THE immediate response of the leaders of the trade unions representing public sector workers to the wage-cutting programme outlined by Osborne in this week’s budget illustrates just how prostrate and impotent they are in the face of this weak but desperate Tory government.
On Wednesday, Osborne announced that public sector workers, who rank as some of the lowest paid in the country, will be forced to suffer even greater pay cuts because of a pay cap of 1% a year for the next four years.
This latest cap on pay follows on from a continuous policy of slashing the wages of public sector workers under the coalition – a policy that is now to be enshrined as a permanent feature under the Tories.
Public sector pay was frozen for two years in 2010, with annual rises since 2012 capped at 1% in following years. The catastrophic effect of all these freezes and caps has been for the take-home pay of low-paid hospital staff, school workers and local council workers to have plummeted as their pay falls below all the inflation rates.
Over a year ago, the Unite union reported that these cuts have resulted in public sector workers losing on average £2,000 a year in real terms. This is equal to a loss of £1 an hour. The Unite leadership’s solution to this savage attack on their members’ pay was to tell the working class to hold on and wait for the election of a Labour government committed to an ‘alternative strategy’ to austerity.
Last year, McCluskey wrote movingly about his public sector members being forced into the arms of loan sharks and food banks through wage cutting – what he refused to do is answer the question: What is the union going to do to defend its membership and their families?
The answer is now patently obvious – they are going to do exactly nothing except crawl on their bellies and beg for relief from the Tories and the bosses. Since Osborne’s declaration of war over pay Unite, along with the other main public sector unions like Unison, have issued no call for action or made any attempt to even threaten to organise strikes in defence of their members’ pay.
Instead, McCluskey just commented that Osborne’s budget ‘risks taking Britain backwards’, while the leader of Unison, Dave Prentis merely moaned that ‘Capping wages at a miserly one per cent for four more years for public sector workers will hasten the reluctant exit of many dedicated staff from our hospitals, schools and local councils’.
Of those forced to remain on poverty level wages Prentis had nothing to say. McCluskey and Unite yesterday came out with a naked appeal for the Tories to stop being nasty to the unions and offering themselves up as willing partners in the hopeless struggle to save a bankrupt British capitalist system.
Yesterday Unite issued a statement pleading that: ‘Ministers should stop regarding trade unions as “the enemy within” when it comes to partnership working to jump-start the UK’s dismal productivity record!’
These leaders want partnership with a government that is determined to inflict the most savage cuts to pay and welfare, to introduce the most savage anti-union laws, and to privatise public services like health and education out of existence – all in the cause of rescuing a bankrupt capitalist economy and pay off the hundreds of billions of pounds spent bailing out the banks and keeping the capitalist class in luxury.
These leaders are beneath contempt – they are offering themselves up as partners to a government determined to destroy the working class and signalling that they are quite prepared to collaborate in this class war in order to ensure the position of the trade union bureaucracy.
The only answer to this treachery is for public sector workers to immediately demand emergency conferences of the unions to kick these leaders out and replace them with a leadership that will immediately organise the full strength of the trade unions and working class in a general strike to remove this Tory government and replace it with a workers government and socialism.
This is the only way forward for the working class. Trade union leaders that offer a partnership to the Tories must be sacked!