Stop Cuts In Jobs And Services

NEW LABOUR took a hammering in the 10 June elections.
But Blair wasn’t listening. "Now is not the time for a change of
direction, but it is the time for a change of gear," he said the week
after the election.

New Labour’s policies of cuts and privatisation could
devastate public services. The government are considering acting on the
Gershon report which threatens tens of thousands of public-sector jobs,
particularly in the civil service.

MICK PHILIPSZ works in the head office of the
Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which could have a third of
its workforce cut (1,460 jobs from 4,500) by 2008.

Mick explains: "Year in, year out since I joined the
civil service over 15 years ago I’ve been increasing my productivity while
working longer hours and seeing my pay fall further and further behind the
rest of the public sector.

"At the moment my work involves helping organisations
who work with vulnerable children. Before that I helped ensure that those
thousands who work with pupils when out of school did so as safely as
possible. And before that I helped create childcare in areas of
deprivation.

"The people I have worked with have only ever
complained because I’m not on call or able to provide guidance often
enough. No parent, teacher or local authority worker has ever suggested
that I am a bureaucrat or ‘unnecessary’.

"My reward is that I have still not been able to get
into the property ladder in London and my job is on the line. I would
enter a labour market in which employers have been fed the line that I’m
wasteful and a pen-pusher.

"Yet private consultants are often employed with
taxpayers’ money on over £20,000 a month where I work doing what I and my
colleagues used to do. Where is the sense or justice in that?

"A worker at Queen Mary College was quoted in an
article on DfES cuts in The Guardian, saying: ‘This is about cutting the
lower ranks, not the people who make the policy that makes everyone’s life
impossible. When was the day when a clerical officer made the life of a
head-teacher more impossible?’"

People should not be taken in by the government’s
propaganda. This is an attack on our services and our jobs.

Fight for a properly funded and democratically
accountable public sector. Don’t trust our education, our health, our
future to an unrestrained capitalist market that only cares for profit.
The unions should force Blair and Brown to ‘change direction’ through mass
trade-union action, demonstrations, protests and industrial action if
necessary.