Earlier today over 200 staff and students at Glasgow University rallied against the ongoing ‘restructuring’ process and the cuts which, despite initial denials from management, are eventually beginning to come to light. Called by the UCU, the main lecturer’s union on campus, the demo also had a strong turnout from both Unite and Unison, who represent maintenance and admin staff respectively.

The demo came on the same day it was unveiled in the national press that an entire research unit at the university, the Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD), a pioneering group which regularly features on programmes like Time Team, is being closed down by senior management who claim it does not generate enough income. This is despite the fact it made £200,000 over the past financial year and is entirely self-funding! GUARD staff this afternoon told Leftfield of their shock and anger at the decision, but assured us that they wouldn’t be going down without a fight (apparently they’ve got whole cupboards stacked full of medieval weaponry and cannons, just sayin’…).

The decision clearly indicates where the priorities of senior management and Principal Anton Muscatelli lie – in the further marketisation  of education, where any department ‘not generating enough income’ can be discarded and thrown to the scrap heap, and raises serious questions of where the axe will fall next – if a self-funding department at the forefront of archaeology in the UK can be sacrificed, can anything be considered safe?

Over 100 jobs are now at risk at the university. The UCU have identified 83 across four departments which they believe are at threat, plus the 30 staff employed at GUARD. On top of this, across departments staff are not being replaced when leaving – a sly strategy of ‘natural wastage’ that avoids any confrontation. Last year, the University Health Service was subject to serious downgrading, with the closure of the main medical facility for student accommodation. Earlier this year, the post-graduate student union – the only one of its kind in Scotland – went bankrupt. What this amounts to is a serious attack on education and student services, but from a management cynical and skilled enough to stagger out the cuts – chances are, the major announcements will come at the very end of term, if not during the summer holidays itself.

The student-run Anti-Cuts Action Network was established at the uni last year as a pre-emptive move against the cuts. Management have consistently played a difficult game with us, making false promises and refusing to even reveal the existence of the restructuring process in itself until February of this year. Similarly, the student union bureaucracy have acted shamefully – no official student representation showed up in support of today’s demonstration. This comes despite past assurances from the SRC that they will ‘oppose academic cuts’.
Today’s ACAN speaker received an excellent reception, arguing that if any cuts are necessary at Glasgow Uni, it should be the salaries of senior management. Muscatelli is paid £248,000 and received a pay rise of 8% this year. Meanwhile, staff are being offered below-inflationary increases of 0.5%, effectively mounting to a pay cut, exposing the rank hypocrisy of those pushing through these swathing job cuts.

The UCU have called for an immediate halt to the restructuring process and for a fuller consultation to take place.Unfortunately, any opposition to the plans was needed months ago – when the unions were offering ‘cautious welcomes’ to the plans and refusing to engage with those who predicted the inevitable cuts and job losses that would soon follow. Nevertheless, there is still scope for action to be taken – the uni has warned that compulsory redundancies may be necessary, saying that ‘nothing can be ruled out at this stage’.

The restructuring, which will see the number of faculties cut from 9 down to 4 and departments slashed from 45 to around 20, will be complete by August of this year. It looks likely that the major cuts will not be announced until the break-up for the summer, creating obvious difficulties for resistance from a students.
As struggles like the one at Sussex, which has seen a huge militant anti-cuts campaign of student occupations and resistance alongside UCU strike action (in the face of police brutality and unjustified expulsions), the campaign will require mass participation and solidarity between staff and students. Today was just the beginning!

As the General Election campaign enters full swing pundits and pollsters are falling over themselves trying to find out who will become the next Government, based largely on the fates of dozens of swing seats – most across the south east of England. Very little attention so far is being given to Scotland. This is despite Labour driving around Glasgow constituencies asking for folk to vote Labour to “keep the Tories out”. Never mind that Labour’s majority in most Glasgow constituencies is massive – 60% in some cases, that the Tories struggle to hold their deposit in many Glasgow seats and across Scotland Labour hold 40 seats compared to only 1 Tory seat.

Scotland’s been ignored in most of the election coverage because it is taken for granted that it will overwhelmingly vote Labour. It doesn’t matter which way Scotland votes in the national picture, because swing seats in middle England will determine who governs the UK. This meant despite Scotland repeatedly voting Labour throughout the 80’s had no effect on who governed us.

The electoral contest in Scotland has always been different from the UK, as it’s dominated by a rivalry between Labour and the SNP (and in recent years the Lib dems). The SNP have always stood on a platform of “standing up for Scotland” and argued that the only way to keep the Tories out of governing Scotland for good is to go independent.

With a hung parliament now a likelihood, a small but significant SNP group (alongside Welsh Nationalists) could extract concessions out of the larger UK wide parties as part of a coalition Government. The SNP say they’ll bargain with the major parties to spare Scotland harsh Westminster imposed cuts – that More Nats means Less Cuts. While in England a variety of smaller parties – Greens, BNP, UKIP, Respect – are trying to get seats, and have had some success in the past in other elections the SNP make that harder in Scotland. This is because as a party the SNP can play to an extremely varied vote – they can be a party of rural conservatism in the North East of Scotland, and to the left of Labour in Glasgow.

Despite this variety the SNP’s overall programme is still significantly to the left of Labour – opposition to war in Iraq (but not Afghanistan), opposed to Trident nuclear weapons, against the unfair council tax, against privatisation of schools and hospitals. When the SSP has done well in elections, it has been predominantly SNP votes it takes. The SNP has always had a vote from progressive, Left-wing Scots who are angry at Labour’s shift to the right. But do the SNP deserve the reputation of being progressive, left of centre, and in this election, champions of Scotland who will stand against cuts?

The SNP might be able to pose left and opposed to cuts when they stand for Westminster but their record in Holyrood and local councils speaks different. Right after winning the 2007 elections the SNP alongside the Liberals in Edinburgh City council tried to cut 22 schools. Thanks to the opposition of school pupils, unions and their parents – which SSY and the SSP both took part in – the SNP backed down from their plans to slash education in Edinburgh.

They’ve been a lot more successful in other places though – in Renfrewshire the SNP council has imposed hikes in charges for the warden service for the elderly, and is proposing shutting down the school bus service for kids and Johnstone swimming pool. They’ve also got Edinburgh’s services back in their line of sights again – proposing to cut 6 community centres. The SNP have also attacked council workers pay and conditions in West Dunbartonshire and suspended SSP councillor Jim Bollan for supporting the workers in this council.

When the SNP took power one of the first things it did was to freeze the council tax. The SSP spent years campaigning against the council tax, which was a marginally fairer version of the poll tax, but still a tax which does not take account of how much income the taxpayer has. The SNP was shifted to the left by this campaigning and has won support on demands to abolish the tax entirely. Freezing council tax is quite right given how it disproportionately punishes low paid workers, and the SSP has proposed a Scottish Service Tax that would raise more money and shift the burden of tax from the poor to the rich. Unfortunately just freezing the council tax, as the SNP have done without changing the tax system has meant less funds for public services and a necessity for cuts.

The SNP faced opposition from other parties on the issue of the council tax but never pushed forward for reform of the council tax to shame the lib dems in particular for not backing some alternative. Nor did they seriously try and mobilise community organisations, unions, etc to demand Scotland have real control over it’s resources to pay for decent services. The reality is that the SNP whilst having some Left wing MSP’s and councillors has also had a Thatcherite wing who don’t believe the rich should pay more tax. Alex Salmond declared that Scots opposition to Thatcher was based on her social policies not her economic ones – a bit astounding when you consider most popular revulsion of Maggie in Scotland lies in the destruction of industry, mass unemployment and poverty her economic plans caused.

The SNP continue to argue for Thatcherite economics – one of their flagship policies for big business is a cut in corporation tax from 30% to 20%.  Corporation tax was already slashed under the Tory governments in the 80’s and early 90’s, and lost revenue increased through the use of indirect taxes like VAT which spiked up to 17.5%. This now means that the poorest fifth of society pays more in tax as a % than the richest fifth. Under the SNP’s plans, the poorest section of people in Scotland would pay almost double a % of their income in tax than corporations would in tax. This tax cut is justified on the basis that wealth will “trickle down” – that tax cuts for the rich will increase investment in the economy, and this will eventually benefit the low paid and working class majority. The reality however is that when the Tories enacted these tax changes child poverty in the UK tripled. If the SNP are allowed to cut corporation tax there will be less money in the coffers for jobs and services, and more cuts.

There is a whole other raft of issues that the SNP are on quite a different wavelength from some of their left-wing and progressive supporters; on Afghanistan they only call for a “rethink” of the mission, not troop withdrawal; they took money from homophobe Brian Souter and dropped their commitment to re-regulating Scotland’s rigged and privatised bus transport. Alex Salmond also calls for a lowering of the abortion limit from 24 to 20 weeks, which would force a small but abused minority of women to seek the backstreets if they wanted an abortion at 24 weeks.

Voting for the SNP may be more left-wing in many respects than Labour, but they are by no means committed to opposing all cuts like the SSP is, or to redistributing wealth from rich to poor. Their plans for corporation tax would just be another salvo in a continuing war to extract more and more money from working class people to the wealthiest. Their independence was based on Scotland being like Ireland, a “Celtic Tiger” of low wages and lwo taxes with our economy based almost entirely on the finance industry. The SNP have done great damage to the cause of independence by attaching an independent Scotland to an economy based on the casino. Only the SSP has consistently stood against any and all cuts to public services in the past 10 years, with a commitment to a Scotland that is a republic, that abolishes poverty, low pay and involvement in foreign wars. If you want left-wing champions for Scotland don’t vote for a kiddy on SNP to do it, vote for what you wanted, vote SSP.

SSY has already reported on the astronomical levels of youth unemployment that Britain is suffering from during the recession. The Government is currently trying to curb it by introducing funding into the “Future Jobs Fund” – a fund which ostensibly exists to provide funding for jobs specifically for those unemployed for 6 months and 18-24 years old.

These jobs are almost always minimum wage however, will only create 150,000 jobs (out of youth unemployment of 2 million) and are only guaranteed to last for 6 months. This will be good for Labour’s election prospects in the short term as youth unemployment falls slightly, but not for stopping another generation from being lost.

The Tories think they have the right idea, and they’ve got backing from none other than Michael Caine. Cameron’s launched a “National Citizen’s Service”, the aim of which is to get young people into voluntary community work – helping old ladies, painting fences, etc. The plan has proved popular in recent opinion polls, and with youth unemployment so high what could be wrong with giving young people work – particularly when it appears to be socially useful work?

Well for a start the work is unpaid. If your under 18 (and Cameron’s plan is directed to 16 year old school leavers) you cannot apply for benefits. With the economy in such dire straits, school leavers today are going to have as much trouble finding jobs as their counterparts did in the 80’s. These lack of options mean that many young people may go into a National Service plan not out of choice but because there is nothing else for them to do.

Not only is there no proper wage in these National Service plans but there is no guarantee of a permanent job, apprenticeship, training or education. It would serve as a good way of getting young people off the unemployment figures but not provide them with much of a future after their National Service is over (and the service will only last for 2 months).

The biggest danger is that the national citizen service plan is a stepping stone to “workfare” – where unemployed young people will be made to work for their beneifts (and not a wage). This was what happened during the last period of mass youth unemployment in the 80’s, where the Tories introduced Youth Training Schemes. This forced school leavers to work for pittance wages for employers.

There’s still a similar scheme like it today, called Skillseekers where some jobs for 16-17 year olds are not minimum wage and young people can work a 40 hour week and take home only £50.

These kind of schemes do not reduce youth unemployment – they are only used as a short term pool of extremely cheap labour for employers. This pool of cheap labour means that companies who need to take on extra staff won’t take them as school leavers on the minimum wage – they’ll wait till they’re on the dole and employ them for £1 – 2 an hour. Both the Tories and New Labour clearly believe that having an army of low paid young workers are necessaries to allow companies to become profitable again after the recession.

What’s the alternative then? Well there’s nothing in principle wrong from community work for unemployed young people – far from it, done properly it can be a socially useful job far more rewarding than working in a bar or a call centre. There are plenty of communities in Scotland suffering the worst levels of poverty in Western Europe who desperately need assistance in making the streets cleaner, safer, providing childcare, running youth centres, assisting the elderly etc. But the SSY and SSP wants jobs like these to be available for unemployed young people on a decent wage, on permanent contracts and with full trade union rights. That can be easily funded if we enacted a greed tax on the hyper-rich in the UK. It may not have many celebrity supporters, but it is an idea which we believe will have a lot of support among young people in Scotland today.

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire . . .

A group of French workers has threatened to blow up their own factory if they don’t get their full redundancy pay.

Workers at the Sodimatex car parts plant near Paris were told last year they were getting laid off, and have been in a row at the level of redundancy payments ever since. Stubborn bosses are offering them just half of the amount their demanding to compensate for losing their jobs.

On Thursday, workers blockaded the road in, and then barricaded themselves inside the factory when riot cops arrived.

And now workers have demanded the bosses take action, or they’ll blow the plant. One of those taking action told French radio (by phone):

“We have a 5,000 litre gas tank surrounded by wooden palettes, and I can guarantee you we’ll blow it up. The whole building and everything around it will be flattened.”

Yet again French workers have made us over here look timid. While Scottish unions aren’t even allowed to march in Glasgow city centre, these workers have obviously been taking their lessons from the action movie school of negotiations.

And here it’s likely that, under repressive anti-trade union and indeed anti-terrorist laws, such actions would have to be condemned by the official union.

But in France, union lawyer for the workers Caroline Substelny said:

“These workers fear that once they lose their jobs they will not be able to find another one. If the management does not take its responsibilities seriously, then workers will use all means at their disposal to get what they deserve.”

Shocking and radical as these moves might seem to some readers, the fact is you just have to look at Greece and elsewhere to see the violence bosses have got planned for us, the working class. They intend to make workers everywhere pay for their idiocy by drastically cutting living standards, and if we don’t like it there’ll be riot cops to stop us doing anything about it. In the face of this, these French workers are ready to take it all the way in the fight for what they deserve.

Good for them!

The 3 contenders for Chancellor of the Exchequer all agree on one thing – the budget deficit must be cut. This will require a variety of “brutal”, “savage” and “deep” cuts – but none of course, will affect you or your frontline services. It’s a bit like serial killer say he’s going to stab you repeatedly but you will still be able to go for a pint and a game of football afterwards. Most people don’t like seeing their school, hospital or for that matter job cut. But all 3 parties say they can make these brutal cuts without it really affecting the living standards of the population – how?

Well the Tories in league wi the tabloid press have said they” cut “non jobs” that are allegedly rampant in the public sector; gypsy co-ordinators, totem pole dramatists, carbon officers, etc. A lot of these jobs are basic admin stuff which have been made to sound fancy to stop the people working in them from forgetting that we are all middle class now. But a lot of them are tokenistic, designed to make it look like the Government are doing something about climate change, racism and discrimination in the workplace.

Ultimately though the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates 14 – 24% cuts in non-protected departments are necessary to deal with the budget deficit. We gave £500 billion in a bail out to the banks – sorry folks, there aren’t enough walking coordinators and health and safety outreach guardian jobs to cut to save that kind of money.

One thing that can be cut, and doesn’t directly affect the mass of the population though is benefits. There’s already demands from the tabloid press to drastically cut “spongers” on benefits. There are parts of Glasgow, London, Manchester etc with large minorities of adults who are living on benefits – a lot of whom are also on disability benefit.

Disability benefit ranges from £47 – £70 a week, an increase from what you get on the dole, which is around £50 a week depending on your age. The Government can’t cut people’s dole easily, but it can force people who are on disability allowance on to the basic unemployment allowance.

New Government tests have been designed, with 70% of the applicants failing to qualify for disability allowance, and deemed fit to work. These tests have been condemned by charities like Macmillan, and the Citizens Advice Bureau for deeming those with terminal illnesses as being fit to work.

Here’s a few examples below,

A CAB in London saw a former engineer in his 50’s who was working as a driver. After feeling ill for a number of months he visited his G.P and was immediately referred to hospital where he was admitted with heart disease and required a triple bypass. About three weeks after he’d been discharged he started to feel extremely ill again. He went back to hospital and after a series of new tests was diagnosed with inoperable and incurable stomach and liver cancer. Although he was advised to continue taking regular exercise, he found walking and breathing difficult, was in constant pain and suffered a number of uncomfortable side effects from both his cancer and heart medication. At his WCA he was found fit for work on the basis that he remarked how he walked daily (although not far and not without discomfort) and could raise his hands above his head (once). None of his medical consultants could believe the decision. He recently appealed the original decision and was successful in being put into the support group for people not required to look for work.

Other examples are given, of one client with Parkinson’s disease who was barely able to stand, and whose speech was slurred but still cleared as fit to work. Another man who was shot at by a violent gang, and diagnosed with PTSD was declared fit for work. His test did not take account of any of his personal circumstances, but just asked him a series of yes and no questions. It’s not dissimilar from what was featured in the documentary The Trap, where people were diagnosed or cleared of complex psychological disorders on the basis of a questionnaire and nothing else. New Labour are quite literally working people to death to save money.

The welfare bill for the budget is massive, with £190 billion spent on social protection – the largest single cost – and a further £29 billion spent on personal social services. Since coming into power in 1997 New Labour have been attacked for this massive proportion of spending on the welfare state. But the reality is the benefits you receive today for being unemployed are lower in relation to average income than ever before. Benefits are now 10% of average wages, down from almost 20% in 1970.

New Labour’s massive welfare bill exists due to long term unemployment in urban areas all over the UK – who previously had no lack of people working, but were plunged into massive unemployment, poverty, ill health and crime as part of the transformation of Britain from a manufacturing country (with the union power that entails) to one based on finance services.

This transformation meant that the economic boom has passed over areas in Scotland with massive unemployment, and without any Government investment or control of the economy to make jobs there are thousands claiming benefits because the talents they had are now irrelevant to the modern economy.

Another part of the welfare bill is in tax credits. Tax credits act as benefits for those who work, but are paid very poorly. Contrary to the tabloids many civil servants who administer this service are themselves paid so low that they also claim them. Tax credits effectively act as a Government subsidy to employers who pay their workers such a low wage, the state has to step in to provide them with enough money to earn a decent wage.

You can expect the unemployed to face a sustained attack from whichever party wins the next election; cutting benefits, forcing the ill to work, making people work for the dole (and not a decent wage). Remember that the biggest welfare state claimant in the UK’s history is not single parents, immigrants, the unemployed or the disabled – it’s the banking system who took £500 billion. They’re the real spongers.

This time last year it looked almost certain that Labour would not only lose the election, but be absolutely humiliated by the Tories. They had not only dropped in the polls, but actually came third in the European Elections. Within the past month however, Labour’s electoral fortunes have resurged, Lazarus like. It is not an overwhelming resurgence – they are still behind the Tories in %’s in all polls, but thanks to the UK’s electoral boundaries they could get less votes than the Tories but win more seats. This has happened before in UK voting history. Even if they do win more seats than the Tories however, they would at best have a minority Government.

This is increasingly the best Labour can hope for – though it is not an impossibility. A Labour Government could either run the country as a minority Government, like the SNP do in Scotland – or they could form a coalition with the Libdems. This electoral scenario should give hope to Socialists, as it means at a time when the bankers need a strong Government to push through ruthless and brutal cuts the UK will actually have the weakest Government in decades.

Labour have already tried to steal the Tories thunder by claiming that their cuts will be “deeper than Thatcher’s”. That should send a chill down the spine of millions of working people in the UK, especially as it is being said BEFORE a general election. At the same time Labour are saying they will defend frontline services – it’s bizarre that both Cameron and Brown believe they can both make savage cuts but not attack peoples communities, education, and NHS. It’s a con trick that will be exposed when they start to try and make those cuts, and the left has to be able to organise and fight back like we did in the SOS campaign.

Despite New Labour trying to retake Tory ground quite clumsily, they are still managing to stay in the polls with a fighting chance – why? The most sensible explanation is that the real threat of a Tory Government has mobilised Labour’s old working class support to vote for them. Despite hatred of Labour, millions of people can remember Thatcherism and will vote for a lesser evil to stop it. Also, again in a crude and disingenuous way Labour are using class as a tactic. From Gordon Brown attacking Cameron’s Eton background, to their “Fairer for All” sloganeering Labour are trying desperately to carve out some difference between them and the Tories.

For the past 13 years Labour have dropped ideology from their politics – they got elected on the basis they were the best “administrators” of the UK. They could rely on most of their working class base and large sections of the middle class to vote for them on this basis. Now that the economy has collapsed so badly, Labour can’t pretend to be competent apolotical admins. They have to create some kind of false divide between them and the Tories, and they are having some success in exploiting widespread anger at privilege to pose as the defenders of the working class majority.

This crude posturing was supposed to be the reason Labour could not win elections – mentioning class was meant to lead to electoral disaster. Yet right now, it is probably the only tactic that could keep Gordon Brown in Number 10. If nothing else it is heartening for Socialists and the Left in general, that basic parts of our politics are not irrelevant or outdated, even when they aren’t fleshed out.

Where Labour’s use of “class war” may fail is obvious though – while millions of working class people hate the Tories, and will vote for New Labour if they pose as the defenders of working people just as many know the reality; that Labour are trundling out this rhetoric to win an election, and have applied none of these ideas when they had the opportunity to.

This blog can be serious sometimes, as displayed through our use of graphs.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation outlines how the poorest tenth of the population in the UK have actually seen their wealth decline – at the same time as the richest tenth have seen their wealth increase dramatically. 40% of the increase in wealth in the UK has gone to that top 10% of earners, this top 10% also has a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of earners. The top 10% are more than 100 times as wealthy as the bottom 10%.

Class politics are by no means dead in the UK, and never will be for as long as class divisions exist. But if New Labour wants to use class rhetoric to win an election, they need to have the actions to back up the propaganda.

Cancel your weekend jaunt to the Maldives SSY readers, those mindless militants have only gone and ruined everyone’s holiday – British Airways cabin crew are going ahead with strike action after the collapse of talks. The strike by BA workers was originally called last year, and was due to occur during Christmas/New Year. That strike was ruled illegal by a High Court because it was believed ex-BA workers would have been allowed a vote. This was despite the vote being won by a massive margin on a massive turnout, and the fact that no MP, MEP, Councillor or any other elected official is disqualified despite the potential of inaccurate electoral lists, and their mandate being far smaller than for the BA strike. The BA workers union, UNITE the largest union in the UK has rescheduled strikes for this weekend – but has itself also been dragged into a political storm.

After the Tories were exposed for taking money from a Lord who has not been paying tax in the UK, David Cameron believes he can deflect the criticism he has faced by attacking Labour for it’s links with UNITE. As the largest union in the country, UNITE has donated £11 million to the Labour Party, and sponsors hundreds of MP’s as well as providing assistance during election campaigns for Labour. The Tories are playing to their middle England base – the same base that was wooed by Blairism – that New Labour is over, and Labour has returned to its left wng trade union roots.

If only. If UNITE have Labour in its grip, they certainly aren’t squeezing where they should be. The only statements from the Labour government on the dispute have not been ones of support, nor even neutrality. Both Gordon Brown and Lord Adonis have attacked the strike, as bad for UNITE, BA and “the national interest”.

No Labour minister has spoke out on UNITE’s willingness to compromise. UNITE were willing to accept an offer put forward by BA and call off the strikes, but this offer was taken off the table by management. The unions members have already worked for free for a month, and have outlined the sacrifices they are prepared to make for BA. What the union is unprepared to do is to accept an imposed settlement from BA – one that freezes pay for 2 years and will reduce staff on flights. BA are also planning on introducing new terms for fresh staff, which will mean they will earn substantially less than current cabin crew. This will not only attack the wages of BA staff but reduce customer service on flights. BA say these changes are necessary due to the losses BA made last year, of £342 million. The unions desire to strike against this background has raised concerns from media pundits that the strike is suicidal. However a mix of Walshs cuts and union sacrifices means BA is sitting on £2 billion, enough to keep the company afloat despite strikes. Also, both BA management and the anti-union press and politicians did not appear to be very concerned for BA’s future when the company was fined a massive £270 million for price fixing. This criminality did not of course result in Walsh facing any threat to his job, despite the fact that without this fine BA would not have to make such cuts to staff and conditions.

The unions willingness to negotiate means nothing to Willie Walsh however, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the aim of the dispute for BA management is not simply enforcing changes to pay and staff, but to remove the unions influence and power. Willie Walsh himself was a former trade unionist from the Irish Airlines Pilots Association, so is aware of the power an organised workforce has. In a union magazine he is on record saying “A reasonable man gets nowhere in negotiations”. Walsh upheld his motto well during his defection from union rep to managament in Aer Lingus. His management of the company was was disastrous for many of its staff – his lack of “reason” allowed him to go very far indeed.

In management at Aer Lingus Walsh attacked trade unions and slashed thousands of jobs. He was condemned by no other than Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, when he said that Walsh’s running of Aer Lingus was a time “when the management wanted to steal the assets for themselves through a management buy out, shafting staff interests”. When Bertie Ahern accuses you of being a dodgy spiv, he’s probably on to something given his own experience of being one himself.

Walsh’s plans are to maintain BA’s image as a “premium” airline, but without “premium” pay for the staff. His ultimate aim is to smash the UNITE union so he can downgrade pay to the levels present in Ryanair, Easyjet, Virgin etc, where the cabin crew earns substantially less. BA, the Tories and their allies in the press have made a hue and cry of the fact that BA wages for cabin crew are higher than in other airlines – but then again, the fares for BA are higher than these budget airlines. A more important point however is this – so what if BA cabin crew get more than budget airline equivalents? Ultimately, its the cabin crew (along with thousands of other workers) who keep BA going, not its shareholders or its management, with its incompetent criminal attempts to rig prices.

The facts are simple – if you are in a union, on average you will have better pay, better conditions, and increased job security. Those basic facts stand up against propaganda that trade unionism is like flares and disco music – best kept in the 70’s. Any reduction in BA workers conditions won’t improve wages for Ryanair cabin crew or customer service. All it will do is increase the profits for Willie Walsh and BA’s shareholders.

Despite the global recession, record unemployment and demands to cut public spending across the world Forbes has revealed that the wealth of the richest billionaires has continued to increase. The global financial crisis has still not stopped the rich from becoming even richer. This year, Bill Gates has been toppled from the number 1 richest by a Mexican Businessman Carlos Slim.

Slim now has a personal wealth estimated at $53 Billion – thats an increase from last year of $18 Billion. Slim’s personal wealth is even more disgusting when you consider that his home country of Mexico still faces widespread poverty – the average Mexican income is only $14,500 and 17% of the country lives below the poverty line. Slim makes his money through his telecom empire Telmex, which operates as a virtual monopoly controlling 90% of Mexico’s phone lines.

Despite his personal wealth increasing by $13 billion, the much more recognisable face of Bill Gates has been bumped into second place. Gates may have made his millions out of a genuine creative ability to redefine how people work with computers, but in order to keep the company he founded – Microsoft – dominant in the market they have had to form their own monopoly like Slim. Microsoft are increasingly threatened by superior and free open source operating systems for computers and have instituted technical measures that will allow them to keep their market share at the price of holding back progress in computer technology.

In at number 5 is Lakshmi Mittal, once the UK’s richest man. Mittal is a steel magnate whose personal wealth stands at $28.7 Billion. Mittal’s Kazakh mines have been condemned by the coalminers working in them, for their appalling safety record. More than 90 miners have died in his mines since 2004, and many of the miners condemn Mittals lax health and safety precautions as being even worse than during the Soviet era. Mittal has also done damage to the environment in the pursuit of naked profit – in 1998 Mittal bought a steel plant for only £1 in Cork, 3 years later not only had he made the workforce of 400 redundant but left the Irish taxpayer of a bill of €70m for the damage his plant had caused to Cork harbour.

The total number of billionaires on the list has increased from 793 to 1011, and their average net worth has increased to $3.5 billion, an increase of $500 million from last year. Interestingly the number of billionaires outside of the western world has rocketed – the number of Chinese Billionaires has doubled, and there are more Billionaires in Russia now than any European country.

Alongside Chinese Billionaires there has been an increase in the number of Indian Billionaires – showing that despite the massive poverty in India, there are a few who are able to live lives beyond the imagination of their workforce. In both China and Russia the dismantling of large parts of the planned economy and the welfare state has allowed a massive transfer of wealth to these Billionaires, which accounts for their ability to challenge the dominance of western Billionaires on the rich list.

The next time David Cameron, Nick Clegg, or Gordon Brown tell us about the necessity of sacrifice, about how were all in it together, or that it’s unreasonable for people to demand a defence of their jobs or living conditions remember this list. For the past 30 years Thatcherism and its equivalents in Europe and the US have made the rich richer than they could have possibly imagined in the 70’s, at the costs of the welfare state and the right to work. Now even in a global recession – the worst in 80 years – they are still getting richer, and expect us to pay for their mistakes.

tesco's ideal employee

Young people are lazy, illiterate, untidy, useless and have an ‘attitude problem’, one of the most highly-paid people in the country revealed yesterday to a conference of supermarket executives. Lucy Neville-Rolf, who earned £1.6 million last year in her job as an executive director of Tesco, blames the ‘education system’ for its failings to create a perfect society of conformist minimum wage robot clones, in a speech which rolled out just about every clichéd anti-youth prejudice in the book. I mean, it is about time these pesky young folk were brought into line and started showing some fucking gratitude for their shitty minimum wage temp contracts, isn’t it?
Well, Lucy agrees, adding into her anti-youth tirade that ‘a society where people don’t feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society.’

Undoubtedly, Neville-Rolf hinted in her speech at serious issues in our education system, in her claims that  school-leavers “Cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”. There are tens of thousands of young people every year slipping through the system and leaving school lacking basic numeracy and literacy skills -- but the only reason this concerns Tesco is that it’s affecting their profit margins, not because they actually give a shit about the state of education in this country. If they really do care that much, maybe they could consider not going to such extreme lengths to avoid paying their taxes here…?
Tesco already employees 40,000 people under the age of 19, and seemingly want to see the whole school-system re-oriented to be a rolling production line of cheap labour to suit their own interests. In all their moaning about the state of education, something they’ve done in the past too, they seem to miss the point that education is important for education’s sake. This sentiment the education system purely acts to ready people for a live of wage slavery is pretty worrying at a time when schools and colleges are facing massive budget cuts from central government.

Lucy Neville-Rolf says that young people seem to think that the ‘world owes them a living’. Why the hell shouldn’t it? Everyone has the right to a job with decent pay and conditions, and  just because the bosses at Tesco would rather we lived in a corporate paradise of low-taxes and the conditions of cheap labour (ie. mass unemployment), doesn’t mean it’s suddenly acceptable to start shitting all over young people. After all, do you think Lucy Neville-Rolf would go into her work smiling, happy and looking forward to a fun day of shelf-stacking if she was on £5.86 an hour? I doubt it.

BONUS: TESCO INVADES DENMARK!!

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PCS in Glasgow [photo: john lanigan

 Thirty thousand civil servants (people who work in places like the Scottish Parliament, job centres, courts and tax offices) are on strike in Scotland today.
The action is being taken by members of the PCS trade union, over changes to redundancy entitlement which mean that if staff lose their job, they could also lose up to a third of what they would’ve previously been paid as compensation. The government is hoping to save £500,000 through this scheme.
What makes this so important at the current time, is that both Labour and the Tories are intent on pushing through massive cuts in the public sector, including job losses  - and now they don’t even want workers taking redundancy to even get decent compensation!

Meanwhile at the Student Loans Company – where workers are also represented by the PCS union – management are looking to lay off around around 150 staff in Glasgow – 20% of the total workforce!
Now, if you’re a student, you’re probably already pretty familiar with the SLC – last year, the issuing of loans was left in chaos, with tens of thousands of students starting the year with no money whatsoever. And these are the loans that have to be paid back, with interest, remember – no student grants for us! Predictably enough, it soon emerged that at the same time as students weren’t receiving their loans, senior executives in the SLC were getting massive bonuses – in some cases, up to five figures. And now, the same management have unveiled their plan to slash nearly 200 jobs across the country, which will presumably make the whole loans thing be even more efficient this year than it was last year, while hundreds of workers are thrown onto the scrapheap at the same time. Logic!

Mairi Cranie, an SSY member who works at the SLC in Glasgow, explained: “The Student Loans Company is cutting almost 200 jobs, the majority of which are in Glasgow. Forty-five of these jobs are moving from Hillington to Darlington at no saving to the tax payer. This will impact families across the west of Scotland and the service for both current students and people in the process of repaying their loans.”

You can sign a petition against the cuts at the SLC here: http://www.gopetition.com/online/34078.html
The PCS strike continues tomorrow, so get down yr local picket line and offer them some support!