Autumn randoms

Mister Osborne’s big ideas on welfare benefits

Indeed when you are worth a cool £4million and more you really don’t have to think too hard about your existence. What a nice and bubble-esque privileged life. And that illustrates just what a cushy number someone like George Osborne has…. yet he’s wielding the axe in smashing and slashing welfare benefits. In some ways though the real wretches are the LibDems. For all their historic talk of a better more open way of politics they have handed the government of Britain to a cabal of privileged toffs at one with the high command of News International and the top bankstas.

To return to Osborne’s proposals for Child Benefit and benefit capping. The Child Benefit proposals are the thin end of the wedge. Sooner rather than later the bar will be extended down the salary scale and/or this benefit will disappear: merged with Child Tax Credit into a means tested child element of Universal Credit. The cap at £500.00 will mainly affect a small number of extremely fragile households or Black households in London. It will not save much money. It is an attempt though to do two things. Firstly it suggests that people on benefit can expect the equivalent of an annual net salary of £26,000. This is nonsense. The majority of current households on benefit will be far less than this. This could change with a new crop of public sector workers/private tenants being sacked. These people will be paying very high rents compared to council tenants or housing association tenants. They pay this extra, typically twice as much for like for like housing, not because they like living in luxury but because they are forced into a bad deal on their housing. The benefit cap combined with the changes to Housing Benefit will make these victims of the ConDems homeless in double-quick time. However most people forced onto benefit get nowhere near this amount to live on. The other thing it attempts is to stir up resentment against the poor amongst the not quite so poor. Classic divide and rule.

The other point worth making is that these two cuts will add complexity to the system. Politicians always claim that they are going to simplify the benefits system and always make it more complex. New Labour did it with tax credits and Employment & Support Allowance. The ConDems are now adding a new form of means testing to the system. Means testing is the main reason for the benefits system being complex. On top of this the method of means testing is different from the means testing for other benefits and tax credits, so not just more means testing but different types of means testing within the system. So for instance: a single earner household with let us say a freelance IT professional. Your Child Benefit is a weekly benefit. You get CB for each week that you fulfil all the conditions of entitlement. This will include there not being a high rate taxpayer in the household. Due to the double dip recession during the first half of a coming tax year you have not much work and you are skint. You need the CB to put food in your children’s’ mouths. During the second half of the year the private sector recovery predicted by Mr Osborne and Mr Cable rides to your rescue and you have plenty of work and when you file your online tax return guess what… Mr O will want the CB back to pay his pals in the banks so they can invest it for themselves in the property boom that will be underway in Brazil (or somewhere if not there). The point is that Mr O has fallen into the same trap that Mr B did 9 years ago. Mashing together the benefits system and the tax system gets you into a horrible and complex mess.

The right to strike

So Boris Johnson wants to restrict strikes.  He wants to further toughen up the anti-trade union laws.

Johnson, the chair of Transport for London, used his Telegraph column to urge David Cameron to “consider a law insisting on a minimum 50% participation in a strike ballot”. The Conservative mayor accused Labour of trying to manipulate industrial unrest for political purposes, and pursuing a “nightmarish return to the politics of the 1980s”.

First the CBI and now Boris Johnson attacking the fundamental right of workers to withdraw their labour. The anti-trade union laws are already oppressive and now the establishment want to go further. If this reactionary lot get their way we will be living in a very nasty, subservient and destructive society. The message people should take is organise and resist or be destroyed.

In the meantime,  John McDonnell MP is sponsoring the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill as his private members Bill in Parliament. The Bill would tackle the increasing practice by employers of using minor technical errors in the balloting process – which have no material effect on the outcome – to take unions to court in order to prevent them from taking industrial action.

John McDonnell MP said:
We have seen in the current BA Cabin Crew dispute and many other recent disputes, employers have been able to exploit loopholes in the existing law by using minor technical errors in a trade union ballot to thwart trade unionists from taking strike action. This resort to the courts by some ruthless employers is bringing current employment law into disrepute and undermining industrial relations in this country. This cannot be right and in the interests of good industrial relations needs to be addressed.

The Bill is being debated in Parliament on Friday 22 October, and requires 100 MPs to attend the debate and to vote for it. If you have a Labour MP, please lobby them to attend and vote for the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill.

And let me take this opportunity to show solidarity to RMT members who are on strike today.

Dave’s big ideas on benefits

David Cameron this morning confirmed that the coalition plans to scrap many existing welfare benefits and replace them with a single benefit. The prime minister told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that, although the reform would cost money upfront, it would save public funds in the long run.

If  the reason for bringing in the Universal Credit is that currently you can be better off on benefit than in work then Universal Credit will fail. For the vast majority of people you cannot be better off on benefit than in work. You may not be much better off than on benefit but you will be better off. It is certainly true that some of the workfare companies will twist peoples’ arms to take jobs that have heavy travelling costs that can outweigh the extra amount that they will get working but there are always jobs that are not worth taking because they are too far away no matter what the money.  There are real barriers to people re-entering the job market such as lack of retraining opportunities and lack of childcare facilities.

The only way to bear down on unemployment is to have industries that invest in the things that people need such as building affordable housing and renewable energy. A society not based on an endless quest for bigger and faster profit will always create unemployment and will always want to blame the poor for being poor.

Welfare to work has not stopped unemployment rising. It cannot do so. It can only do two things. Firstly it can force people into the new poverty pay economy. Secondly it cannot serve the ideological need of the right wing to blame the poor while the bankers walk off with every more of our money: if anyone is working the system it is they and not working class people thrown onto the dole or people who cannot get into a job because of the health problems they face or because of the attitude of employers towards disability.

Review – Made in Dagenham

There is a fictitious scene in Made in Dagenham, I say fictitious as the worker and the Ford boss didn’t send their child to the same grammar school.. a clever plot device conjured up by the writer no doubt, where Rita (composite character who is shop steward and leader of the strike played by Sally Hawkins) and Lisa (wife of the boss for Ford Dagenham played by Rosamund Pike) meet where the strike is discussed. Lisa is  secretly passionate in her support for the strike. She tells Rita that she has a first class honours degree in History yet her husband ‘treats me like a fool’. The degree fascinated her where she studied people ‘who made history’. And certainly the women machinists at Ford Dagenham made history. Their demands were simple and straightforward they wanted the same parity as men on their grade and recognition, they wanted equal pay.

The film isn’t perfect. The use of the Bob Hoskins trade unionist character, Albert, to fill in some of the exposition is a bit of a push that comes to shove and it is not clear how the sub-plots feed into the main story. However to see a film that shows militant trade unionism in a positive light and what can be achieved if working class people stick together is a great change from the  reactionary nonsense you usually get (certainly at this present moment with all the union bashing). Having said that if anyone went on strike thinking it was that it was as easy as in the film they  would be in for a very hard shock. It would have course been very hard for the women themselves during the course of the strike. Showing, as well, that there is not a false choice between fighting for women’s liberation and fighting for your class. There was some real footage in the film about male workers saying that the women should go back to work and that male workers needed to earn more money than women workers: it was these reactionary sentiments that divided the class. Rita makes this point when saying to Eddie, her husband, that the women workers come out in strike in solidarity when the men do, so why can’t they show the same level of solidarity? There’s also a comparison between British and American capitalism. The American representative from Ford simply says to the trade union bureaucrat, Monty (played by Kenneth Cranham), “Break the strike” while reading the workers’ personnel files, and checking up their political affiliations. Ford British management just came across as chinless wonders abdicating all responsibility to the American representative.

This political period was also pivotal point in the history of the women’s liberation movement, the strike paved the way for the Equal Pay Act. Sheila Rowbotham writes in, ‘Promise of a Dream’, how annoyed she was when the striking machinists were described in the press as, ‘Petticoat Pickets’. Rowbotham also wrote about how she related to Rose Boland’s (shop steward) comment, “It isn’t about pay, it’s about recognition”. Recognition! How women workers were put down as women! Support for the strike spread throughout the Ford factories, more women came out. This led to the emergence of National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACWER). Rowbotham wrote, “These initiatives from working class women preceded the emergence of Women’s Liberation as a movement; indeed, they influenced us”.

After 3 weeks on strike the women workers settled for 92% of the C grade rate. Barbara Castle , who was Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity (played by Miranda Richardson) plays a part in these negotiations, against the backdrop of increased trade union militancy. Central as well to the narrative is the portrayal (and certainly it’s a true depiction) of the way that the trade union bureaucracy undermines workers struggles and how the movement of the day was dominated by white middle aged male faces. This is illustrated with Rita’s powerful speech at TUC Congress while the camera pans a sea of white male faces. The women and their struggle were a blast of fresh air that many of the white male delegates welcomed.

Certainly go and see the film. What I liked was the way Rita evolves from a nervous woman who lacks self-confidence (early scene where she tries to confront a middle class bully of a teacher  at her son’s school) and belief in herself but once the strikes gets going she develops a resolve with her confidence increasing. This also impacts on the dynamics of her relationship with her husband (there’s a powerful scene between Eddie and Rita that speaks volumes about the position of women in society). Also, it depicts the appalling Dickensian working conditions these women have to work in, the health and safety is non-existent where they work in bras as there’s no air conditioning, where, as well, the rain pours in surrounding electrical compliances! There were elements of glamourising the struggle, feel-good factor, but the realistic interpretation of the struggle compensated for it.

Don’t take it as a guide for how hard taking strike action is and how the whole establishment turns on you. Not only will you face a life without money but also the lie machine of the media and the whole array of anti-trade union laws that did not exist in 1968. The only way to overcome these things is organised solidarity across the whole movement. And obviously this film is being shown at a time where the public sector is being cut to the bone which will heavily impact on women workers with further knock-on effects, as currently 4 in 10 women work in public sector occupations, compared to less than two in ten men. Geographically, Wales (46.6 per cent), the North East (45.9 per cent) and Scotland (43.1 per cent) are the areas where the highest proportion of women work in the public sector. Therefore women working in these areas are most vulnerable to job losses resulting from public spending cuts.  Inevitably with cuts in services and loss of jobs this will impact on pensions and increased poverty for women pensioners.

Finally, during the end credits you get a glimpse of some of the women strikers now and their opinions which was excellent to witness. Though what irked me somewhat was the mention of the Equal Pay Act in a caption at the end yet what was missing is the fact women working full-time are paid on average 17.1% less an hour than men for doing work of equivalent value. This figure rises to 20% for ethnic minority women, and to 36% for women working part-time. Equal pay is still on ongoing struggle, 42 years on. Also, there was a mention about Ford’s “good practices” in the workplace. Really? Tell that to Visteon workers!

This film is a timely reflection of working class women standing up for their rights.

Just mind your own damn business Nadine Dorries

There’s been a lot said so far about Nadine Dorries here, here, here, here…. to name but a few….

Firstly, Nadine Dorries is a hideous right-wing offensive reactionary Tory. Secondly, she knows sod all about people on benefits except what she has read in the right-wing populist press, along with views based on a right-wing sloppy lazy  ideology and thirdly, so bloody what people use Twitter. What people do, whether it is Twittering, is nowt to do with Dorries so she should mind her own business. I mean, what is she gonna do, get the DWP to random bloody checks on claimants using Twitter. Great use of resources there.

As many people/bloggers/Twitters have pointed out Twitter (and also blogging) is a useful tool for social interaction, even if its online cyberworld it’s still a great way of engaging, getting to know people and sometimes it can be a place for solidarity, support especially when you feel isolated and alienated. For me it has proved to be invaluable during the couple of arduous months.

So Dorries… do me a favour… cease the right-wing reactionary crap and mind your bloody own business…!

Made in Dagenham

It’s been dubbed as a female version of ‘The Full Monty’ but without the stripping, compared to Billy Elliott due to its political narrative … (and boy did I loathe that contemptible distorted illustration of the 84/85 Miners’ Strike!). A kinda feel-good movie? Groan… I hope not!

Yes, ‘Made in Dagenham’ has now been released. Women machinists working for Ford went on strike over equal pay in 1968, pivotal point in the history of the 2^nd wave feminist movement, women fighting for equal pay that paved the way for the Equal Pay Act. Interestingly, Sheila Rowbotham in her autobiographical account of her early political activism (‘Promise of a Dream’) writes about the strike and the meetings showing solidarity with these women, the wider impact of what this struggle had on the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.

Will be seeing this film tomorrow and give my appraisal fully later. And now at a time when the public sector is being cut to the bone which will heavily impact on women workers with further knock-on effects, this film is a timely reflection of working class women standing up for their rights. I just hope it does justice to those ordinary working class women trade unionists who fought against inequality and sexism.