John Pilger: Britain’s postal srtike is the war at home

by John Pilger London 23 October 2009 The struggle of striking British postal workers against privatisation plans is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people are denied hope of a decent job or education. And now, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government is to mount a “fire sale” of public assets and services worth £16 billion. Unmatched since former PM Margaret Thatcher’s transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way. The common thread is adherence to the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and of the City of London, now rescued with hundreds of billions in public money and still unregulated with a single stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the PM, is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000. The London Financial Times now offers a service called How to Spend It. None of this is accountable to the public, whose view was expressed at the last election in 2005: New Labour won with the support of barely a fifth of the British adult population. For every five people who voted Labour, eight did not vote at all. This was not apathy, as the media pretend, but a strike by the public — like the postal workers are today on strike. The issues are broadly the same: the bullying and hypocrisy of contagious, undemocratic power. Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. Not long ago, you posted a letter anywhere in the country and it reached its destination the following morning. There were two deliveries a day, and collections on Sundays. The best of Britain, which is ordinary life premised on a sense of community, could be found at a local post office, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, where pensions, income support, child benefit and incapacity benefit were drawn, and the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate and the harried were treated humanely. At my local post office in south London, if an elderly person failed to turn up on pension day, he or she would get a visit from the postmistress, Smita Patel, often with groceries. She did this for almost 20 years until the government closed down this “lifeline of human contact”, as the local Labour MP called it, along with more than 150 other local London branches. The Post Office executives who faced the anger of our community at a local church — unknown to us, the decision had already been taken — were not even aware that branch run by the Patels made a profit. What mattered was ideology; the branch had to go. Mention of public service brought puzzlement to their faces. The postal workers, having this year doubled annual profits to £321 million, have had to listen to specious lectures from secretary of state Peter Mandelson, a twice-disgraced figure risen from the murk of New Labour, about “urgent modernisation”. The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. In dealing with new technology, postal workers have sought only consultation about their working lives and the right not to be abused — like the postal worker who was spat upon by her manager, then sacked while he was promoted. Or the postal worker with 17 years’ service and not a single complaint to his name who was sacked on the spot for failing to wear his cycle helmet. Watch the near frenzy with which your postie now delivers. A middle-aged man has to run much of his route in order to keep to a preordained and unrealistic time. If he fails, he is disciplined and kept in his place by the fear that thousands of jobs are at the whim of managers. Communication Workers Union negotiators describe intransigent executives with a hidden agenda — just as the National Coal Board masked Thatcher’s strictly political goal of destroying the miners’ union. The collaborative journalists’ role is unchanged, too. Mark Lawson, who pontificates about middlebrow cultural matters for the BBC and the Guardian, and receives many times the remuneration of a postal worker, dispensed a Sun-style diatribe on October 10. Waffling about the triumph of email and how the postal service was a “bystander” to the internet when, in fact, it has proven itself a commercial beneficiary, Lawson wrote: “The outcome [of the strike] will decide whether Billy Hayes of the CWU will, like [Arthur] Scargill, be remembered as someone who presided over the destruction of the industry he was meant to represent.” The record is clear that, 25 years ago, the miners and their union head Scargill were fighting against the wholesale destruction of an industry that was long planned for ideological reasons. The miners’ enemies included the most subversive, brutal and sinister forces of the British state, aided by journalists — as Lawson’s Guardian colleague Seumas Milne documents in his landmark work, The Enemy Within. Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent. From www.johnpilger.com Hat tip Green Left Weekly

Rest home staff in struggle for better pay

Chants of "Union Power!", and toots of support from passing cars, rang out in the leafy Wellington suburb of Thorndon on September 26 as two hundred rest home staff protested outside the offices of Presbyterian Support Central (PSC).

Rallies were also held in Palmerston North, Levin, Wanganui and Masterton.

The carers, belonging to the NZ Nurses Organisation and Service & Food Workers Union, are paid much less than their counterparts in the public hospitals. They took a two hour stop-work to protest the miserable pay offer in their current negotiations.

PSC is the largest operator in the aged care sector in the region, owning 16 rest homes in the Lower North Island through its "Enliven" arm. It receives huge amounts of government funding.

Like the last Labour-led government, National is refusing to set any requirements on how this public money should be spent.

This is despite a recommendation last year from Parliament's Health Select Committee that funding should be focused on increasing wages up to the levels paid to similar workers in District Health Boards.

In 2009, Enliven is receiving a 4.9 percent increase in funding from government. It only wants to pass on 3.1 percent pay rises – except to a few nurses who, in a divisive move, are being offered much more.

A stumbling block in negotiations is that the employer representatives at the table don't have the authority to make any binding decisions. General Manager Nicola Turner is refusing to take part. The protesting workers chanted, "2, 4. 6, 8 – Nicola, it's time to negotiate".

PSC share their Wellington office block with a number of other NGOs. The NZ Council of Christian Social Services, an umbrella body which Presbyterian Support belongs to, has its headquarters there.

If Nicola wasn't shamed in front of her Christian peers, she should have been.

The National government's vision for the health system is for more and more services to be provided by the private sector and NGOs like Enliven.

Distribution workers picket supermarkets

by David

Distribution workers from the South Island branch of supermarket giant Foodstuffs were on strike last Thursday. They held pickets at Christchurch and Dunedin supermarkets owned by Foodstuffs board members. Foodstuffs is a “co-oprative” of owner-operated supermarkets, superettes, dairies and liquor stores (Pak’nSave, New World, Four Square, On the Spot, Liquorland and Henry’s) and is divided into Northern, Central and South Island companies. 

I spoke briefly to workers at outside Papanui Pak’nSave in Christchurch. Low pay was the main grievance. One worker who had been at Foodstuffs for 10 years, is still paid a measly $13.80 an hour. Even the best paid only got around $15. 

The workers believed the starting rate for distribution workers at rival supermarket chain, Progressive (Countdown Foodtown and Woolworths) was $16.60 an hour and, and that in general workers there were around $5 an hour better off. 

In 2006 Progressive locked out distribution workers, but with the help of an impressive out-poring of solidarity campaign, the workers stood strong. They forced Progressive to back down and meet union demands for a rise and equal pay workers in different parts of the country. 

During that dispute much was made of the fact that Progressive is Australian-owned. The assumption was that as an Australian company, it didn’t give a toss about it’s Kiwi workers. This may have been true, but it’s also clear that the Kiwi capitalists at Foodstuff don’t give a stuff either, and for one reason or another they’ve been able to get away with paying even less.

South Island Foodstuffs workers strike over low pay

Media Release: National Distribution Union Thursday September 3 2009. Christchurch and Dunedin supermarkets owned by board members of Foodstuffs South Island are being targeted for protest action today by distribution centre workers who are walking off the job in protest over no progress in their negotiations. The workers say that the company, whose profits continue to rise each year and pays its CEO nearly $1 million a year, should come to the table with a decent wage offer. “The recession is being used to hold back workers from earning a liveable weekly wage,” Paul Watson, Southern Region Secretary for the National Distribution Union said today. “This is despite the South Island cooperative making record profits ($227 million in 2009 up from $222 million in 2008), and NZ Foodstuffs chief executive Tony Carter saying that New Zealand’s supermarket sector trumps any other industry in any other country right now in sales growth and expansion opportunities.” “With South Island Foodstuffs CEO Streve Anderson earning close to a million dollars a year ($910,000-$920,000 the last time salary bands were published) it is time that this prosperous company shared more of its wealth with its workers.” “Foodstuffs distribution centre workers’ low weekly wage is totally unjustified given the company’s dominance and profitability in the supermarket industry – of which they control 57%. Foodstuffs’ main competitor Progressive Enterprises pays a start rate of $5 more per hour for distribution centre workers doing the same work.” “Whilst the company may pay a discretionary bonus each year, they are one offs and the pay increase last year did nothing to bridge the pay gap with Progressive Enterprises workers.” Members at the Foodstuffs DCs in the South Island have this year been in drawn out negotiations because Foodstuffs has refused to increase wages and merit pay steps and make any offer to improve working conditions, Paul Watson said. “It’s time Foodstuffs came back to the table with a respectable offer, and that’s the message their workers will be taking to the public in Christchurch and Dunedin today,” Paul Watson said. Ends. For further comment: Paul Watson, on (021) 618-395. Dunedin contact: Ken Young, on (021) 994-998.

Air NZ bosses threaten to sack striking cabin crew

NZPA media release 1 April 2009 Executives at Air New Zealand are to act as cabin crew for the airline's subsidiary, Zeal 320 Ltd, during next week's planned strike action on trans-Tasman and Pacific routes. Talks between the airline and the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) are continuing. Air New Zealand told Radio New Zealand it had 100 fully qualified staff, including top executives who have volunteered to keep planes flying over the Easter period. But the EPMU said it did not believe the airline had staff available to replace striking cabin crew. The airline has an application for an Employment Court injunction due to be heard on Friday. Air New Zealand's group general manager of short-haul airlines, Bruce Parton, said senior staff, including Glen Sowry, who is heading the negotiations, will act as crew on the Zeal 320 flights. Mr Parton said the airline may consider sacking and replacing the 250 Zeal cabin crew if the industrial action is drawn out.