery to millions of people who have already suffered from the recession. A fresh wave of public sector job losses could leave many families with both parents out of work.

“Many women choose to work in the public sector because it offers secure work with a good work-life balance and a decent retirement income. It’s hardly fair that these are now all under threat thanks to the mistakes of super-rich bankers, who are already back collecting their bonuses.

“When politicians talk about the need for deep spending cuts they rarely say how this would affect ordinary working people. But as our report makes clear – women would have to pay for these cuts with their jobs and pensions.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

Rewind almost three years and the trade union movement was embroiled in a bitter media spat with the private equity industry.

In a portent of something much bigger, private equity firms were accused of playing fast and loose with high levels of debt to buy up companies they neither understood nor cared for in order to make a quick buck.

But the ridicule aimed at the unions in the Summer of 2007 was often intense. It reached its nadir when the Chair of the All Party Private Equity Group, Sion Simon, went Paxo on the TUC General Secretary at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee.

Simon asked Brendan Barber six times in quick and testy succession to produce the evidence that private equity firms increased risk for the companies they acquired.

Well, the evidence is now here.
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contribution by Adam Lent

Back when cuts mania was all the rage during the conference season of 2009, only the TUC, others on the left and serious commentators like Martin Wolf argued that cuts came with major economic consequences.

The TUC argued particularly strongly that to start measures to address the deficit when the economy was still fragile threatened a double dip recession.

These views were of course rejected by the small state right in the form of the Institute of Directors, the Taxpayers Alliance and the Conservative Party itself.

Now it seems a new consensus has emerged in line with the view that cutting while the economy is weak is a recipe for disaster. All three main parties now agree on this since the Conservatives announced over the weekend they would not take any significant deficit measures until 2011.
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contribution by Adam Lent

One day we might get a proper public debate about why the UK economy remains so anemic after six quarters of shrinkage. And, more worryingly, is now starting to lag badly behind some other equivalent economies.

For me there were four big mistakes made which need close investigation and which we need to work out ways of avoiding in the future. We clearly also need to take further remedial action to address the damage done.

1) the UK economy and the public finances were over-dependent on financial services for too long even though everyone not in thrall to the efficient markets hypothesis or their bonus knew this was a notoriously volatile and unreliable sector;

2) interest rates were held too high for too long in 2008 by the Bank of England even though the TUC, business groups and David Blanchflower were warning that the threat of recession was higher than the threat of inflation;

3) the Government did not seize the chance for a bigger stimulus before the Tories and the right wing press made public borrowing the big political issue;

4) the Government have not been proactive enough in preventing people losing work through interventions such as short time working subsidies which appear to have been highly effective in countries such as Germany and Netherlands in very significantly holding down unemployment. The CBI bear a big responsibility for refusing to call for this when the BCC, EEF and TUC demanded it throughout 2009.

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Adam Lent is the Head of Economic and Social Affairs at the TUC. He blogs at ToUChstone blog

Opportunities to skive, doss, bugger about on Facebook in company time, spend three hour lunches down the pub, take multiple fag breaks and generally put in as little effort as is consistent with not being sacked are not entirely lacking in the private sector.

I make these elementary points after reading the latest bollocks  in the Daily Telegraph on ‘the record gap between public and private sector pay’. The article is shockingly private sector supremacist, and built on the assumption that state and local government employees are labour market Untermenschen poncing off the soul-sustaining largesse of the wealth creation master race.

You know this guff off by heart by now:

Workers in the public sector are now being paid more than £2,000 extra a year compared with employees in the private sector, after public sector pay continued to race ahead of inflation.

The average public sector worker was paid £23,660 a year, compared with private sector workers who were paid £21,528 a year, in the three months to the end of November.

Cue the inevitable whingeing from the sort of people who often pull down 20k a month.

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, warns us that public sector pay has “exploded out control”.

John Philpott, the chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, weighs in with the observation that “everyone knows the public sector gravy train is going to be derailed.”

Doubtless he would argue that the investment banking gravy train – a veritable Train à Grande Vitesse compared to the council white collar employee suburban stopping service – must be allowed to trundle on in the national interest. Perhaps I am missing something here?

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, adds: “There will have to be a public sector pay freeze or public sector pay cuts. It will be painful but it is necessary.”

And here’s Frost again: “This just isn’t sustainable … The wealth-creating private sector is losing out to the public sector.”

Now that’s what I call a broad spectrum of opinion, ranging all the way from private sector bosses’ organisations to, well … private sector bosses’ organisations. Maybe the reporter didn’t have the number for the Unison press office.

Yes, there is a gap between public and private sector pay. There is also an obvious reason for it. Most unskilled jobs that were once in the public sector – refuse collection, hospital cleaning and that sort of stuff – have long been outsourced to private companies.

Public sectors workers are increasingly likely to be graduate professionals and expect a graduate professional’s wedge. Of course civil engineers get paid more than crew members at Burger King.

Inevitably, then, comparing mean averages is not comparing like with like. Grade for grade, any disparity remains decidedly in favour of forex traders rather than social workers.

Writer Harry Wallop and the Daily Torygraph damn well know this elementary argument. Yet they prefer to slant the debate to suit their small state ideological agenda. Opinion pieces should be labelled accordingly.

Cadburys has succumbed to the advances of Kraft in a takeover deal worth £11.5bn. Unions have expressed their concern for the future of Cadbury’s workforce.

They are right to be concerned; Kraft financed its takeover by incurring £7bn of debt and that will have to be repaid somehow and already, Cadburys Chairman has said job losses are ‘inevitable’. Plus there is the highly likely chance of asset-stripping.

Both Gordon Brown and Lord Mandleson expressed concern about Kraft’s intentions. Back in December Mandleson said;

If you think that you can come here and make a fast buck, you will find huge opposition from the local population and from the British Government

However, despite this both have been powerless to do anything and Mandleson now has washed his hands of the whole affair saying what happens is a “matter for the shareholders”.

But what happens to Cadbury’s is of concern to both British citizens, especially as we have to deal with the consequences of redundancies and we lose a successful British brand.

So, what can the left do to shape the debate in situations like this?
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The High Court ruled today to stop the 12 day strike of BA workers from going ahead. The grounds for this decision were the irregularity of including in the ballot cabin crew members of the union who were set to leave BA anyway prior to the strike itself. However I think there are grounds for viewing the decision by Mrs Justice Laura Cox as a political one.

Firstly, the inclusion of the 800 workers who are leaving (the number provided by BA’s legal team) could not have altered the outcome of the ballot. Unite represents 12,500 staff. On an 80% turnout, with 92.5% voting to strike (figures from BBC), 9,250 workers voted to strike. Even if all 800 of those leaving voted and voted yes to the strike, it would still not have been enough to sway the outcome.

Secondly there are some of the remarks made by Justice Cox herself:

“A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year,” (BBC)

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BA Cabin Crews have voted to go on strike over the Christmas period against the threat of reducing staffing levels through imposed redundancies and changes to staff contracts. 90% of the crews, on an 80% turnout, voted for the action.

There was some fantastic rhetoric flying about yesterday morning on Radio 4. BA Chief Executive Willie Walsh was reported to have said that the union shouldn’t bother going on strike, it should concentrate on helping the company reduce costs.

Of course the union might well have been in the mood to do that, but it wasn’t asked to help out. It was simply bypassed.

And now, though Walsh claims to be available for talks at any time, he has said that the central issue is not up for negotiation. So the union is absolutely correct to go on strike; this is not a case of simple costs it is now an attempt to de-recognize the whole union.
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Tomorrow night, tireless leftie grafter John McDonnell speaks at a London meeting called to kick off a fightback against public sector union Unison’s vicious witchhunting of popular anti-Labour union activists.

Yours truly will be in close attendance, as will everyone who thinks the future should include a representative Labour party and democratically-run trade unions (I trust I won’t be the sole attendee).

Right now, we have neither a representative Labour party, nor democratically-run trade unions – particularly in Unison’s case.

Unison’s New Labour luvvn’ bureaucrats have lined up against shopfloor activists and members who believe that this Labour party has betrayed working people and that the union must stop funding the party as a result. Things ain’t been pretty for a while.

Some of Unison’s unelected officials appear at employment tribunal next week, accused of running a very nasty campaign to remove activists who insist that Unison cuts its links with Labour.

As I wrote earlier this year, these activists:

“have long held that Unison ought to cut the Labour party loose – and that’s a line that is making sense to more union members than Unison cares to see. The government’s war in Iraq, various doomed love-ins with big business, privatising of public services, and failure to repeal this country’s draconian anti trade union laws have stirred a poisonous – and possibly permanent – loathing for this Labour government in the average union member.”

So it is that Unison members are demanding an independent inquiry into allegations that union officials are actively jettisoning people who dare to dump on Labour’s record.

I will report back from tomorrow’s event. Suffice to say for now that Labour party members dying for reelection should take note. Unison has a million members and they’re very aware that their hardest-working shopfloor representatives are getting the boot for going off New Labour message.

The good people of the grassroots are buzzing with it. Throw them a bone and you might get something back. Do the math, if you will.

contribution by Riz Din

How should the left respond to the financial crisis? Here are some issues to think about.

Clarity and Transparency
The complete hotch-potch of initiatives earlier in the year pointed to a government scrambling about in the dark. Now, at least, policy measures seem centered on the key prongs of fiscal stimulus, a gigantic asset protection scheme and quantitative easing. However, significant uncertainties remain and the lack of transparency suggests the public may be being hoodwinked at a very basic level.

Let’s take the example of the government’s asset protection scheme, an insurance programme that has so far agreed to underwrite losses on over £600 billion of toxic debt from RBS and Lloyds alone. If the economy stages a sudden recovery the solution could cost the taxpayer almost nothing, but if things go completely belly up it could well be ‘game over’ for the public finances.

Either way, the government surely has a figure for expected losses in mind that it is not revealing, or has it just written hundreds of billions of insurance without understanding the risks involved (can you hear the scary ringing echoes of AIG?). Is the outlook not foggy enough that we must add our own smoke to the mix with unnecessary obfuscation?
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Early tomorrow morning, I shall be awake and walking down to the local Royal Mail depot to support the postmen and CWU in their dispute.

As Dave Osler points out, the issue has gone far beyond the mere question of who is right and who is wrong over the specific issues of modernisation. The question is now whether or not Royal Mail has the unmitigated right to do what it wants with its business.

Bearing in mind that the business survives on the labour extracted from tens of thousands of postal workers up and down the country, few of whom are paid very well – whilst their bosses enjoy bonuses on a level with parts of the City of London – I’m inclined to say that no, they do not. Modernisation must be agreed with the workers, or it simply should not be permitted to happen. It hasn’t been agreed.

In fact, Royal Mail have now said that they will only take the question to arbitration if the CWU give up their planned strike – which has been endorsed overwhelmingly by CWU members in a national ballot.

This amounts to asking the union to surrender before negotiations begin, and with the leaked Royal Mail policy document indicating that they want nothing less than union derecognition, it would be criminal to concede it.
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The 48-hour postal strike planned for later this week represents ‘a suicidal move’ for the Communication Workers Union, according to Lord Mandelson. A leader writer on the Financial Times compares the CWU to Turkeys voting not just for Christmas but Thanksgiving as well.

But if any fatalities ensue, they will not be self-inflicted. As a leaked PowerPoint presentation documents, Royal Mail management has already drawn up plans to derecognise the union, and is ready to make good on the threat by recruiting 30,000 strikebreakers.

Meanwhile, TNT – Britain’s largest private mail operator – is also gearing up to handle a slice of the work. Trials have already taken place in several UK cities, according to one leading trade press title.
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I pointed out not long ago that the TUC was not looking to ban high heels, only to stop employers forcing women to wear them. The medical evidence is clearly against employers. Now that the TUc conference is taking place, the motion is in the news agenda again.But you can’t even rely on left-wing newspapers to make this clear or call out Nadine Dorries.

Here’s the Tory MP again:

I applaud the society of Chiropodists for pointing out to me the dangers of this; however, having done so I now respectfully ask them to leave it me and every other high heel wearing woman in the land to decide whether or not we wear high heels in the workplace..

Of course this isn’t the first time Nadine Dorries MP has chosen to disregard medical evidence. Now, she wants women to have the choice to wear high heels, but apparently not to avoid wearing them.

The Independent today, while clarifying that the TUC motion is not to ban high heels, still lets her get away with the last word without asking her, who has actually demanded that high heels be banned?

It’s typical of right-wing politicians that when they don’t like a debate they simply change the way they frame it. It’s more annoying to see that left-wing newspapers can’t even bring themselves to call out those Tory MPs.

More reading
Left Outside: High Heels, Low Politics
John Innit: Et tu Konnie? The stilettos go in
Byrne’s Tofferings: TUC, High Heels, and Nadine Dorries

I don’t know if Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson are particularly up on Søren Kierkegaard.  But as the annual Trades Union Congress conference kicks off in Liverpool today, I reckon many union leaders could do worse than dust off their copies of Fear and Trembling.

The labour movement today is clearly facing what the Danish founder of existentialism would recognise as an existential crisis, a process said to occur when someone undergoes a deep questioning of the very foundations of his or her existence.

Now, I’m not sure if organisations as opposed to individuals can be so afflicted. But Britain’s trade union leaders really do need to ponder an obvious conundrum; what is the point of what they are doing? What, in short, is trade unionism for?
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One of the strangest political trends of the year has been the Blairites, who dominated British politics for many years, carrying out massive unprovoked attacks on their own reputations and doing their best to annoy and alienate people in the Labour Party.

This is in preparation for their total marginalisation and defeat by Neal Lawson and chums in an internal faction fight after the election. I find this for the most part entertaining, but also somewhat baffling.

Over the summer, most of their leaders resigned from government, so it is left to the second string to keep up the fight for the true cause.

This week, Phil ‘not the singer’ Collins, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter and chair of Demos, has a smug article in the Spectator slagging off the trade unions.

I understand that there is probably some personal benefit in slagging off Labour’s main funders for the benefit of a right-wing audience, but surely this sort of behaviour only hurts the faction which Collins supports?
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On Sunday Peter Beaumont wrote this article in the Observer asking: “What is the Climate Camp in London for?”
He goes on to quote approvingly from Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (one of my favourite books ever) and then says:

I mention Alinsky because he seems to crystallise many of the failings, not just of the Climate Camp, but of significant sectors of the wider anti-war and anti-globalisation movement which have struggled either to articulate precisely what is their message or who have chosen, literally at times, to pitch their tent at the margins of the political debate.
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Climate Camp, with its often hazy message and complex inner negotiations, with its indulgent obsession with its own workings, its insularity and the suggestion of elitism of its direct-action hard core, is in danger of becoming about Climate Camp, the institution, rather than about the wider fight to halt global warming. With all its energy and motivation, that would be a shame.

As applicable to Climate Camp itself, those are not criticism that should be dismissed so easily. But I see all this slightly differently. The problem is to assume that Climate Camp is the entirety of the environmentalism movement. It isn’t. It represents an arm of that movement: the more anarchic, activists interested in direct action and publicity stunts.
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If your boss sacks you for wearing a crucifix to work, you may have a case the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003. Clock on clad in a hammer and sickle lapel badge, and she can freely tell you to pick up your P45, you dirty commie bastard. Or so I had assumed, anyway.

But shortly we will find out whether or not Trotskyism is deemed legally equivalent to religion, after the decision of Socialist Party members Brian Debus, Onay Kasab, Glenn Kelly and Suzanne Muna to take one of Britain’s largest trade unions to an employment tribunal under these very regs.

All four have been banned from holding office in Unison for between three and five years. Mabledon Place says that is because they are racists; the four activists say they are being singled out because they are Trots.
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Lousy news from the trade union front, people:

The New Labour-loving horrors who run the public sector union Unison have stepped up their campaign to purge their Labour affiliated union of all grassroots socialists and leftwing activists.

We on the left are not pleased.

The union has just banned four of its best grassroots activists – Glenn Kelly (Bromley Unison branch secretary), Suzanne Muna (Unison’s Tenant Services Authority branch secretary), Onay Kasab (Greenwich Unison branch secretary) and Brian Debus (Hackney Unison chair) – from union office for three (Kelly and Kasab), four (Muna) and five (Debus) years.

Their crime? – well, that depends on who you ask, and how highly that person thinks of Labour.

I’m one of the many who believe that Kelly, Kasab, Muna and Debus are being strongarmed out of Unison because they are Socialist party members. They are passionate critics of New Labour, passionately opposed to this government’s privatising of public services, and – and this is doubtless the kicker, as far as Unison’s New Labour lubbers are concerned – galvanising grassroots enthusiasm for Unison to break its formal funding ties with Labour. continue reading… »

Nadine Dorries MP says on her blog:

Don’t ya just love the TUC? Apparently, at their forthcoming conference, they want to debate a proposal to ban the wearing of high heels in the office. Can you hear the collective sharp intake of breath and the no noo nooo from all of British office working womankind?
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I’m 5ft 3 and need every inch of my Louboutin heels to look my male colleagues in the eye. If high heels were banned in Westminster, no one would be able to find me.

For those subjected to regular uninformed tirades by Dorries, who recently declared that Trident was not a weapon of mass destruction, this may not entirely be a bad thing.

The TUC is not looking to ban high heels in the office.

The news story originated with the Torygraph – which has long had a vendetta against trade unions.
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Britain ‘could return to crippling 1970s strikes’, according to a headline in Britain’s biggest-selling rightwing broadsheet on Saturday. And note how the Daily Telegraph says that like it’s a bad thing.

My first response is not to get my hopes up too high. Newspaper commentators have been predicting an imminent rerun of the Winter of Discontent every year for at least the last two decades, and have somehow managed to get it wrong every single sodding time.

Even today, the mere mention of trade unionism can still evoke Dirty Harry-style responses from the Heir to Blair, who only days ago told one interviewer:

Mr Cameron added: “My message to union leaders who think they can take me on is simple: don’t do it.

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