An afternoon South of the Border in Latin America with Oliver Stone on Wednesday and a 3-D trip to Toy Story 3 last night have stuck in my fuzzy ‘downtime’ brain, despite my best efforts to crank up a gear and blog for Public Finance.
South of the Border celebrates the rise and growing confidence of social movements and the new socialism they have prompted in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Ecuador. Toy Story 3 sees Woody, Buzz and the gang escape the abandoned toy box and win a desperate struggle for psychological and physical survival against the harsh odds of Andy’s adolescent rejection and the spectre of the landfill site.
So what’s that got to do with anything Public Finance readers might be interested in? If you really want to know, the image of Woody, Buzz and co hurtling towards a furnace broke through my vacation reverie and thoughts of real life on Planet UK zoomed in – more Tory Story than Toy Story you might say. It’s been a bit of a week you see.
On Friday last week, the three local government trade unions – Unison, GMB and Unite – found ourselves lodging an official dispute against the largely Conservative Local Government Employers and lodging a claim for binding arbitration with Acas. Our complaint? Refusal to pay the £250 pay rise kindly ‘promised’ by Chancellor Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor, to public sector workers earning less than £21,000 (on top of a pay freeze for 2010-2011) and sending out a document entitled ‘Reducing Workforce Costs’ to councils without a hint of a ‘Big Society’ encounter with the unions. It encourages councils to seek local agreements to cut pay and conditions, reduce hours, use interns and volunteers and generally undermine collective bargaining.
Before anyone asks ‘what’s wrong with that?’, let me tell you. First of all, it highlights the disdain of the Tory-led Local Government Association for trade unions in general and a negotiating body that has kept industrial peace and fostered good industrial relations since World War 2.
Secondly, local government pay is the lowest in the entire public sector, with a bottom rate of £6.30 an hour and almost a quarter of a million women workers on less than £6.50. Vital local services are provided by hundreds of thousands on poverty pay, dependent on state benefits to just about get by. Maternity pay, annual leave and flexible working rights all lag behind the NHS and other public sectors.
Thirdly, a staggering 67% of the workforce earns less than £21,000, when median earnings across the economy in 2009 were £489 a week (£25,248 a year). Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised given the below-inflation pay awards of recent years.
And fourthly, the sector-wide agreement already provides for local flexibility, so pay for the same job varies widely across the UK to reflect labour market conditions and local pay rates. Add to that the fact that our members are now covering the work of 23,000 jobs lost in the last 15 months, and you might understand why Toy Story became Tory Story.
If you don’t understand and you remain hard hearted, think on this. A relative of mine, herself a local government employee and Unison member, works in a specialist section of the housing department in a large rural council. One of the many victims of the council’s botched attempt at bringing about equal pay for work of equal value a few years ago, she earns little more than £17,000. For this she travels hundreds of miles on tricky country roads each week, assessing the home adaption needs of elderly and disabled people, making drawings and estimates, advising on sources of help and liaising with colleagues back in the office. She’s a bit of a model employee too. Having worked in welfare rights, she has personally expanded her own job to include a benefits assessment service and seems to have great success in securing hitherto unclaimed funding.
As if the salary weren’t insult enough, she has to provide her own car to do the job and is paid the princely sum of 40p a mile, with no recourse to further allowances for wear and tear or breakdown. No ‘essential user’ allowance or even a council ‘pool’ car for her, just the privilege of subsidising a vital council service on an already low wage. When the snow jammed the roads last winter and she asked to visit clients from home rather than skid 25 miles to the office first, her request was refused. An everyday story of council folk and a symbol of the disdain regularly meted out to caring, inventive council employees.
Of course, ongoing exploitation of our members was not the only bad news last week. While out ‘crowdsourcing’ on a Dave Direct mission, the prime minister suggested that a home for life may not perhaps be an appropriate right for council tenants. After all, why should they experience the lifelong pleasures of a tower block, when they might have increased their earnings enough to play the housing market?
Home secretary Theresa May rubbed rock salt in it by withdrawing plans for ‘go orders’ which would have protected abused women in their own homes and education secretary Michael Gove just made matters worse by exaggerating take-up of his ill thought-out plans to fragment our education system.
And if culture is your concern, take a look at the TUC’s excellent ‘Cuts Watch’ on its website to see how many small theatre groups and arts projects are being deprived of the modest funding that is their life blood and the only access many in our society have to the theatre, music lessons or a pensioners’ tea dance.
Our welfare state is being dismantled with indecent haste before our very eyes by aristocrats and the Jimmy Choo’d middle classes who have never had as much as a whiff of what it means to go hungry so that your kids can eat, for whom the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne are just routine outings and whose country homes combined could significantly reduce council housing waiting lists. While the banks which gobbled up our members’ taxes get themselves back in credit and start paying out obscene salaries and bonuses again, hundreds of thousands of poorly paid public sector workers wait in trepidation to see if the axe is going to fall on them, while many service users haven’t a clue what’s about to be taken from them.
But South of the Border has made me think that Lady Thatcher might just have had a point. Where there is despair, there may indeed yet be hope, even in this, the most cautious of nations. The poor of Latin America once fell for rule by the rich, for the rich, but slowly and surely things have changed. Now oil and gas are used for education, health and housing. The IMF and the World Bank are put in their rightful places and popular social movements consolidate people power from below and genuine accountability.
Who would have thought it? Certainly not the heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor or his Notting Hill neighbour. May their Bullingdon coat tails catch in Buzz Lightyear’s space suit and take them to infinity and beyond....
Heather Wakefield is the head of the local government service group at Unison
