Comment: Why you should support the pensions strike

Thursday, 24 November 2011 10:00 AM

Before you decide you're against this strike ask yourself one simple question.

By Ian Dunt Follow @IanDunt

You'll have trouble dropping off your children at school next Wednesday. If you're taken ill, you may have trouble getting an appointment in hospital. The rubbish might not be collected. The fire service might be disrupted.

Up to two million public sector workers will be out on strike, probably the most widespread industrial action this country has seen since the winter of discontent. At first you'll be angry. Your already stressful day will have been made even more difficult by people you rely on. But before you decide you're against this strike please ask yourself one question: would you care if a banker went on a walkout?

I'll go ahead and presume your answer was no. The very fact that this strike inconveniences you demonstrates the value of the public sector. These are the people who look after us; our children, our property and our streets. Their reward is to be libelled every day in the press for their 'gold-plated pensions'. Their demands for their employer to abide by the terms of their original contract are treated like special interest pleading. Private sector workers are propagandised against them, encouraged to desire public sector impoverishment rather than to fight for their own working conditions to be improved. The classic tactic of divide and rule is alive and well in the British class system.

That's not the case for all those people whose labour accomplishes nothing, apart from the occasional sabotage of the world economy. Executive pay rises ever upwards, regardless of results. The recent Fair Pay Commission report found the top Barclays salary rose 4,899.4% since 1980, compared to a threefold increase in its average wages. Thomas Cook, which is doing so well it is now staring into the abyss, was paying chief executive Manny Fontenla-Novoa £2.27 million last year, including a £1.19 million performance bonus and £338,000 in share options.

What about the government negotiating team, which so reasonably asks public sector workers to accept their "extremely generous" offer? An average public sector worker would need to work for three lifetimes to earn Francis Maude's pension and two for Danny Alexander's. They would have to work 124 years to get a pension equal to what local government secretary Eric Pickles would earn - but only if he quits at the next general election. If he sticks around it would take much longer.

For the rich, this country is a socialist utopia, where losses are nationalised and any criticism of their wealth is brushed off with self-serving arguments about talent-flight. For the poor, it is pure, brutal capitalism, a race to the bottom to attract international capital and satisfy the credit rating agencies.

Banking reform has been kicked into the long grass. The 50p tax rate is discussed every day in hushed, serious tones, as if it were a significant moral failure. A paltry 0.05% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency and derivatives is met with the argument that it must be implemented multilaterally – but David Cameron makes no effort to negotiate with Asian or US governments. Corporation tax is cut. Employment regulations are weakened in the bosses' favour. The prime minister's only achievement from talks with Angela Merkel is to remove us from the working time directive.

The injustice is so plain, the system so evidently rigged, that the government has used every tool in its arsenal to prevent anyone drawing the obvious conclusions. Its much-publicised move on accrual rates and cost ceilings does nothing to prevent the lowest paid workers, such as part-time nurses, bearing the brunt of the Hutton-proposed reforms. It relies on the Hutton report to show how essential reform is, but the report showed the long-term cost of public sector pensions is falling as a percentage of GDP. Our deficit is not, as the government would have you believe, the result of a bloated public sector. It is, as the IMF itself admits, a  product of "revenue losses associated with output losses from the financial crisis". There's no reason to hammer down public sector costs in response. Morally and economically, we shouldn't make those who did nothing to cause the crisis pay for it.

The government argued that union votes for strike action were invalid because of a low turnout (typically around 25%). Of course, no such moral standard applies to MPs themselves, who rarely, if ever, win over 50% of the popular vote in their constituency. The sight of the same MPs who campaigned against AV condemning strike votes on the basis of low turnout has to be one of the most laughably hypocritical spectacles in all of Westminster.

According to a YouGov survey from last weekend, 52% of people oppose the strike while 35% support it. It's a majority, but a relatively slim one given that the full range of political and press propaganda is weighed against public sector workers and their modesty demands. That percentage should increase. The people striking next week are some of the most valuable workers in our society. Their value is not monetary. It is social. They deserve better than a hounding from the press, a libel from the government and our own moral indifference.

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