UK: Government Cuts Are Directed Against the Working Class

Following the recent emergency budget in the UK, which outlines the government’s proposals for major cuts in welfare benefits, social services and in other state spending, there has been a remorseless campaign in the capitalist media to enforce their acceptance, which can be summed up in the oft repeated mantra: ‘the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary’.

Once again we are being told that the ‘bitter pill’ of austerity and sacrifice must be swallowed to restore ‘the nation’s finances’ to ‘health’. But it appears not all will share the burden, and indeed an especial source of anger is the fact that the banking elite, recently baled out to the tune of billions of pounds from State income, is already back to awarding itself massive multi-million pound bonuses. Given that, and the palpable sense of injustice it has provoked, the proletariat this time round might not be quite so happy paying for the crisis. And the direct attacks on the wages of those in work, already suffering significant pay cuts along with an intensification of labour, is now to be compounded by an attack on the reserve army of labour – the unemployed and the sick, already condemned to a poverty-stricken half-life on the margins of society.

Discontent is already bubbling to the surface, but unfortunately the recent industrial action in the underground about staff cuts and rising discontent in the Public Sector has not met with a very robust response at the recent Trades Union Congress, which has merely come up with a few soporific measures to try and contain the situation, consisting of the same tired old remedy of ‘lobbying MPs’ and of course the obligatory ‘demo’; on this occasion postponed for six months until March 2011. No one can accuse the TUC of striking when the iron is hot!

An example of the proposed attacks by the Government on the unemployed is the introduction of a cut in Housing Benefits to 90% of full entitlement if a claimant is unable to find a job within a year of first signing on. This reduced payment is a truly harsh measure which effectively blackmails the unemployed into taking any job at all, even with dire working conditions and pay, rather than risk losing their accommodation and ending up on the streets.

The State’s campaign to cut the welfare bill will also attack the sick by extending the definition of those deemed ‘capable of work’ to large sections of those suffering from one type of illness or another. The government has set a target of half-a-million of those currently on Incapacity Benefit to be redefined as fit-for-work. The way this is being accomplished is by incorporating Income Support (sickness benefit) and Incapacity Benefit into a new benefit called Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) for which claimants will have to be reassessed. To re-qualify for ESA, current claimants will be asked to attend gruelling ‘medicals’, conducted by stony-faced interrogators, who are often very intimidating and have anything other than what can be described as a ‘bedside manner’. The new questionnaire is evidently designed to redefine people hitherto defined as ‘sick’ as ‘capable of (some form of) work’, despite the fact that most of this group will only be able to perform the most specialised jobs, in specialised settings and for specific periods of time, and will be competing against other workers in the job market who will be deemed by employers t be less of a risk.

Those claimants who are redefined as ‘capable of work’ then have to abide by the same regime as the rest of the unemployed.

Those already signing on as unemployed are finding themselves under increasing pressure to find work by the Job Centres. The latter, and the various companies to whom the Job Centres sub-contract the work, keep benefit claimants busy by filling in endless, often conspicuously short, CVs, and by sending their ‘customers’ off on various pointless ‘work placements’, which generally lead precisely nowhere for the individuals concerned: as often as not they find, at the end of a work placement into which they entered in the expectation of possible paid work at the end of it, that they are suddenly replaced by a new batch of unemployed hopefuls, and the realisation dawns that the have been used as cheap, nay free, labour.

Another indignity the unemployed have to put up with is the risk of being ‘sanctioned’. This consists of a reduction in benefit which is imposed, amongst other reasons, if the clamant is held to be not ‘putting his back into applying for work’ (the efforts made have to be evidenced and documented), or not attending at the designated time to ‘sign on’ for the benefit and declare oneself ‘available for work’, with or without good reason. This ‘sanction’ not only results in basic benefits being stopped but has a knock on effect on housing and council tax benefits, since the departments that administer these benefits are automatically informed of the claimant’s ‘change of circumstances’ arising from the sanction, with these latter benefits being abruptly withdrawn, producing consequent worry about rent and irate landlords. And now many of the charities and agencies, funded largely by the State, who currently help the unemployed unravel these various paperwork trails and to launch appeals are themselves at risk from the threatened cuts.

So, the unemployed, now forced to compete not only with each other but with the new influx of those previously designated as sick and incapable of work, will be especially hard hit. And those who do end up in employment will find, as often as not, that they are working for virtually the same amounts they received when on benefits! After jumping through all the hoops and straining every nerve to find a job, it is surely small comfort for these workers to find they still remain trapped in poverty.

The TUC’s position on the Unemployed

So what attempts to organise the unemployed have been made over recent years? A very revealing insight is given in an article, available on the internet, entitled ‘Why I resigned from the TUC’s ‘Consultative’ Committee of Unemployed Workers Centres’.

We note first that Unemployment Centres arose in the 1980s, during an earlier time of especially high unemployment, and that they sprang up all over the country and numbered 150 at their height, eve if by 2009 merely 50 remained.

These were useful up to a point by breaking down isolation amongst the unemployed, and by providing some support and advice around benefits along with a limited sense of solidarity in the best of cases. But these centres are certainly not a universal panacea, and our stance is that the most important organisational factor is that which enables the unemployed to be organised alongside the employed, and that this should be a core priority of any trade union which claims to have a classist outlook.

The running of these unemployed workers centres has varied in different parts of the country. The unemployed centre in Liverpool was run largely as a business enterprise, mainly as a Conference Centre, and definitely not for the unemployed. The tough management stance there would actually lead to industrial action by the cleaning staff. Indeed, the person who organised the cleaning staff (against management) was barred from the centre – and the police were subsequently called in to escort him out of centre’s trendily named “Flying Picket” bar!

Anyway, the author of the article cited above refers to how the unemployment centres were forced to go cap in hand to government agencies and local authorities to seek funding, and how funds were consequently made conditional on the centres adopting a ‘non-political’ stance and reducing their campaigning activities (the State demonstrating, thereby, that it was well aware of the potential for such centres to become potential centres of agitation, veritable ‘chambers of unemployment’ even). The author declares himself as the secretary of a TUC recognised unemployment centre and as such he was elected from his region to a body known as the National Consultative Meeting of the Unemployed Workers Centres (NCMUWC).

The author explains:

The author accordingly offers his resignation, offering a summary of his criticism in an accompanying letter:

     ‘I hardly think it necessary to describe what is happening in the outside world – rapidly increasing unemployment and a concerted attack on the unemployed, coupled with a TUC ‘consultative’ committee that is paralysed into doing nothing and captivated by its own inertia. It has adopted a trappist silence regarding New Labour’s Welfare Reforms, has produced no literature, leaflets or indeed anything of relevance and its only purpose or role would seem to be to preside over the gradual disappearance of a TUC network of unemployed centres.’

This, then, is the kind of support the unemployed can expect from the Trade Unions Congress. At the 2010 Congress in September 2010 the subject of organisation amongst the unemployed would be relegated to a fringe meeting on Saturday evening (and it appears the National Unemployed Centres Combine, whose existence the author of the article put in some doubt, is alive and well with its representative designated as one of the speakers).

So, whilst the TUC offers a few half-hearted palliatives to the unemployed, whilst at the same time letting its former unemployed workers centres wither away, others see it as a money making opportunity.

Divisions within the Ruling Class

Although there is wide-spread unanimity in the ruling class about the needs for cuts in state spending, it is only the scale of the cuts and how they will be administered that bothers them. And underlying these divisions is the perennial question of who is to make money out of the whole process.

The strategy for dealing with the (now greatly enlarged) unemployed population is a “welfare-into-work” scheme to be managed by private providers. An agreement has been made between the welfare reform and work ministers, Lord Freud and Chris Grayling, and financial institutions in the City of London about the possibility of providing these resources, these agreements being linked to the idea of the private sector deriving revenue on the basis of benefits revenue saved.

The Managing Director of welfare-into-work at G4S, the so-called security and support services group (which provides such private sector services such as moving prisoners between gaols and courts) thinks that a model “that allows investors to provide upfront payments, with the money coming back from the revenue streams as people move into work, is a challenge. But we think it can be made to work.” The private sector, facing contracting markets, is constantly looking for new ways of making money, and smells an opportunity here for doing so by exploiting the most disadvantaged sectors of the proletariat.

And the Treasury’s object of enforcing a 25% cut across most state sector budgets is causing concern across many sectors of the state. Even the Police are worried and are seeking to prove their indispensability by opportunistically unveiling worst case scenarios to frighten the bourgeoisie into backtracking on their recent proposal to cut an estimated 40,000 jobs from the Police force. At the recent Police Superintendents Association the association’s president argued that the Police should be protected from the worst of the cuts because a “strong and confident” Police force will be needed to deal with the rise in industrial and social tension that is likely to arise from the cuts: a tension, we read between the lines, likely to be exacerbated by 40,000 angry unemployed coppers!

And the ‘elephant in the room’ at this conference must surely have been protests called by the Police Federation (the lower ranking police officer’s staff association) a couple of years back; and indeed perhaps even the memory of the riots which occurred during the police strikes following the First World War, after which the police were forbidden from joining a union.

We cannot resist mentioning in this context that during these police strikes it was the army which was brought in to “maintain order” on the streets, but it looks like the armed forces, already significantly reduced, will also be affected by the present cuts; and with the prospect of the auxiliary fire engines, the renowned “Green Goddesses”, used by the army in the past to break Fire Brigade strikes also being phased out, who knows what the future may hold!

In general, where things will go from here is difficult to say, but the TUC has been forced to adopt a slightly more militant face and, along with the insipid measures previously mentioned it has be obliged to declare the necessity for an ill-defined ‘Joint Action’ between the various unions. Such joint action – when and if it happens – will only be effective if it escapes from the control of the union leaders, whose vision, if past experience is anything to go by, is severely restricted by their anticipation of an eventual seat in the House of Lords; by their hefty pay packets; and by a ‘Union Jackist’ outlook which seems unprepared to back any measure incompatible with the interests of the national economy; indeed ‘the country before the class’ seems to be their motto.

The workers, along with the unemployed, in order to launch effective actions, will be forced to transcend job category and work place and build a broader and broader alliance; this alliance (which the names of the big unions ‘Unite!’ and ‘Unison’ hint at but ever fall sadly short of) will eventually have to resort to illegal and wildcat measures and step outside official structures. Only by such means will the proletariat be able to build up sufficient force to act as a class and force the bourgeoisie to relent in its ruthless attacks, testing its strength for the final, inevitable battle with capitalism.

To trade union activists! Long-term Support for the unemployed, sick and disabled can only be provided by defending all members of our class, rather than by passing meaningless resolutions and engaging in publicity stunts. The bosses want a mass of potential workers who are “flexible”, a euphemism for working for next to nothing, and being at the beck and call of employers. The organising of the unorganised is a direct way of protecting those still at work. Look towards defending all the workers, rather than those who are members of the existing trade unions! This way forward is especially important when the public sector is facing whole-scale cuts in the work-force, with many facing the prospect of joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Comrades! Proletarians! Workers, employed and unemployed! State and private sector workers! Workers from Home and Abroad! Proletarians of all races! Sick and able-bodied! Unite to resist these cuts! Let the capitalists bear the consequences of their own crisis!