Choosing the enemy

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Perhaps there’s something in the water in Downing Street; or perhaps power simply goes straight to the incumbent’s head. But the rock-solid belief that the PM of the day can deal with major problems by ignoring them or diverting attention elsewhere seems to take hold almost as soon as a new PM crosses the threshold. As Boris Johnson showed, with a sufficiently thick skin, a good dose of chutzpah, weak and terrified underlings, a complete lack of human empathy, honour, honesty and conscience, and sheer dogged determination to do whatever he or she wants regardless of the consequences, a PM can get away with it. For a while. As the same man also demonstrated, gravity cannot be denied indefinitely, and things eventually catch up with the incumbent. Whilst both of his successors have shown at least some of the same traits (see: lack of honesty, empathy, honour, or conscience), neither has quite been able to match the sheer bravado with which their mentor simply ignored anything he didn’t want to hear (see: covering his ears and humming the English anthem). The PM who lost out to a lettuce, to say nothing of the one who lost out to the one who lost out to a lettuce, simply don’t have what it takes to carry it off even for the short period for which Johnson somehow managed it.

The way in which Thatcher ‘vanquished’ the unions has become part of Tory Party folklore, along with the belief that simply attacking ‘the unions’ will somehow transform itself into a huge wave of support, but an inability to distinguish between taking on the miners on the one hand and declaring war on nurses on the other looks like a huge mistake, as even a growing number in his own party are recognising. It’s impossible to believe that senior civil servants are not telling him, in blunt terms, that he’s taking a very ‘brave’ stance (perhaps he's unfamiliar with Yes, Minister and thinks it's a compliment) given the public support for the nurses, but he’s still clinging tightly to his shovel and continuing to dig, even when he’s been offered a way out in the form of asking the ‘independent’ pay review body to consider whether circumstances might have changed. The ‘independence’ of pay review bodies isn’t exactly what most people might understand by the term (the members are appointed by the government which also sets their remit) but that does create an opportunity to blame the ‘independent’ body for any climb down. It’s a face-saving approach rather than a considered decision, but a drowning man can’t be too picky.

There’s an old saying that we should choose our enemies carefully, because that choice ends up defining us. It’s a truism which Sunak seems not to understand. Defining his party and government as opponents of paying a decent wage to nurses – and by extension, as opponents of a caring and effective NHS – doesn’t look the wisest choice for someone whose one job was to detoxify his party enough to ensure that it isn’t wiped out at the next election. But then again, as the last 5 PMs have shown us, in the eyes of the party’s MPs and members ‘wisdom’ is not even on the ‘desirable’ list of attributes for a Tory PM.

Concentrating power

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The newspapers and their Tory friends have been milking the planned series of strikes over the next week for all they’re worth.  “Ruining Christmas” seems to be the more-or-less ‘official’ tabloid description; although I’m sure they’d have found a similarly pertinent title at any other time of the year.

I don’t doubt that the strikes will inconvenience many, and I’m equally sure that if I were depending on Southern Rail to get to work, or on BA to fly away for some Christmas sun, I’d be pretty unhappy about it too.  Unhappiness, and playing on people’s anger, sells newspapers.  To make the issue more complex, I’m not sure that I have a huge amount of sympathy with the grievances of the staff taking strike action in every case either; the issue of driver-only train operation, for instance, seems to have been resolved elsewhere, and I’m finding it hard to understand why what’s acceptable sometimes isn’t more generally acceptable.

But there’s an underlying issue here which isn’t really about the validity or otherwise of a particular grievance, it’s about where power lies and what rights working people have to pursue a dispute with their employer.  To listen to some of the Tories talking, they ‘accept’ the right of people to withdraw their labour, just so long as it causes no inconvenience to the employers or customers; the moment it does, it becomes a case of trade unions abusing their power.  And that in turn leads to demands to ban ever-increasing sections of the working population from ever going on strike.  But a right to withdraw labour only so long as it inconveniences no one doesn’t look like a particularly useful right to me – the whole point of any industrial action is to put pressure on the employer.  Striking, or threatening to strike, is effectively the only power that workers have.

What concerns me even more is the way in which people are being swept along with this attitude.  Finding angry commuters to interview is easy enough, but it’s no substitute for a consideration of the power politics underlying the question.  Ultimately, the Tories and their media friends are seeking to make the power balance between workers and employers even more one-sided than it is at present, and the presentation of the issue is effectively aligning workers in other industries and sectors with the employers.  Every time those workers who depend on the trains to get to work criticise the strikers, and demand that they don’t strike, they are effectively telling them that they must accept whatever the employers say and forgo any right to oppose it.

In an increasingly interconnected economy, the failure of services on which so many depend – whether because of a strike or for any other reason – is something which we would all prefer to avoid, naturally.  But the jump from there to handing all power to employers and telling employees that they must accept whatever is imposed on them is far too simplistic a response.  In recent decades, under Tory and Labour governments alike, the balance of power has swung very much away from employees, and those who wield the power are seeking to continue that process. 

I understand the argument that strikes should be a last resort, and that not all strikes will appear to have merit to everyone, but who should decide on the merits or otherwise of a particular dispute?  It’s a question which we can debate ad infinitum, and one on which our opinions will tend to depend in large measure on the impact any particular dispute has on us as individuals.  But the solution is surely a bit more complex than simply taking away employee rights and giving all power to employers.  I hope that ACAS will be able to help resolve the current disputes – that’s the best outcome for all concerned.  The alternative (and apparently popular) suggestion of further eroding the position of working people, and further accumulating power in the hands of the employers, doesn’t look to me to be in the long term interest of all those angry people being so willingly interviewed by the media, however much it might appear to be in their short term interest at a point in time.

Uniting the workers of the world?

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Corbyn’s reshuffle was an agonising thing to watch, although part of the reason for that appears to have been his own willingness to listen to alternative points of view.  I’d have thought that a virtue, and entirely in line with his stated wish for a different type of politics (albeit badly undermined by some of the briefings which members of his core team seem to have been giving), but from the reaction of some members of his own party, they’d prefer the ruthless lack of consultation to which they’d become accustomed.

I, for one, welcome the fact that the Shadow Defence Secretary has been replaced by one more in line with Corbyn’s own view on the renewal of Trident.  It’s a step forward, although given that many Labour MPs remain wholly committed to spending more resources on weapons of mass destruction it’s a step along a path rather than the end of the journey.  It holds out some hope, though, that we might see senior opposition spokespersons arguing, for the first time since the 1980s, against the possession of nuclear weapons.

One particularly disappointing reaction was that of the trade unions.  One officer of the GMB was quoted as saying “We are absolutely clear and unequivocal that we will be supporting Trident replacement and any suggestion that there is alternative employment for people in that sector is utter nonsense and everyone is going to have to wake up to that fact”.  I understand, of course, that it is the job of trade unions to protect the interests of their members, but keeping people in jobs is not a rational argument for building and maintaining weapons of mass destruction which no sane person could or would ever use. 

It’s even sillier than arguing for a new nuclear power station on the same grounds – at least Wylfa B will produce some useful electricity.  It is an argument, in essence, for carrying out a pointless activity simply to keep people working.  I can think of a lot more useless activities which would be less potentially damaging than building and maintaining nuclear weapons if that’s really the way we want to run our economy.

But what it really underlines is a willingness to accept what is rather than argue for what should be.  And that’s what disappoints me most.  The father of one of those recognised by the GMB as a co-founder of the union coined the phrase “workers of the world unite”.  I somehow don’t think that either he, or his daughter, would have added “to build weapons which we can use to kill workers of other countries”. 

Overheads and packages

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For decades, pension provision was seen and treated as part of an overall remuneration package.  Employees didn’t just get a salary, they got a package, and people thinking of changing jobs were encouraged to compare the total package, not just the headline salary. 

I’m aware that some employers even implemented flexible arrangements under which employees could, within agreed limits, sacrifice part of their salary for higher employer pension contributions, or even reduce the contributions for an increase in salary.  Such arrangements suited employees, who could vary the elements of the overall package at different points in their lives, and they were generally cost neutral (other than administration costs) for employers.  Above all, they encouraged people to think package rather than salary.

I’m not entirely sure at what point ‘part of the package’ became an ‘unaffordable overhead’ apparently provided by the employers out of the goodness of their hearts, but the perspective certainly changed.  Factors such as increasing longevity come into the equation, but I have a feeling that the crucial event was the raid on pension funds mounted by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor.

I’ve never felt that he was wrong in principle; the previous tax treatment of pension funds gave disproportionate benefit to the most well-off rather than the least well-off.  But he was wrong, and badly wrong, in practice, by introducing the change without warning and with no transitional period for both employers and employees to adjust to the significantly increased contributions which would be required from both if previous pension provision was to be maintained. 

Overnight, an approach to occupational pension provision which had been so successful over decades was rendered unviable.  The pensions crisis may be coming to the fore under a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, but the seeds were sown by Gordon Brown and New Labour.

The sleight of hand by which pension contributions have come to be regarded as an ‘overhead’ disguises the fact that employers reducing the benefits or increasing the level of employees' contributions are, in effect, reducing the total remuneration package of their employees as certainly as if they were simply reducing wages.  The wrath of those being hit by this attack is easily understandable.

The surprising thing to me is not that public sector employees are protesting so strongly, but that private sector employees did not protest more when the changes impacted them.  It underlines, perhaps, the extent to which economic power has become increasingly unbalanced in favour of capital and against labour.  However, the mere fact that private sector employees have already had to suffer the closure of final salary schemes and the prospect of reduced income after retirement is no basis at all for arguing that public sector employees should meekly accept the same fate.

It’s also often overlooked that not all public sector pension schemes are the same; some are much more actuarially sound than others, and there really is no need to treat them all on the same basis.  There are some serious problems though, particularly in those services where pensions are paid from current revenue rather than from a properly funded long term savings scheme.  Arguing that all schemes can just continue as they are is as disingenuous as arguing that they all have to change fundamentally.

What is surely clear overall is that we have a choice between reducing the size of pensions after retirement and increasing the amount saved before retirement.  The position we’ve got to seems to be that public sector employers are determined to make that decision unilaterally, just as private sector employers have already done.  It’s a short term decision though; it saves money today at the expense of potentially creating a bigger problem for pensioners in the future.

The government is giving conflicting messages as well.  On the one hand they say – quite rightly – that we need to save more to make provision for retirement, and on the other they seem likely to further postpone auto-enrolment in the new pension scheme because they want us to spend not save in order to boost the economy.  Long term needs conflict with short term ones, and as is usual with politicians, short term considerations are likely to win out.

Seeing pensions as part of a remuneration package rather than as an overhead puts potential industrial action by employees into its proper context.  There will have to be changes to the package in many cases, of course; but change should be negotiated not imposed, and public sector employees are right to insist on that.  That surely is at the heart of what trades unions are about.

How far they have fallen

Tweet Lord Adonis is absolutely right to call for both sides in the BA dispute to resume talks. Discussion is ultimately the only way of seeking to resolve any industrial dispute, and the inevitable disruption which will result from a strike is something no-one really wants. I can't believe that anyone - least of all the staff who will lose pay - really wants to see the strikes go ahead.

Adonis is also entitled to hold, and to express, his own views about whether the strike is or is not justified, although I'm not convinced that doing so is necessarily helpful to the settlement of the dispute. But the phrase that really struck me was towards the end of his interview today, where he called on the union to "put the company first".

A Labour minister suggesting that the proper responsibility of a trade union is to put the employers' interests ahead of those of its members is a staggering indication of how far that party has moved away from its roots.