Wide of the Mark
I don't know what knowledge, qualifications or experience Owen Jones has to speak with authority about trade unions in the UK, but he laughably wide of the mark in this recent article in The Guardian when he says that public sector strikers are really "fighting for us all".
Not for me they're not, Owen.
The main reason I say that is because I've achieved much more in terms of equal pay, for example, fighting outside the trade union movement than I ever managed during my long career as a full-time union official, latterly as Unison's chief negotiator and Head of Local Government in Scotland.
So if you ask me, Owen needs to set aside his left wing slogans and consider the evidence in relation to low pay and equal pay which suggests that the trade unions have been asleep on the job for the past 15 years - a period when for the most part at least, local and national governments had 'money to burn', so to speak.
But where were the strikes in support of the low paid or equal pay?
Where was Owen Jones and/or the trade unions when the Scottish Government and Council employers in the year 2000 decided to spend £800 million a year on teachers' pay while reneging on an earlier 1999 and less costly pay agreement aimed at some of Scotland's lowest paid workers?
'Nowhere', is the answer - yet now we are being asked to believe that the trade unions are intent on challenging low wages when the evidence says that for far too long they have actually been defending the status quo.
Which is why, for example, male Refuse Workers in Birmingham City Council (Labour led for most of the past 15 years) were earning £45,000 a year while (predominantly female) Home Care Workers were being paid less than £15,000 a year.
And the trade unions negotiated these pay arrangements, of course, the same trade unions which Owen Jones says are now "fighting for us all".
The case to walk out is unanswerable, but will be eclipsed by outrage from a media utterly opposed to trade unions
By Owen Jones - The Guardian
'Trade unions are Britain's biggest democratic movement, representing 6.5 million workers.' Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP
If trade unions are not going to go on strike now, their leaders might as well clench their fists for the last time, bow solemnly before the sisters and brothers, and perform the last rites on their movement. The longest fall in wages for generations; pay packets for many public sector workers down by a fifth in real terms; and, despite politicians' deceitful mantra that work is the route out of poverty, most of Britain's poor consigned to low-wage jobs. An increasingly casualised, hire-and-fire workforce is being forged, manned by an army of zero-hour contract and self-employed (often "self-underemployed") workers lacking basic rights like paid leave; and the vast majority of new jobs in David Cameron's Britain in industries paying less than £7.95 an hour. Throw in cuts to in-work benefits, attacks on pensions and VAT rises, and the rationale for workers to fight back is surely unanswerable.
That will not be the case presented in most of the media when hundreds of thousands of workers take part in co-ordinated strike action on Thursday. This column will remain one of the very few pieces supportive of the strike to be published by the mainstream media. I don't write that as an act of self-congratulation, but simply to point out how ideologically charged and biased our media is. Trade unions are Britain's biggest democratic movement, representing 6.5 million workers – more than nine times the combined membership of the main political parties – and yet they are treated by the media as though they have almost no legitimate place in public life. On the rare occasions they are granted media coverage, their elected leaders are invariably described as "union barons". Surely it is only unelected, unaccountable figures like media owners who should be called barons.
Cover your ears for the screeches of outrage over a day of disruption by a media largely uninterested in the never-ending disruption caused by falling living standards. There will be non-stop complaints about strike ballot turnouts, stoked by the likes of Boris Johnson – narrowly elected London mayor on a 38% turnout – and Tory politicians who championedpolice crime commissioners elected with an average turnout of 15%. If our rulers were really interested in boosting turnout they would allow workplace-based balloting, but they are not.
Another key plank of anti-strike propaganda will be the politics of envy. Struggling people are relentlessly encouraged to envy each other rather than to be angry at those with power, who are responsible for their ever-deteriorating plight. Private sector workers are worse off, goes this line of argument, but you don't see them downing tools en masse, unlike those pampered public sector workers with their cushy perks. This is the logic of the "race to the bottom". It is all based on myth, given that the public sector has a higher ratio of professional workers like judges, university lecturers and senior civil servants, and the pay figures are also distorted by high wages in bailed-out banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland, which have been reclassified as public sector institutions. A quarter of local authority workers, for example, languish on poverty wages.
Labour is often demonised, sometimes with the complicity of its own leaders, for being in the "pocket of the unions". This is odd given Labour leaders' commitment to the Tories' public sector pay freeze, their acceptance of cuts and their timidity even when it comes to popular policies like public ownership of rail. Labour should speak of its pride in being backed by a movement of dinner ladies, supermarket shelf-stackers and care assistants – union funding is, after all, the cleanest money in politics. But where is the never-ending scrutiny of a Tory party bankrolled by bankers, hedge funds, legal loan sharks, and secretive private interests?
When it comes to unions, there is a chasm between the elite and popular attitudes. How it must rile politicians that, while only 18% of the public believe them to tell the truth, and just 34% of us believe business leaders, trade union officials are trusted by 41%. Those who relentlessly dismiss unions as outdated vested interests must be frustrated to learn that 78% believe trade unions are essential to protect workers' interests; and those portraying unions as being run by extremists and militants may huff as they find just 23% of Britons agreeing and 60% disagreeing. Despite the media's best efforts, 49% of us believe that big business poses a greater threat to the public than trade unions, with just 13% dissenting.
In truth, we all suffer because of trade union weakness. The great squeeze in wages long predates the financial crash: from 2004 onwards, the bottom half of workers found that their pay had stopped growing, and for the bottom third pay in real terms began to fall. That increased the burden on the taxpayer as billions more were spent on tax credits to compensate. Many workers relied on cheap credit to maintain their living standards, helping to win Britain the dubious honour of being one of the world's most indebted nations. Wages began sliding even as corporations posted record profits – but there were no strong unions to compel them to share the wealth.
As a 2011 US study found, the decline of unions is behind a fifth to a third of the growth in wage inequality across the Atlantic. Last week, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, co-authors of The Spirit Level, published research for the Class thinktank that fleshed out the link between a weakened labour movement and growing inequality.
That doesn't mean our hunted unions are beyond scrutiny. While most public sector workers are unionised, just 14% of private sector workers are members. All too many supermarkets and call centres are virtually union-free zones. Yes, it is hard to organise because of a law tilted in favour of bosses, and because insecurity leaves workers less likely to remain in the same job. But as early 20th-century unions adapted their organising model to recruit unskilled workers, today's unions must focus their efforts on the ever-expanding service sector. Private sector union membership has grown from a low base for three years running, but unions must expand their efforts to organise in the community as well as the workplace, as the likes of Unite have done.
Come Thursday, hundreds of thousands will sacrifice a day's pay to take a stand. They will be ignored or demonised as they do so. But they should remember that they are not just speaking for themselves, but for the millions expected to pay for a crisis caused by the vested interests who fund the Tories. Who knows – they may give courage and inspiration to others to get off their knees, too.
Who Gets What and Why? (3 October 2013)
As the fight for equal pay continues - in South Lanarkshire and elsewhere - I think it's important to remember that when the powers that be really want to deliver a result - they can always find the resources.
How else to explain the the fact that the Scottish Government, council employers and the trade unions found the money required to fund a landmark pay deal for Scottish teachers - back in the year 2000 - which cost the public purse £800 million a year.
Far more, of course, than the cost of implementing the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement in the way that was originally intended - by raising the pay levels of many female dominated jobs which had been badly undervalued for years.
So why did Scottish teachers win out while Scotland's lowest paid council workers lost out?
Now that's a question for the employers and trade unions - but money wasn't the problem since the budgets of councils in Scotland doubled in the decade up to 2007.
And if the employers and trade unions had done what they said they were going to do - back in 1999 - there would be no need for this belated campaign for a Living Wage because the lowest paid council workers would have been earning more than £9.00 an hour for years.
Politics of Equal Pay (2 August 2013)
I am often drawing readers' attention to interesting and/or thought provoking article in the newspapers and here's a real doozy which lays bare the politics of Equal Pay in today's Herald - from none other than little old me!
So, go out and buy yourself a copy of the Herald, share it with your friends and use the information in the article to good effect - kick up a great fuss - for example, by posing a few awkward questions to your local councillor, MSP or MP.
Because when it comes to equal pay - Scotland's politicians, particularly its Labour politicians, have a great deal to answer for, if you ask me.
There are still battles being fought on equal pay.
The Supreme Court in London ruled that the council wrong to withhold information from me. I wanted to check whether women workers at the authority were being discriminated against.
The way in which Scottish councils chose to deal with equal pay has important implications for areas of social policy.
The business goes back to 1999 when a new national agreement was struck (the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement between Scotland's council employers and the unions. The stated aim was to sweep away years of historical pay discrimination against many female- dominated jobs which were paid much less, typically £3 an hour less, than traditional male jobs.
The way equal pay was to be achieved was by raising the pay of women workers to the same as the men. The costly price tag was around £500m a year: 90,000 women workers at £3 per hour x 30 hours a week (on average) x 52 weeks = £421m.
You might well ask how Scotland's councils could afford to spend so much on equal pay. The answer is that the annual budgets of Scotland 32 councils and that of the Scottish Parliament doubled in size during the period between 1997 and 2007. So, money was never the problem – the problem was political will.
Because in the year 2000 Scotland's 32 local councils with the enthusiastic support of the Scottish Government, implemented a much more expensive agreement on teachers' pay, the McCrone Agreement, with a far weightier annual price tag of £800m. Now this pay deal gave Scottish teachers an unprecedented 23.5% increase in a single year, whereas other very low- paid council workers were still waiting for the promises of their 1999 Equal Pay Agreement to be honoured.
Nowadays Labour and the unions are demanding a so-called Living Wage, yet I am struck by the thought that a rate of £9 an hour could and should have been achieved years ago. Not only would this have put more money into the pockets and purses of thousands of low-paid women council workers, but equal pay would also have eliminated the need for the crazy and complex system of working tax credits.
Those who failed to keep their promises in 1999 were the Labour councils who dominated the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) at the time and the Labour trade unions who decided not to cut up rough on behalf of their lowest-paid members. Instead this was done by Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES), which arrived on the scene in 2005 and began to explain the big pay differences between male and female council jobs, which led to an explosion of equal pay claims in the Employment Tribunals.
Aome people criticise A4ES because we charge clients a success fee of 10% (not 25% as some have suggested), but I've always regarded that as great value for money. The same people wrongly claim that the unions represented their members "for nothing", which is nonsense because they were, of course, taking millions of pounds in union contributions from these members –while turning a blind eye what was going on right under their noses.
So the fight for equal pay continues because certain councils decided to preserve the historically higher pay of traditional male workers when introducing job evaluation, which means that women workers have a potential ongoing claim while these pay differences continue.
Other councils have cynically reduced male workers' pay to avoid the likelihood of claims from women employees, yet this was never the aim of the original Equal Pay Agreement: the problem was never that men were paid too much, but that women were paid too little.
Mark Irvine was chief union negotiator in the 1999 Scottish agreement which was meant to deliver equal pay for women.
