A strike against the latest attack on workers’ pensions

On March 28^th, prompted by a proposed attack on the LGPS – the Local Government Pension Scheme, an estimated 1.5 million low-paid local government employees took official strike action. Dubbed as the ’biggest strike in Britain since the General Strike’, it was called by a Joint Union Strike Team drawn from the 11 trade unions with members who work in the sector. Amongst those balloted, support for strike action was overwhelming.

Fresh in their minds was the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers in the private sector have also seen their pensions undermined over the last few years. All of us are now very familiar with the company which either under the guise of a ’pension holiday’ or by means of ’creative accounting’, helps itself to the company pension fund to prop up an ailing concern. One characteristic example is United Engineering Forgings in Ayr, which went into administration in June 2001 with a shortfall in its pension fund of £12 million. When the company was eventually declared insolvent, after the Directors had carefully divided their own from the company’s liability, retiring workers would find they had suffered a massive cut in their lump sum and a severe reduction in their weekly pension entitlement.

Given the Government’s insistence over the last few years that people ’need to take more responsibility’ for their retirement, it was perhaps not surprising that workers affected by the failure of these various pension funds would turn to the Government for help in such circumstances. Thus, a parliamentary ombudsman, a government official who investigates complaints against government departments, was duly appointed to investigate the matter of who was responsible for the fiasco. The official report has just appeared and found the Department of Work and Pensions guilty of mal-administration, declaring that official guidance on company pension schemes was “inaccurate, incomplete, unclear and inconsistent”, and calling on the Government to compensate 85,000 people who have lost all or a part of their pensions. This the government has arrogantly refused to do (only the second time the Government has gone against the decision of an ombudsman, both times under ’new Labour’). In fact the Government has already twice altered the minimum funding agreement, and reduced the amount companies have to contribute to pension funds, and whilst this has saved the bosses millions of pounds it has pushed some funds into crisis. All in the name of ’affordability’ and ’sustainability’, of course.

Meanwhile, the Government’s Turner Commission is demanding that the state pension age be raised to 67, then 68 and eventually 70. The bosses union, the CBI, has upped the anti and suggested that 75 be the retirement age, with the ’lunatic fringe’ even suggesting 80!

Anyway, the main reason for the March strike was the proposed abandonment of the current ’Rule of 85’. This rule states that Local Government Scheme members can retire at 60 with an unreduced pension if their age plus service is 85 or greater. The scheme administrators, whose interests are inextricably bound up with the Government’s, now want to restrict this right to those below the age of 53. Also, it was more than slightly galling that higher grade workers in local government would not be affected by this proposed change, so it would only affect those already on a very low wage.

The abandonment of the Rule of 85 is bound to be an especially worrying for those who are just below the threshold of entitlement, but plenty of younger workers also appeared on the picket lines on March 28^th. There is an acute sense of discrimination being perpetrated against the lower paid. Thus, for instance, teaching assistants working alongside teachers and emergency services control room staff working alongside NHS paramedics will be acutely aware that their work is undervalued compared with their colleagues’. They have suffered an attack on their standard of living; an attack that is really equivalent to a massive wage cut, and they have suffered an attack on their basic sense of worth.

And the current pension isn’t exactly something to shout from the rooftops about. Currently members of the LGPS are already the poorest pensioners in the public sector, with women members, who make up three-quarters of the pension scheme membership, getting an average pension of a mere £31 a week.

So these workers were prepared to go out on strike. And the strike did have some impact. Tyneside virtually ground to a halt. The metro and the Tyne tunnel were closed. In Merseyside the Transport Authority workers closed both tunnels and shut down the ferries. Hundreds of schools, sports centres and libraries were closed and numerous college lecturers, still smarting from a derisory wage settlement, refused to cross picket lines despite much pressure from the management. The main streets of Manchester was full of picket lines, 440 strikers gathered at a strike outside Brighton Town Hall, and so on and so forth throughout the country.

Reports from the picket lines nevertheless show a lot of dissatisfaction with the way the strike has been planned and conducted. It was frequently asked why the original plan for a two-day strike had been shelved and reduced to just one day; indeed there were numerous calls for an all-out strike, seen as far more effective that a one, or two, day strike for which the authorities would have had adequate warning and been able to make adequate preparations. On the Admin staff picket line at Manchester Met University, the workers were unequivocal about what the next step should be – “general strike”! and striking on May 4 polling day was correctly seen by many as a necessary, and highly effective, measure to force the government to back down.

Another issue frequently raised was why the unions are still paying out huge amounts of union members’ money (in UNISON’s case, £500,000 per annum) to the very party in government which is so blatantly ignoring their needs. A fact which prompted one striker to compare these donations to ’buying the Labour Party a pair of Doc Martens boots so they could give the union members a good kicking!’ (In the end UNISON did decide to suspend its contributions to the Labour Party, but not for long of course). Our own, cynical answer would be that if union members aren’t getting anything out of this cosy relationship with the Labour Party, then the union bosses must be. They will be expecting government posts for ’their’ money, directorships and consultancies; and for seats in the House of Lords on which to park their substantial butts when they ’retire’. That seems to us the real outcome of the much vaunted ’historic link’ between the Labour Party and trades unions; a link which we used to be told would, one day, usher in ’workers’ control of production’!

In any case, after the March strike, TUC-brokered talks hastily got underway with the threat of a rolling programme of strikes set to take place on 25, 26 and 27 of April and the prospect of two days national action on 3 and 4 May, including local election day. The proposal for the rolling strikes was that they would take place on each of the three days, but indifferent regions, meaning there would be no cumulative effect of three continuous days of strike action, over the same territory and with the same people involved. Rather than an escalation of the strike this proposal seemed more like a way of winding it down. In fact, with these one day strikes all it means is that there’s absolutely tons of work to catch up on when you get back, and you have to work twice as hard!

But in the end, all these magnificent plans would come to nothing! After the Government had made some minimum concessions around offsetting lump sums against reduced pension payments, the unions decided to pull the plug on the April strikes, and suspend any further action pending talks with local government officials! Even the days of action, something which would have really affected the government by throwing the elections into chaos, as we noted earlier, were abandoned as well. And the talking will no doubt drag on and on and on, gradually losing momentum, until resurrected at the next union conference.

Faced with their disappointment at the latest betrayal of the union leaders, who made their decision to abandon the strike without consulting the membership, an organised union left within UNISON has called for greater ’democratisation’ of the unions. This is a tempting remedy but it doesn’t address the need for the kind of class-conscious organisation needed to win workers’ struggles. Calling for democracy in the realm of workers’ economic organisation can also work against class action, and indeed the bosses have broken many a strike by launching press campaigns about how they were launched ’un-democratically’.

Historically rank-and-file organisations have sometimes managed to attain a certain degree of autonomy with regard to the Union leadership and have often launched impressive (although frequently un-democratic) actions. Do the workers win or not, that is the acid test! Such organisations have tended to be successful when launching unofficial actions but have generally not had any kind of extended or permanent organisation which can ensure that the momentum of a strike is kept up. This has meant that struggles have all too often been isolated and then run out of steam. All too often they have been recuperated back into the unions, and the unofficial leaders slotted into an official job away from the shop floor; or sacked.

One demand that was made by the UNISON left after the betrayal was especially interesting: that the strike committees continue to meet. It is interesting because the demand contains within it the germ of a class organisation.

But a true class organisation would need to extend further still, out of the confines of a particular trade or locality, with links extending to other sectors of the working class. And for really broad class actions, encompassing several sections of the working class, there will need to be in place some kind of structure which is actively opposed to the present leadership, now totally integrated into the Government in, a ’quasi-autonomous’ kind of way, and acting as a kind of informal Ministry of Labour.

An organisation, from above, as in the present strike, is not the same as the one organised from below required by the workers if they are to win the strike. The leadership will use legal and safe channels, which will end up as innocuous escape valves for letting off pent-up anger; it might seek to bring ’moral pressure to bear’, but it will not step outside the law and risk its funds being sequestrated. Thus in the main leaflet which was widely distributed at the demos, the call for support from the rest of the class is at best insipid: ‘members in the NHS and other sectors could show support by donating to their strike fund and joining in any lawful activities’.

The obvious thing to do from a class point of view, of course, was to have called for solidarity action between private sector and government employees, both of whom, as everyone knows, are having their pensions attacked

This attack on workers pensions is just another episode in the class battle. It is another example of the ruling class trying to cut its costs by passing them on to the workers. It is part of a class battle which is being fought around us all the time, in lots of little skirmishes between workers and management in every firm, and every country, in the world. At the moment, the class is a slumbering giant, lulled into a false sense of security by the few remaining privileges left over from its militant heyday.

But it will rise again when it has been pushed too far. When it does, and we could be approaching that point, the class will have to equip itself with organisations which truly express the economic interests of the working class, rather than those of the highly paid and privileged elite which governs the present trade-unions in the interests of British capitalism.