Local Government Workers Determined to Persist with their Demands

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Local Government Workers Determined to Persist with their Demands

Report Indicts PPP/PFI

Selby Closure Threatens over 2,000 Miners’ Jobs

More than one million local government and public sector workers took part in a national strike on Wednesday. UNISON, the Transport and General Workers and the GMB said that further general and selective strikes, targeting specific areas or services, would follow unless the demand for a six per cent pay increase is met.

Gordon Brown and 10 Downing Street have maintained that the pay claim is a matter for local councils to sort out. But union leaders directly called on the Chancellor to fund the increase. A spokesman for Tony Blair, however, said, "These are matters for local government employers to work out with their staff. There has been a generous settlement for local government and it is for them to make decisions in respect of pay awards."

Derek Prentis, leader of public sector union UNISON, the country's biggest union, said, "This is the biggest stoppage in the country since the general strike. It involves everyone from manual workers to senior professionals. We are not dealing with part of the local government service, we are talking about all of the local government service."

Union leaders said that the strike vote reflected not just the dispute over pay, but the souring of relations with the Labour government over its continued involvement of private sector companies in the delivery of council services.

Heather Wakefield, national officer for UNISON, said that the case for a realistic pay rise was indisputable and that local government was facing a recruitment and retention crisis. "Our members have voted for industrial action because they are sick of being treated as the poor relations of the public sector," she said. "The employers should be left in no doubt that our action will continue until they return with a realistic offer."

Jack Dromey, the national organiser of the TGWU, said: "Over a million public servants have had enough. All they want is fair pay, better treatment and, quite simply, respect from their managers in town halls and ministers in Whitehall."

Mick Graham, the GMB national secretary, said: "Our members have sent a very clear message that enough is enough. Local government workers delivering a quality service deserve quality pay."

Seventy-five per cent of the local government workforce are women who are amongst the lowest paid workers in the public sector, earning on average 66% of the salary of their male counterparts. There were women taking part in the strike who say they have never considered industrial action before but are sick of being treated as the "poor relations" of the public sector.

More than 40% of social workers, classroom assistants, nursery nurses and occupational therapists work regular, unpaid overtime. 17% of women are only paid for term-time work (losing up to nine weeks pay a year) compared with only 3% of men. Local government staff most likely to be working two or more jobs to make ends meet are women employed as school meals workers, school cleaners and building cleaners.

Addressing the issue of the gender pay gap in local government, UNISON National Secretary for Local Government, Heather Wakefield, pointed out that women "educate and feed our children in schools, look after our elderly and vulnerable people, and are on the frontline of many essential services. Yet they are underpaid and undervalued. Twenty-seven years after the Equal Pay Act came into force, we are fighting to bridge the yawning pay gap between men and women in local government. For too long, local government has run on the goodwill of our low paid women members. We are saying, enough is enough."

Concerns have been expressed repeatedly by local government workers that privatisation and contracting out means deterioration, that market-based anarchy instead of planning services to meet the society’s future needs spells disaster. The struggle being waged by the local government workers is thus also against the dismantling and sell-off of the public infrastructure in order to privatise services.

There was strong support for the strike around the country. However, some services were being maintained because many local services are now contracted out and nearly half of all council workers are not in a union. Many pickets and demonstrations were extremely militant. Women workers, who are some of the lowest paid workers carrying the heaviest responsibilities, were at the forefront throughout the actions. The striking workers won strong expressions of support from the public at large.

Union leaders meet again on Friday to discuss further action with another one-day strike expected next month.

The action comes also as railway workers, university academics, further education lecturers and fire brigade staff are in dispute over pay, and as London Underground workers also took action over the Public-Private Partnership on the tube.

Companies involved in Public Private Partnerships should not be given the impression that the government will always bail them out, according to a House of Commons spending watchdog report last week. MPs on the Public Accounts Committee also warned that many public bodies are not doing enough to ensure that PFI projects represent "value for money". In effect, this VfM, as it is known, changes as the contract evolves. Companies also look to government to bail them out when projects "go wrong". The PFI contracts, supposedly based on commercial risks, represent a way of handing over state funds to private capital at minimal risk, in a mechanism that equates to a loan at far above market rate.

Dave Prentis, General Secretary of UNISON, said: "This report is a damning indictment of the PFI/PPP process and shows what a giant waste of taxpayers’ funds it is. All this money lost on hidden costs and extra charges, and the expensive accounting games that go on to maximise contractors' profits, are at the expense of people using public services.

"How much longer can Britain afford to continue with this gamble that is PFI/PPP?

"The secretive nature of these processes hide from the British public the true scale of loss and waste involved. At the end of the day, the risk of service failure still falls on the public sector. It's time that the government owned up to the fact that they are taking taxpayers for a ride.

"The answer is directly funded public services run by people in the public sector who put the service users first every time, and not shareholders.

"Chinese walls between sections of companies are insufficient when PFI/PPP involve critical public services and large amounts of money, plus considerable post tender negotiation and contracts that typically last for 25 years.

"I have written to Sir John Bourn at the National Audit Office, pointing out at least 45 instances where the firm acting as adviser to the public authority was also the auditor to one of the consortium members who was either shortlisted or successful in winning the contract."

A so-called "phased shutdown" over the next 20 months will throw 2,100 miners out of their jobs. The closure Selby, Britain’s biggest remaining mining complex, will mean the possible loss of as many as 5,000 jobs. In addition to the workers at the three pits in the complex – Riccall, Stillingfleet and Wistow – the knock-on effect in related industries is likely to lead to a further 3,000 workers losing their jobs.

The National Union of Mineworkers said that to close the Selby coalfield would be "ludicrous", arguing that millions of tonnes of coal remained at the complex. The NUM has said that the reserves are sufficient to keep the mine open for up 40 more years.

The chairman of Selby chamber of commerce, Geoff Gordon, said the closure would be a "massive blow" to the area and urged the government to take swift action to help bring in fresh investment. He said the chamber was anxious to know if the complex was to close virtually immediately, or wound down over a couple of years.

UK Coal, then known as RJB Mining, bought the bulk of Britain's pits in 1994 when they were privatised. The company acquired an industry that had been the nation's largest employer in the early 20th century. Since the end of the year-long miners' strike in 1984-5, the number of deep mine pits has fallen from 170 to just 16, of which 13 are owned by UK Coal.

The three pits in the complex, which dominate the area around Selby, incurred a combined loss of £35 million last year and £93 million over the past three years. A UK Coal spokesman said: "That’s a fact we have to face up to." The company had commissioned two reports, one by the Department of Trade and Industry, the other by consultants IMC, to study whether coal reserves that remain at Selby could be extracted "economically".

The government responded to the news by announcing support for redundancy costs, regeneration and retraining. Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, called this putting "miners at the Selby complex in Yorkshire first". She also announced consultation on an investment aid scheme for the coal industry and an extension of the operating aid scheme. A task force will be set up to aid the regeneration of the area.

The government’s stand amounts to neither putting the welfare of the miners first, in the sense that their right to a livelihood is not being recognised. Nor does it take account of the welfare of the economy. Ever since the miners’ strike, the issue for governments has been both to eliminate the miners as a militant fighting force and to calculate within the terms of being competitive in the global market. When the government refers to a viable future, it is using these same criteria.