No you don’t..

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Another one who can’t read – these men work for a private company, Veolia. They’re not employed by the public sector directly. Try their job for a few months, let’s see how much you whinge about them then.

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John,

‘The miners strike that lasted a year and lead to the loss of most of this countries mining industry.’

What?! It was Thatcher’s plans to destroy the mining industry as an act of political revenge that led to the loss of the mining industry, not the strike! There wer no subsidies for the British mining industry, but she was also buying subsidised coal from Eastern Bloc countries – what a hypocrite she was!

Austin Rover ultimately closed because of a long period of lack of investment through the ’60s and ’70s. If British management had shown the foresight of their German counterparts we’d still have a successful car industry today.

One of the many things that Red Robbo frequently raised with management were the difficulties in component quality and supply, leading to half-finished cars leaving the production lines – but of course, you won’t have seen that reported in the pages of your Daily Mail at the time, so presumably it didn’t happen…

In the case of the Veolia dispute, I believe this has now been settled – it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the threat of strike action often brings greedy employers to their senses?

If all they were intending to do was to consolidate a number of employees into one company, there is perfectly adequate legislation (the TUPE regulations) to cater for this – without the need to terminate contracts or change terms and conditions of employment.

Many large and highly profitable companies are cynically exploiting the current over-hyped recession to allow them to attack their employees. At the same time we see that the pay of directors continues to outpace inflation, and is already back to pre-recession levels.

Where public money is funding contracted-out services, savings made by such pay cuts aren’t likely to go back into the public purse – instead I think it far more likely the savings will go to shareholders or to line the directors’ pockets. And of course, as we cut pay especially in low-paid jobs, we make it more likely that the affected employees will becom entitled to benefits to ‘top-up’ their income, so the employer’s saving becomes the taxpayer’s burden in many cases.

There are also some statistics around average pay in the UK. The average salary/wage is £26,000 per annum. That will sound very high to many in Shropshire, which is a fairly low pay economy. However, it’s also true that anyone earning over £50,000 is apparently in the top 10% of earners. That just shows the extent to which the mega-wealthy are slewing the figures with their astonshing greed – and these were the people who caused the recession!

I’m astonished at the subservient, forelock-tugging defeatism shown by so many correspondents. Why don’t some of you grow a spine and challenge your employers about their greed? All the evidence is that union members get higher pay rises and better working conditions than non-members – we should be congratulating and supporting the Veolia workers and other who are prepared to stand up against the race downhill to a sweatshop economy.

I note that today Vince Cable has made a speech about the morally unacceptable and ‘murky world of corporate behaviour’.

Whilst I view this as largely for the consumption of the Liberal Democrat faithful to limit the damage done by their Faustian pact with the Tories, rather than as a true statement of likely policy, it is at least comforting to know that this is being noticed as an issue, and that we still have our trade unions to stand up against this sort of abuse.

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