Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I had many jobs as a waitress, in a number of different restaurants. Sometimes fun, with friendly customers, plenty of staff camaraderie and after-work drinks, other times gruelling with hot hours spent in a nasty uniform trying not to look embarrassed as I handed over another overcooked/overpriced/much delayed by a fight between the chefs, pizza.

Part of what drew me to these jobs was the tips - by smiling, being helpful and pandering to odd food requests I could significantly increase the amount I took home at the end of a ten hour shift thanks to the generosity of some of those I waited on. Lucky, since these jobs usually had pretty low hourly rates.

But I was furious when I realised the last restaurant I worked in not only paid a low hourly rate but actually took money from my tips as a top up to the minimum wage.
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David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:

Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.

This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market - customers  - judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.

And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.

Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” - rather than just unprofitable - was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?

One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.

But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps.  So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.

* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?

When John McDonnell, hero of the working class, ran for the Labour leadership, one of the most convincing arguments in his arsenal was the demand to repeal the battery of repressive legislation aimed at the Trade Unions, which the Tories fielded and then Labour compounded.

Recently this has again come to the fore, with speculation that Labour is ‘in hoc to its paymasters’ following union bailouts of Labour’s massive debts.

Gordon Brown, while at the G8 summit in Japan has attempted to put paid to this sort of accusation:
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What stories can we tell about poverty in the UK? As prices rise and wages stagnate, a new era of industrial action may turn up some new ones.

The second Tube Cleaners’ Strike this week is a flashpoint for a city and a country sick to its stomach of scraping by or stumbling over whilst the rich get richer under New Labour.

We are sick of market-licking policy promising us jam tomorrow; for a generation, now, we’ve been waiting for Thatcher’s economic reforms to trickle down and lift the rest of us out of squalor, as we were promised they would.

But now the bubble has burst, and it’s the poor who are taking the fall for the City. The recipients of Income Support in London who rode in with their discounted travel cards to vote Ken Livingstone out of City Hall are now feeling the pinch after Johnson cut that benefit, in one of his first acts as Mayor. And with wages across the board failing to rise in line with inflation, Alastair Darling’s plea that we all ‘tighten our belts’ rings hollowly in the ears of those not earning an MP’s salary of £62,000 plus expenses.
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Firstly, on the cleaner’s strike across London. I got this today:

The second round of strikes are about to come to an end. They have been well-supported across the London Underground network.

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Excellent chance of it all hitting the fan at Unison conference today: The four left-leaning union activists that the union bureaucracy is presently trying to expel are holding a special protest meeting at midday. It’s a meeting which anybody who is anybody in Unison has a substantial stake in.

The union bureaucracy’s witchhunt of these four respected officers is easily the biggest issue at conference this year. There are those who think that the union’s future is written in this battle. Either left or the right in the union must win.

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Yours truly is at Unison conference, doing the blogging business. Here’s a little starter post, to give you an idea of the reporting on Unison that yours truly is planning to do:

The great moment has arrived, people: it is time to start publicly discussing Labour-affiliated trade unions and their dreadful betrayal - particularly since New Labour came to power - of the low-paid people and communities who are most desperate for union help.

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Even with New Labour now in urgent need of a major bail-out from the unions simply to stay solvent, Gordon Brown has apparently decided that he has better things to do than attend next week’s GMB conference.

Most delegates will privately be relieved not to have to sit through the inert expanse of boilerplate, platitudes and waffle that passes for a prime ministerial speech on these occasions. But the arrogance of the snub is both palpable and somewhat distasteful.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Brown’s no show is that a call for disaffiliation from the Labour Party is on the GMB’s agenda. Meanwhile, the Communications Workers Union will discuss the issue at its annual get-together, also planned for next week. Smaller unions such as RMT and FBU are already out of the fold, of course.
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Workers in at least parts of the public sector are significantly more likely to do unpaid overtime than their private sector counterparts.

This new paper finds that people in the not-for-profit caring sector (education, healthcare, childcare and care homes) are 12 percentage points (40%) more likely to do unpaid overtime than comparable workers in the profit-making caring sector.

This suggests that what Julian Le Grand called “knightly motives” are significantly more common in the public sector - because people with a strong sense of vocation are likely to avoid working for someone else’s profit.

The TV detective motivated by a desire to nick villains rather than get on with the top brass is a cliche because it contains some truth.

This doesn’t just mean that the neoliberal idea that everyone is motivated by narrow self-interest is wrong. It also means that there are dangers in “reforming” the public services. Reforms that introduce profit motives, or alienate workers by introducing heavier-handed management, might add to costs by reducing donated labour.

There is an article by John McDonnell published in yesterday’s Morning Star, which I feel at once encapsulates the reasons why people on the left feel a lingering affection for the Labour Party and also why that Party is in reality a no-goer. And indeed I think McDonnell himself is emblematic of that same duality.

In the article, McDonnell begins with his ususal rallying cry “New Labour is dead” and seeks to take us forward via the construcation of a new set of economic policies (dare one say an Alternative Economic Strategy?) based on left-wing and socialist politics. He appears to be offering the notion that thus we will be able to take control of the Labour Party’s political direction via victory in a sub-Gramscian war of ideas.
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A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.

With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric.

I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot:
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Personally I’ll only believe that there is really an upturn in the class struggle at the point of production when Leicester Square is knee-deep in rubbish, at least a dozen bodies remain unburied, and the ghost of Red Robbo bestrides the now presumably deserted Longbridge car park once again.

But as someone schooled in the quasi-syndicalist brand of Marxism that sees industrial action as the first step to imminent world revolution, the co-ordinated public sector stoppages involving 350,000 workers does have a sort of seventies retro ring about it. Just in time for the Rock Against Racism 30th anniversary gig, too.
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Last week the National Union of Students threw out a proposal to drastically restrict its campaigning and representative powers by an approximate ten-vote margin. Frustrated by this narrow defeat at the annual conference, Labour Students, ‘independent’ Labour affiliates and other centre-right groups have already drawn up plans for an extraordinary conference to attempt to pull the changes through.

If they do go through, NUS democracy will be re-focused upon “celebrating the achievements” of the union, with a cutback in constructive debate and a much larger role for external, unelected political and corporate ‘advisers’.

NUS radicalism has been so eroded over the past decade, however, that there’s barely been a murmur of fuss has been made about all of this outside the narrow alley of student politics: as a former NUS rep for Goldsmiths commented, “It’s been coming for a long time.”
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Tomorrow the second reading of a Private Members Bill put forward by Labour MP Andrew Miller, which aims to end exploitation of temp and agency workers, takes place. The unions, which have been quite vociferously pushing this, are hoping that over a hundred MPs stick around to push it through.

There’s only a day left but you can still write to your MP to urge them to support it. The Unite website has model letters, in addition to testimonies from temp workers illustrating the problems they face under the current rules.

I was there five years ago, one of the two million or so. I’ve never regretted attending and I still think the cause was fundamentally good.

But even at the time I and many other comrades had our worries. The self-congratulatory carnival atmosphere was all very well, but where were the Iraqi socialists, democrats and trade unionists amongst the assorted Quakers, sloanes, hippies and Islamists? Why was that disgusting pro-Saddam apologist Galloway on the platform but no representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions?

Why had left-wing Iraqis been excluded from the national committee of the Stop The War Coalition?
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As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the story of the Fremantle Trust careworkers who spent much of 2007 striking against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The dispute is unresolved.

Part one of this series.

A year’s a long while to fight your employer. Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust’s Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there’s much point to it. She will “keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,” but she doubts that Fremantle will budge. “Fremantle doesn’t give a shit about its staff. It’s gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.”

One thing everybody is specially stressed about is Barnet Council’s recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home - that’s the carehome that Jones works at.

Fremantle says it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere. Careworkers say families of residents at the carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect that being dragged out of one home into another will have on their elderly relatives.
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Gordon Brown, Thatcherite? I wouldn’t dream of saying that myself, of course; it’s just too damn Dave Spart for me to get away with. Oh no, I’m simply quoting the succinct title of a chapter in Simon Jenkins’ recent book ‘Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts’.

Not being a particular fan of the man’s newspaper columns, I don’t know whether or not I’ll get round to buying a copy. But according to the synopsis, the central thesis is that Major, Blair and Brown essentially constitute the apostolic succession in terms of the Iron Lady’s project.

Summarising the charge sheet against Britain’s current prime minister, Jenkins reportedly rails against:

‘Brown’s unbridled enthusiasm for the privatisation of public services and public investment, his aversion to the public sector ethos in favour of private profit, his crushing of union power, his introduction of workfare into welfare and his patronage of money making above all other virtues’.

None of this a particularly controversial assessment for much of the far left. But coming from Sir Simon – former editor of The Times and all-purpose member of the great and the good – it hasn’t gone down well among New Labour supporters.
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[The first part in this series on trade union issues is here.]

It is 1pm on a crisp afternoon in North London’s Burnt Oak, and a hundred or so Fremantle Trust carehome workers and supporters have gathered in the St Alphage church hall on Playfield Road, where they’re waiting to be addressed by various lefty speakers and political worthies.

There’s a bit of a buzz in the hall this afternoon: the carehome workers have just finished a very noisy (whistles, horns, hooting, honking, yelling, etc) protest march through the town centre, where they again aired their grievance about the harsh cuts that the Fremantle Trust has made to their sick pay, holiday allowances and salaries.

Most of the workers here are middle-aged women, and they are from a variety of - charming term - ethnic groups. They say they have no intention of abandoning their fight to win back the salaries and working terms that the Fremantle Trust forced them to sign away in April this year.

Longtime Barnet carehome worker Breege Kelly is one of these women. She’s worked in the laundries and kitchens of Barnet Council and Fremantle carehomes for about 18 years. She says that she got her letter telling her to agree to the new terms and conditions just before Christmas 2006.

“Yep,” she says. “It was saying that we had to sign the new terms and conditions by the 31st of March (2007). A lot of people put it off for as long as they could, but in the end, we had to sign it, or we would be sacked.”

Indeed, Unison says that some members of staff who refused to sign were sacked. “They (Fremantle) work on putting pure fear [into everybody],” Kelly says. “I had to sign the new contract. I’ve got a mortgage and people got a mortgage, you know. They made it so that we had to stay and take it, what they were giving out.”
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This is the first in a run of stories in which this liberal lefter asks: Why are so many people taking strike action?

Where is New Labour at with the low-paid people that the Labour party was established to represent?

Why does the UK still have some of the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe?

In the London Borough of Barnet, a large number of careworkers who work for a grim outfit called the Fremantle Trust are planning another day of strike action this Saturday. Their dispute isn’t a Grunwick yet, but it’s on the road.

Fremantle careworkers Carmel Reynolds, Anne Quinn, Lango Gamanga and Sandra Jones say they knew their working lives were about to take a turn for the perverse when Fremantle management began talking about cutting careworkers’ sick pay and holiday allowances late last year.

It didn’t take long for the talk to evolve into policy. “It went from ‘we’re going to have to take your holidays and your sick pay’ to ‘we’ll do all that and we’ll freeze your pay and cut your weekend enhancements,” Reynolds says.

She and the other careworkers had been worried about their salaries and terms and conditions ever since Barnet Council outsourced its care contracts to Fremantle and transferred staff to the trust’s employ, but the council had fallen over itself to reassure careworkers their new employer would be as great as their old one. God knows those of us on the union circuit have heard that one a million times in the last few years, but unfortunately, there are hundreds of consultants out there who can still make it sound fresh at negotiating meetings, and even more local councillors who are dopey enough to fall for it, so it’ll be a factor until such time as leading members of the New Labour cadre stop privatising public services (fat chance) and/or decide to legislate to consolidate worker protection (ditto).

“Oh yes,” Reynolds says. “They said it was all going to be super-duper and we were going to be fine.”

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