New Labour aims to privatise Job Centres

JANICE GODRICH, president of civil service union PCS and Mark Serwotka, the general secretary, called a special press conference at TUC conference to show how far New Labour will go to smash the welfare state.

Bill Mullins

Mark Serwotka said that a letter from a top civil servant to Margaret Hodge, Minister for work in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), called for plans to be brought forward to "outsource the main bulk of Job Centre work, benefit processing, fraud investigation and incapacity benefits."

Mark said this would make the chaos of the Child Support Agency (CSA) look like a picnic. "It would increase tenfold the problems of the unemployed, benefit seekers and people who depend on the CSA, who already suffered from the privatisation of that agency."

The PCS demands the government disown this report immediately. Otherwise the union will be prepared to "defend its members' jobs and the services they give to the most vulnerable people in society".

Mark also spoke of the campaign to defend civil service jobs and the strike ballot taking place in London DWP offices. "The relocation of jobs from London and the south-east is at the cost of a major fall in services we provide.

"But at the same time the government is preparing to move the Export Credit Guarantee Department from Cardiff to London. It's indicative of the 'don't care' policies of this government."

On pensions, the PCS and seven other unions had forced the government to retreat before the general election: "If they hadn't then one and a half million workers were ready to strike."

If the government try to increase public sector workers' retirement age again, industrial action will "involve dozens of unions and millions of workers".

The PCS is seconding the main pensions resolution at the TUC which calls for maximum unity of all unions in defence of pension rights.

Their pensions and ours!

DIRECTORS OF Britain's top 100 companies share pensions worth £900 million. Their pensions are worth up to 45 times more than most staff pensions. In each company the largest director's pension is worth £4.5 million on average.

And, while practically every FTSE 100 company has now closed its defined benefit schemes to new employees, more than 85% of directors surveyed in the TUC Pensions Watch study have pensions related to their final salary. Workers are supposed to survive on cheaper, chancier schemes.

As TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said, they continue to build up "enormous VIP pensions, as they tighten everyone's belts but their own."

DWP workers confident in ballot

STAFF IN the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) across London are balloting for strike action in response to management proposals to relocate and cut jobs.

Mick Philipsz, PCS, Department for Education and Skills

One worker at Catford Job Centre in south London told me about receiving emails from management suggesting that some staff would have to travel to work in Hackney or Stratford. They say "it's only an hour's journey away." But she had to take her grandchild to school every morning so it would be impossible to travel to the other side of London as well.

In theory Job Centre workers are on flexitime but in practice they must be at their desks between 9am and 5pm. In a nearby Job Centre, staff have been taking calls after 6pm. So the 'flexibility' is all to suit management.

Another worker I spoke to had been doing the job for more than 15 years. She has roots in the area and certainly does not want to move now. The workers are well aware of the government's climb-down on pensions after the threat of joint trade union action. They are eagerly waiting for the ballot result.

Organise migrant workers

THE SCANDAL of migrant workers from Eastern Europe being used to scab on the Gate Gourmet workers is now well known.

Bill Mullins

They were hired in Poland, brought to England and trained in secret locations to replace the workers the bosses were preparing to sack. This is the reality of the Labour government's neo-liberal policies which it demands all other European countries should adopt.

British big business' support for "open doors" for migrant workers from Eastern Europe is not a case of offering those workers a better life in Britain but more a case of: "the free-market buccaneering way to cut wages" (Polly Toynbee in The Guardian).

Without a real effort by the unions to recruit and organise these migrant workers, the bosses will continue to use them to undermine the wages and conditions of British workers.

The TUC must launch a mass campaign aimed at the Eastern European workers. This must appeal to them in their own languages to join a union and not to let themselves be used by the bosses to cut wages and conditions.

The gangster elements that get migrant workers jobs in this country exploit the language and cultural gap. The TUC has found some workers being charged £300 to get a job and if they are from outside the EU, up to £2,500 to get a work permit.

In East Anglia the TUC found gang masters keeping up to 60% of migrant workers' pay. One worker in a potato packing factory in Peterborough was working 60-hour-week night shifts for £4 per hour and paying £40 a week rent to share a house with 14 others.

Since the EU was expanded in 2004, 232,000 workers from the 'new' EU have registered on the home office scheme. Unlike most of the rest of the 'old' EU countries, Britain (and Ireland) have lifted all requirements for work permits.

In Ireland it was the Socialist Party TD (MP) Joe Higgins who exposed the scandal of the Gamma workers (mostly from Turkey) whose wages were illegally being kept in a Dutch bank without their knowledge. Joe's campaign resulted in the company having to fork out over E25 million to the workers involved. It shook the Irish government, who were forced to employ more wage inspectors.

The 'old' members of the EU still demand work permits but all that means is that migrant workers have to work illegally.

Capitalism will always play off worker against worker. History is littered with examples of how the bosses have exploited one new nationality after another. From the Irish immigrants who were used to break miners' strikes in south Wales in the 19th century, right up to the present day with Gate Gourmet.

The trade unions have a duty to reach out to these workers and ensure that they aren't used to drive down the conditions of British workers in a "race to the bottom."

Education: Fight Blair's 'market forces' solution

TUC reports: New Labour aims to privatise Job Centres

Anti-trade union laws attacked

Labour's 1945 landslide

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