Just when you thought that you had read the ultimate drivel justifying welfare benefit cuts, another idiot makes the blood reach boiling point. The case in point this time is Janet Street Porter in Sunday’s Independent. In case you missed it, the entire piece is reproduced here:-
"One in four households now have servants, paid to carry out tasks we haven't the time or can't be bothered to do, according to a survey. Since the recession, more homes have three or more generations living together. In spite of this, more homes now hire in labor than in Victorian times; in 1870, one in six homes had paid help.
‘My argument is that the climate threat makes the need to fight austerity all the more pressing, since we need public services and public infrastructure to both bring down our emissions and prepare for the coming storms. Far from trumping other issues, climate change vindicates much of what the left has been demanding for decades’ said the campaigning writer Naomi Klein in a seminal speech to the founding conference of Canada’s largest trade union Unifor last September:
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2013/09/why-unions-need-join-climate-fight
It is more tragic than ironic that the state owned Qatari Airways
displaced UNICEF on the front of FC Barcelona’s shirt. That the global footballing institution - which styles itself as ‘more than a club’ - compromised its ethics big time is brought into sharp relief by the report of an ITUC delegation into the slave labour conditions of migrant workers building the 2022 World Cup infrastructure for the oil rich authoritarian statelet. Qatar is expected to ship in at least an additional 500,000 construction labourers —mainly from Nepal, Bangladesh and India — in preparation for the 2022 World Cup. According to the ILO, ‘more than 4,000 migrant workers could die between now and 2022 during construction of the infrastructure for the world’s biggest sporting event’
‘The government have made such swingeing cuts to council grants that forces social care providers into cutting pay and conditions. Many employees are now being paid below the minimum wage. That's because they are not being paid for travel time, use their own cars without being paid reasonable mileage rates and have to pay for mobile phones and uniforms,’ says Heather Wakefield, UNISON head of local government, in a Guardian report which examines the downward spiral of budget cuts, underfunded contracts and attacks on care staff wages – exemplified by the Future Directions dispute in Rochdale:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/22/council-funding-cuts-care-homes-minimum-wage
#TUC13 Congress delegates were alerted to the important UNISON dispute at Rochdale during yesterday's debate on local government services. Angela Rayner moving UNISON's motion said: "in the North West, there is ongoing industrial action in Rochdale where UNISON members have come face to face with the consequences of employers using outsourcing to lower costs by paying workers less. Through the Future Directions social enterprise, the local foundation trust can pay care workers less than they would be entitled to as direct health trust or local authority employees. Staff are having their employment transferred to inferior terms and conditions – a strategy of expansion through exploitation'
http://www.unison.org.uk/news/tuc-save-local-government
Full speech below:
TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady speaks for all trade unionists in condemning the introduction of expensive fees for access to Employment Tribunals: “Today is a great day for Britain’s worst bosses. By charging upfront fees for harassment and abuse claims the government is making it easier for employers to get away with the most appalling behaviour. These reforms are part of a wider campaign to get rid of workers’ basic rights at work. Its only achievement will be to price vulnerable people out of justice.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/390932de-f61d-11e2-8388-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2aMzqeo6M
The latest Spending Review does not need a particularly detailed analysis to reach an inescapable conclusion - the current government has no economic agenda but it does have an ideological one.
Only a Tory optimist could believe that this country is in any way approaching “recovery”. For the coalition at the receiving end of public spending cuts - those who have seen their wages and salaries plummet in the past five years, those working households whose wages are on poverty level and who depend on tax credits, families who rely on child benefit, those who rely on disability benefits, there is no recovery. For all those dedicated public workers whose jobs have been slashed there is no recovery. There is only more of the same for us.
On 17 June Cleaning Workers from all over the world will be holding protests and events to mark their own International Justice for Cleaners Day. Covering airports across Europe, the US and Australia, over 35 International airports and national railway networks will be taking part in the action.
The events have been organised by the ISS Cleaners Activists Network. The activists have been meeting with the assistance of UNI Global Union and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI).
‘Unpaid acts of love are keeping an underfunded, fragmented and outsourced care system ticking over, but time is running out’ writes UNISON national secretary for local government Heather Wakefield. A new UNISON report ‘Time to Care’ highlights the atrocious pay and working conditions of the 85% of the adult social care workforce which has been outsourced in England. Between 150,000 and 200,000 earn below the National Minimum Wage and 56% in the private or not for profit sectors are employed on zero hours contracts:
http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/2012/10/who-cares-about-the-care-workers/
As usual the British media deployed diversionary tactics when reporting on the Tory ‘rebels’. Classically portraying divisions in the Tories as being simply the pro and anti Europeans within the ranks but there is a more sinister level to this debate. Deregulation is an ideological standpoint for the Tories.
Today is World Day for Decent Work and is being marked by a great initiative by UNISON members at London South Bank University who are calling on the Vice-Chancellor to pay them the living wage by holding a protest rally. More than a hundred cleaners, who are employed by Interserve get paid £6.08 an hour, and do not receive sick pay. The current London living wage is £8.30 an hour.
http://www.unison.org.uk/asppresspack/pressrelease_view.asp?id=2472
http://www.wddw.org/-English-
A delegation from UNISON’s Northern region is currently visiting Colombia. This is the first of a series of reports sent into UNISONActive by the delegation: Colombia has one of the most challenging political climates in the world. The extreme implementation of neoliberal policies has seen the erosion of core workers’ rights, and the marginalisation of communities. In this context the struggle of the Corteros (sugar cane cutters) is significant.
We are all, rightly, Norwegian today. The inhumanity of the events is overwhelming - only tempered by the humanity of the collective response.
Sodexo - one of the largest private contractors for catering and cleaning in the UK - has been exposed, yet again, as a ruthless exploiter of workers in the most appalling poverty. At their last Shareholders AGM in Paris last week the company reported to shareholders once again a year of record profits and trunover. Like its global rival Compass, the company will be seeking extra contracts in the bonanza that will be created by public sector cuts in the UK:
http://cleanupsodexo.org/2011/01/new-report-on-sodexo-by-civil-rights-gro.php
A New Zealand farming leader and Silver Fern Farms supplier has slammed the company for docking meatworkers' pay for observing two minutes' silence for the Pike River miners. Slaughter chain workers at the Silver Fern Farms Te Aroha plant lost two cattle each from their daily quota after stopping work to pay their respects to the 29 miners who lost their lives in the coal mine disaster. Not paying the staff for the lost production saved the company between 98c and $1.60 for each worker.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4469105/Pay-docked-for-two-minute-Pike-River-silence
