The union faces major problems in relation to procurement, the personalisation agenda, and approach to community services. What problems does that present for the union in this region?
"I’ll start by telling you what I’m not going to do today.
What I’m not going to talk about today is the very fine detail of UNISON’s policies , quoting conference motions and the exact date on which conference passed it- but in relation that I can if you want me to.
What I’m going to do is take you on a canter through;
- the context in whuch UNISON’s policies evolved and how these have related to the to the overall economic, and political context of public services and
- how that context is changing
- make some suggestions about how the union needs to change if we are to operate effectively in the changed circumstances.
Much of the time we consider pieces of our policy in isolation. What’s our line on child poverty? What should we say about an increase in VAT? Why do we oppose Trident? What’s our interest in these things beyond what they mean for our members pay and jobs? I wan to connect the dots.
UNISON was conceived as a public sector union. Nowadays we don’t mention
the merger but the reason behind the new union in 1993 was the industrial logic of having the main public services unions in health and local government combined - a combination that made us stronger and gave us a synergy with regard to the enemies that surrounded us. Just let’s think back to where we were at the end of the 1980’s.
There had been a Tory Government in power for the last 11 years. Think Keith Joseph Nicholas Ridley and on yer bike Tebbit.
That government was ideologically committed to the introduction of privatisation in public services.
That government was committed to the limiting trade union activity and power and the ability of the trade unions to effect changes in either the workplace or the society.
That government was committed to cutting public sector pay and jobs.
That was the conditions into which unison was born and that is reflected in our aims and objectives in our rule book.
Just to remind you of those they are in section B but in short and to paraphrase them just a little the aims are
- To work to achieve equal access to public servicese for all and to ensure that all users are treated with respect and dignity
- To promote employee consumer and user involvement and representation in the delivery of services
- To work to maintain and improve the quality of services to the public.
- To liaise with the UK and other levels of government on public services
That’s where we started from.
To paraphrase that even further we have stated our belief in public services that are universal, publicly owned and democratically controlled.
That belief in itself is an expression of a view that public services don’t just exist as an end in themselves.
That they are an expression of social justice and fairness in society.
Public services are there to serve the collective, to put the needs of society first and to serve its most vulnerable members.
We believe that public should be put first and that society should meet the needs of the public for essential services, to emphasise services based on care and compassion, dignity and respect, equal treatment and accountability.
That needs an economy that provides adequate funding to meet individual and social needs, not one based on tax cuts for the rich and tax evasion.
That’s been our starting point as we have developed our policies over the past 16 years.
We opposed those who would threaten public services not simply because they threaten service levels jobs conditions and pay.
Because they put profits before needs because they represent a threat to our vision of society
And when the Government changed in 1997 we continued to oppose exactly the same policies when they were pursued by a Labour government.
Policies on PFI
On outsourcing
On marketisation
On efficiency savings
What both parties have continued to have in common is a commitment to a neo liberal agenda.
An agenda that prizes the market about all.
That sees no need for state regulation or intervention.
That believes despite the evidence to the contrary that private provsion is inherently more efficient that the public sector That the drive for profit should take precedence.
Long before last October the European Central Bank was already saying that “Comprehensive reforms are necessary to place both public pension systems and health and long term care arrangements on a sustainable financial footing by limiting the public sector exposure, enhancing private funding and setting incentives for efficient service provision.“
“Public health and long term care systems should focus on providing core services for health care and prevention leaving individuals to provide for non essential health expenditure.”
But UNISON’s beliefs in the public services needs an economy that provides adequate funding to meet individual and social needs, not one based on tax cuts for the rich and tax evasion as the neo liberals would have it.,
But then the neo liberal world came to a halt last October when the multiple follies of high finance came crashing down to earth.
Internationally the entire global financial syatem brought down by a self induced crisis of debt, through unsustainable speculation.
The bankers needed bailed out and the likes of RBOS and Lloyds needed big money. The tax payer came to their rescue We all already know what happened next. The ripples from the financial sector went through the economy like a tsunami. Businesses had no credit and were forced to retrench. We entered an economic downturn of historic severity. Output fell and unemployment is expected to continue to rise until at least 2011 with 3 million unemployed.
Public services and the staff who deliver them are not immune from these developments:The economic slow-down is already having a negative impact on tax revenues and the resources available for public spending, squeezing central and local government budgets and adding pressure for further pay cuts, and increasing recruitment freezes and redundancies. If public money was used to bail out the banks it was not available for other more socially relevant projects that needed expenditure.
Due to the government’s excessive reliance on private finance under schemes such as PFI, and on private providers that have been bought up by private equity and laden with debt, the credit crunch is also leading to an abandonment of necessary investment in schools, hospitals, social housing, care homes, and other essential facilities and infrastructure.
To spend however in a time of recession is the only way to stimulate demand in the economy - a universal truth made evident by one John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory published in 1936.
Government expenditure stimulates demand to stimulate the economy. Gordon Brown has at least enough of an understanding to remember that lesson from history, and as Obama has done in the US or even most centre right governments in Europe, have done, has produced a fiscal stimulus package, to use the jargon Brown and Darling got it right, something that you are never liable to hear on the BBC these days.
Overall the stimulus package that European government have produced amounts to about 75 trillion pounds- and I doubt if I could even write a figure like that down correctly.
After the party conference season there is now a common thread running through all of the major political parties but within that common thread there are still a world of difference.That common thread is that of cuts to services. Labour promise cuts but not to frontline services, whatever they are. The Tories tell us up front will slash their way out of Gordon Brown’s catastrophic national debt calamity, cutting twenty per cent of bureaucracy and red tape, slashing the role of the state. Let’s start by asking a few simple questions.
What national debt calamity?
The economic commentators, who have made the national debt calamity a headline, have one thing in common- a shared ideology about the role of government and free markets. Britain is not bankrupt.
To repeat that again, to any commentator with any sense of economic history or decent knowledge of economics, our national debt is not a matter for crisis. The proposals from the Tories frankly stink of economic illiteracy.
But then George Osborne, Tory Shadow Chancellor, knows better than Keynes , Galbraith , Krugman or Stiglitz , and many of the other giants of economics .George denies that public spending had any role in ending the depression of the thirties.- To push the history a bit further, Tory policies will have the same disastrous consequences as the National Governments in the 30’s or Thatcher’s in the 80’s.
They will not only prolong the recession. They will push the country into depression, sending unemployment soaring. Thatcher destroyed the manufacturing base of the British economy. The current Tory party can’t acknowledge that lesson.
And let’s look at little further at that statement about “Gordon’s debt calamity” What is the word that never passes Tory lips when they are talking about blame?
Go on lads. Spit it out. I’m sure you can. It’s B-a-n-k-e-r-. This crisis has one cause- the unregulated profit, the unbridled greed that led speculation of the bankers. Why has the national debt risen in the first place? Was it
a) Because nurses salaries were too high?
b) Because standards in education were gold plated?
c) Or, because the banks went bust and needed bailed out?
99 out of 100 commentators would probably go for the last one.
Tory economic policy is still constrained by a deep ideological commitment to free market liberalism that Thatcher preached: - a system whereby government has no role in the economy, a system with no regulation, and no subsidization.
The market is God and its effects on society unfettered. This is the world where tax becomes a dirty word, where the labour market is unregulated and trade unions have no Consistent with the low regulation in the economy however , is the belief that the boundries of the state need to be rolled back. That is the cornerstone of their economic policy .
“Dealing with the national debt”, as Osborne and Cameron has proclaimed from the conference platform, is a flimsy cover for the basic Tory project. No doubt the army and the uniformed police will do well under a future Tory administration. They always do. Education, the NHS, local government services, welfare benefits of all kinds, the environment will all suffer and the quality of public and social life.
But more than that. Policies like that of personalisation in social services- where an individual will be handed a sum of money and told to find their own services or the academies policy where EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL will come out of local authority control will dismantle collective provision with whatever guarenttee of a safety nete that provided for the community.
So we have all political parties promising public sector cuts. Buts lets also consider that Labour in power has never revoked the anti trade union laws of the Tory years, affecting our ability to orgainise and control our own rule book.
Remember sign up? Will the next steps be and on to docas ?
And consider the information that the Daily Telegraph- the Tories in-house paper- are using the freedom of information act to obtain details from local authorities of the costs of trade union facility time. I doubt that it is because they are concerned that we don’t have evough time to recruit and organise. More likely given some of the recent develpments that we have seen, it will lead to further cuts in facillity time and less ability to represent members.
The world is in which we are working is changing rapidly.How do we evolve to keep up with it?
UNISON faces some big decisions about how we are to face up to the future.
We could become one of those unions- and they exist within PSI- the Public Services International -that no longer see public service provision as being confined to the emanations of the state as the jargon has it but are content to organise within the public services industries as they have now become. Everything is ok as long as the terms and conditions fit. Would we be content to limit our ambitions in that way?
We could also be giving up any ambitions to have anything to say about our services beyond the terms and conditions issues.
Or we can stick by our principles that public services have an end beyond themselves and are part of wider social aims.
We have pledged that we will continue to defend public services and I would hope tat would continue to be on the basis of our principles of equality and social justice.
We can and we will nationally try to expose to myth that the public sector must be cut to cure our economic problems.
We can and we will maintains our campaigns on public services
Lobbying at government level
Briefing MP’s and other opinion formers
Producing campaign materials and advertising material for the media.
Scattering press releases like confetti.
But that is what we have been doing since 1993.
And it strikes me that our policy outputs are a bit like a donuts. . Plenty on the outside but with a hole in the middle.
I want this conference today to think about this.
What does policy mean for our branches?
Making a guess I’d say that it’s what happens at conference.
A bit of a debate, have a kick at the NEC and the Government. Vote. Leave and let the policy committee get on with it. Done for another year.
But how many of those motions that are passed talk about implementation by the NEC regions and branches?
So I want you ask you a question.
Is branch involvement in policy something for conference only?
I don’t doubt that branches do well what branches traditionally do.
Organising members
Discipline
Grievance
Conditions of service matters
Health and safety
Service reorganisations
But
Can I give you one very worrying statistic?
In the midst of the fights that we face at the moment about procurement about efficiency savings about shared services to name but a few, branch applications to the GPF are at an all time low.
Every year since the GPF was decentralised applications have fallen.
Yet if we are taking our policies seriously, should there not be a local public dimension on to those battles that we face? And this isn’t just a question for local government branches, before the rest of you start feeling smug. Its easy to see that in local government there is an elected authority that takes strategic decisions. But in health, for example, I’m told that good practice would see some kind of forum at health authority level. Police branches have either a chief constable’s forum or a police authority one. We all have those strategic opportunities.
Strike action and industrial muscle can win battles. But so can well run local political campaigns. Not only do they put pressure on authorities thay give the union locally the opportunity to spread the word about the kinds of alternative policies that we advocate and why we advocate them.
This is not about branches having to invent and run a campaign on top of everything else that they have to do. I repeat that It not about the tap dancing ball juggling branch secretary putting a unicycle between his or her knees. Its more about putting a polish on the balls that you are already juggling.
Lets look at budget cuts. You’ve been through the negotiations with the authority.
You simply can’t change their mind about one part of their spending plans. But it means the closure of a day centre for the elderly.Or a walk in clinic facility in the health service. Why not campaign to let the public know and politically change minds?
Or if the efficiency agenda dictates that all leisure services are to be privatised? Or as is the case here in the local constabulary, the emergency control room is to be put up for tender. Should we put up or shut up?
Let’s revive our union’s strong history of taking our campaigns out into our communities. EDUCATE, AGITATE ORGANISE IS A BASIC TRADE UNION SLOGAN. LET’S INTERGRATE THE POLICIES THAT OUR CONFERENCE DEMANDS INTO OUR BASIC ORGANISING AT BRANCH LEVEL. THAT IS THE CHALLENGE FACING US."