Strange Priorities


The annual Scottish TUC is taking place in Dundee this week and the 'big issue' for debate, apart from the independence referendum, is that of zero hours contracts - a problem which affects 85,000 Scots workers according to the STUC.

Now I don't know where that figure comes from or how big an issue it is for the workers involved, but what I do know is that equal pay, by comparison, is a much bigger 'scandal' and affects many more people - upwards of 120,000 in Scottish councils alone.

Yet I can't recall the STUC making a similar fuss about equal pay over the past 10 or 15 years or so which tells you all you need to know about the strange priorities of the trade union movement in Scotland these days.  

Strange Priorities (30 October 2012)


The TUC released a report the other day which said that 4.82 million workers in the UK are paid less than the 'so-called' living wage of £7.20 and hour - or £8.30 an hour in London.

Now that comes as no real surprise to me because the problem of low pay has been around for a very long time - and was the main reason for employers and trade unions in local government striking a landmark UK Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement in 1997 - which came into effect in 1999 in Scotland.

The clear intention behind the Single Status Agreement was the need to tackle  widespread discrimination against many female dominated jobs - carers, catering workers, cleaners and classroom assistants - which had been underpaid and undervalued for many years.

The Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement took years to negotiate but even then were never implemented properly despite the relative times of plenty that followed over the next decade - as council budgets increased enormously and even doubled in size in Scotland, for example.

So why was equal pay not given the priority it deserved?

Frances O'Grady - the new woman leader of the TUC - is urging more employers to pay a living wage  which is good to hear - but there should also be some searching questions asked about the attitudes of the big three public sector trade unions - GMB, Unison and Unite.

Because while we've seen national campaigns and even strike action to defend final salary pension schemes (which discriminate in favour of higher  paid workers) - the reality is that we've seen nothing comparable from the trade unions - when it comes to defending the interests of those at the bottom of the pay ladder.

Here's a previous post in the subject from 4 October 2012.

Deepest Pink (4 October 2012)

Today is National Poetry Day apparently which has the admirable aim of encouraging people to take a greater interest in the power of words - what they stand for and how they can inspire.

So in keeping with the spirit of the day I thought I'd share a couple of lines from an alternative version of the Labour Party's battle cry - The Red Flag - which will be sung at the end of today's party conference in Manchester:

The Red Flag

The people's flag is deepest pink

It's not as red as you might think

Now my reason for believing that Labour is not as 'red' as people might think - stems from its terrible track record on equal pay.

Because in 1999 Scotland signed up to a groundbreaking Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement - which promised a new deal for thousands of low paid workers (mainly but not exclusively women) - whose jobs had been underpaid and undervalued for years.

At the time the 'new deal' was supposed to be introduced - traditional male jobs (e.g refuse workers and gardeners) were paid around £9.00 an hour - whereas comparative female jobs which often required much greater skill and responsibility (e.g home carers and classroom assistants) - were being paid around £6.00 an hour or so.

In other words the traditional male jobs were being paid half as much again - or 50% more than the female jobs - which for a full-time worker meant a difference of thousands of pounds a year - £5,000 or £6,000 a year.

And this was at a time when council budgets in Scotland were doubling in size - over a ten year period from 1997 to 2007 they all increased by 100% - in Glasgow, Fife, Edinburgh, North and South Lanarkshire - so money and resources were never the problem.

Nor was the problem down to New Labour or some London based elite - the reason that equal pay never became a reality was that the big Labour councils in Scotland decided they had other priorities - and the Labour supporting trade unions (GMB, Unite and Unison) failed to stand up for their lowest paid members.

Labour now says it is in favour of a so-called 'Living Wage' - which is currently pitched at £7.20 an hour or thereabouts.

Yet the irony is that if Labour and the trade unions had stood up for an Equal Pay Agreement they signed back in 1999 - low paid workers in Scotland would have been earning much more than £7.20 years ago - £9.00 an hour or so in many cases.

The aim of the 1999 Equal Pay Agreement was always to level people's pay up - not level pay down - and the cost would have been a reorganisation of the workforce with perhaps fewer but much better paid council workers.

But instead of moving might and main to achieve Equal Pay - my abiding memory of the past 10 years is the sight of Labour supporting trade unions fighting to defend 'final salary' pension schemes - which benefit the highest paid officials within the local government workforce.

So that is why the people's flag is deepest pink - and why the Living Wage is a such a miserable, watered down, half-hearted policy.

Because it is a symbol of Labour employers and Labour supporting trade unions saying one thing then doing another - and all at the expense of some of the lowest paid council workers in the land. 


Writing Opportunity (12 September 2014)


Here's an article from the Scotsman newspaper by a chap called Gregor Gall - who is a professor of industrial relations, apparently, at Bradford University.

Now I think there's a real issue at stake with these zero hour contracts - although I also think that Gregor 'over eggs the pudding' quite a bit over his comparison with the National Dock Labour Scheme - which addressed terrible abuses in the UK labour market from the 1930s and finally outlawed these soon after the end of the Second World War. 

The key to tackling the problem is to distinguish between workers for whom casual hours of work are exactly what they want because it fits in with their lifestyle - and the needs of a particular business where the demand for labour is not predictable and fluctuates for reasons beyond the employer's control. 

As opposed to other areas of industry where the pattern of business is very predictable - where the demand for labour is stable - but where people are denied to access to these additional hours and a proper contract to regulate employment relations with their employer.

So what I'd like to see and read from academics like Gregor is some hard evidence in support of his claims about employment practices in the public sector - which names names rather than pulls its punches. 

What puzzles me is that the issue of zero hours contracts is hardly new and certainly wasn't invented under the present Coalition Government - yet all of a sudden the need to tackle the problem is in the headlines and even merits a mention in Ed Miliband's recent speech to the TUC, for example.  

Now to my mind, zero hours contracts pale into insignificance - relatively speaking, of course - compared to the fight for equal pay which affects a much greater number of the lowest paid workers, most of whom are women of course - yet equal pay hasn't received nearly as much attention from Labour - in government or in opposition - or the trade unions.  

So while I'm in the mood I must try and find an email address for Gregor and ask if he'd like to write something about Equal Pay in general and the fight for Equal Pay in South Lanarkshire Council, in particular - where the trade unions have played a most peculiar role, of course.

I think an article like that would make for very interesting reading - and I could provide Gregor with lots of hard evidence, individual case studies involving low paid workers - people with strong views about the role that the unions have played.  

Political will to beat zero-hour

Zero hours contracts work for those looking for spare cash, but most workers lack any security. 


By Gregor Gall

State levy on employers may be the answer to curb rise, but will any party be prepared to tackle this issue, asks Gregor Gall

The rise of zero-hour contracts has been inexorable. For 2012, the Office of National Statistics estimated that just 250,000 people were employed on these contracts after it emerged that some big household names were using them. This revision, up from 200,000, came after the disclosure that Sports Direct, JD Wetherspoon and the Spirit Group chain of pubs and Cineworld employed pretty much all their 60,000 workers on them. But since then, even more major names, such as Burger King, Domino’s Pizzas, McDonalds, Subway and Amazon, have been revealed as also using the contracts.

Then, a poll by the Chartered Institute for Professional Development suggested the number of people on zero-hour contracts was not only one million but also that the contracts were most common where least expected. Thus, employers in the voluntary sector and the public sector (health and education especially) were more likely to use zero-hours contracts than private sector employers. On top of this, those primarily employed on zero-hour contracts were twice as likely to be young, that is aged between 
18 and 24.

The political heat generated by all this led Business Secretary Vince Cable to establish an inquiry into zero-hours work and his Labour shadow, Chuka Umunna, is trying to make some political headway around the issue of the contracts as representing the sharp edge of the wedge for an increasingly insecure workforce.

There is no doubt that a handful at the top end of the labour market do benefit from zero-hour contracts. Having taken early retirement or made a career change with substantial personal resources behind them, these types of professionals can withstand not having guaranteed employment and treat their work when they get it as a hobby; something to occupy their time with and keep them interested, rather than as the income they depend upon.

But for the vast majority on zero-hour contracts, they face a triple bind. First, they have no guarantee of work and, thus, of income from week to week. This means being unable to plan any expenditure, not least buying the basics such as food, and paying rent and utility bills.

Second, the contracts make planning anything virtually impossible if these people want to remain available for work. Those part-time workers with set hours who seek full-time employment can at least get another part-time job to make ends meet.

And third, the wage rates for zero-hour contracts are typically 40 per cent less than for those in equivalent work, whether they are part- or full-time, temporary or permanent. All this gives a sense that those on the contracts are the most dispensable of workers, being the epitome of the flexible labour market espoused by neo-liberalism. It also shows that we have moved in a decade from the pressing problem being overwork and long hours to not enough work.

As economic recovery is fragile and faltering – and with some 80 per cent of the cuts in public expenditure still to come – we can only expect that the rise in use of these contracts will continue. Immoral they may be, but they are not unlawful.

From Cable, the only hope of even limited regulation of the use of the contracts comes from the effective restraint on the right to work for other employers.

But as zero-hour contracts have been defended by the CBI and Institute of Directors, it is highly unlikely that Cable’s Liberal Democrats, the minority party in the coalition, will be able to achieve anything other than a voluntary code, essentially urging employers to be more considerate.

Given that those on zero-hour contracts are largely un-unionised and most of them insecure in terms of working conditions, how can this new scourge be best tackled?

History gives us one obvious precedent – the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS). Before its creation in 1947, all dockers had to go down to the docks early each morning to see if they would get work that day. Some did and some did not.

The introduction of the NDLS, paid for by a levy on dock employers, meant that all registered dockers were guaranteed a set level of income per week, even if they did not get a full week’s work. Local boards made up of employer and union sides administered the scheme.

The creation of the NDLS arose out of a series of particular circumstances, such as the 1945 unofficial dock strike, and a mismatch of the supply and demand for dock labour that led to inefficiency. Of course, the creation of the NDLS was not unrelated to the fact that the dockers were unionised and could exercise considerable industrial strategic leverage.

The state, through the Clement Atlee-led Labour government, intervened on the side of the dockers, but also on the side of a more efficient capitalist economy and for the benefit of capital overall.

What the existence of the NDLS showed is that forms of regulation – ultimately underpinned by the state – can be brought into existence to control employer activity. But both the specific conditions and the more general political climate – of the emerging social democratic post-war settlement – are vital to understanding why it came into being. The general economic and political conditions are different today and what needs to be done to reverse the forward march of the zero-hours contracts is different.

An obvious way to regulate zero-hour contracts is to impose a levy upon employers using them. For example, employers could be legally obliged to guarantee a minimum weekly wage for all those that are on these contracts. This would mean that where there was no work, or very little work, in a particular week, the individual worker would know that their income would not fall below a certain level.

Of course, this would provide an economic disincentive to employers to use the contracts. That is the point: a premium would have to be paid for their use. Depending on the size of the guaranteed minimum wage, the disincentive could be more or less.

Some may call this Stone Age economics. But the principle of setting a floor is not so different from having a minimum wage or regulating maximum working hours.

A question though remains: which political party is prepared to enter this territory and would an independent Scotland banish zero-hours contracts?

• Gregor Gall is professor of industrial relations at the University of Bradford

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