Labour breaks old ties of 'friendship'
David Walker
Guardian, Wednesday June 18th 2008
http://tinyurl.com/6pwtpn
You are a lab assistant, say, at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in
Birmingham or a librarian for Rotherham council. Once you would have
looked to your Labour MP as a friend of your endeavour: Labour believed
in the public sector. But now you hear your MP - Gisela Stuart in
Edgbaston, Denis MacShane in Rotherham - calling for your job to be
abolished and your fellow workers to be sacked.
How else do we interpret their recent assertion that the public sector
is "bloated"? What MacShane calls the "insatiable greed of the state"
means jobs; government's "counter-productive ends" means what you do for
a living; the public sector's generic "incompetence" (all phrases from
his article in the Daily Telegraph last month) means you are stupid and
ineffective. Voting for a Labour MP who believes this would be akin to
turkeys welcoming the festive season.
It's not just maverick backbenchers, glad of a headline. Cabinet
ministers such as John Hutton and Andy Burnham have been pushing in the
same ideological direction, towards decoupling Labour from the public
sector. Of course, the battle is far from over. If Labour loses the next
election, its public sector identity will surely be one of the biggest
bones of contention.
Restructuring will run in two directions. If Labour is no longer the
party of collective action through government (and public sector
employment), what is it? For staff in government employment- 5 million
of them in the UK, about one-fifth of the workforce - the question
becomes: do we have any established friends in politics, any party on
whom we can rely to fight our corner?
In power, Labour has never equated the public interest with that of
public sector workers. The Attlee government mobilised troops to defeat
strikes; Wilson and Callaghan tried to control public sector pay more
tightly than pay in the private sector. Yet Labour in government was
kinder to the public sector; numbers tended to expand and relative pay
was more or less allowed to rise.
And so under New Labour, too. Tony Blair complained about the scars on
his back from dealing with the public sector, but he also signed the
Warwick agreement leading to the generous Agenda for Change programme of
pay in the NHS.
Public sector employment rose this decade by a lot less than some think
- the extra 600,000 heads counted by the Office of National Statistics
in 2006, compared with 1999, did not push total public sector employment
above what it was when Margaret Thatcher lost power. But the climate has
been benign. As a party, Labour's reward has been the cash donated by
such unions as the GMB and Unison; public sector workers are its
constituency backbone.
Other unions, such as the FDA, representing senior civil servants, have
steered clear of political affiliation, saying that because members have
to work for different parties, their union cannot be partisan. Their
problem is that the Tories historically stood for cutting the state (and
its staff's pay, conditions, pensions and numbers) and there was nothing
they could say.
But now the buzz words are "personalisation" and "choice", and the
interests of the "customer" are paramount. Management doctrine
marginalises the interests of staff. The gurus and the management
consultants who follow their precepts have no time for collective
bargaining. Obedient to the spirit of the times, the neo-Blairites seem
to want to shuffle off their old connection to the producers of public
services. Meanwhile, on the public sector hinges the fate of trade
unionism at large. If membership in the public sector fell, that would
be the end of the unions as a social and economic force. They have
already been effectively squeezed out of contention in the private sector.
During the next few years, the employment issues over which people seek
protection through collective action are going to get more lively, not
less. If the Tories come to power at Westminster, they are not going to
leave public sector pensions alone. As inflation rises, the Brown
government puts pressure on real pay in the public sector; a Tory
administration would only increase it.
There are purely trade union responses, such as ballots and strikes.
Historically, however, the public sector unions sought to change the
politics, by putting their weight behind Labour. That option is gone.
David Walker is editor of the Guardian's Public magazine.
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