Organising strategy - mobilise or organise?

On 8th November I attended four fascinating meetings at the Historical Materialism conference with people from the USA and Canada discussing the plight of the labour movement and ideas for turning it round.

I found the debates really useful and there were a lot of ideas the British labour movement should engage with.  I've written up some of the key points as a series of three articles.  The first ("Mobilise or Organise?") is mainly about Jane McAlevey's ideas on organising strategy and has been published here.  The other two should be published over the next few days and will cover "Migration, the labour market and social reproduction" and "Reversing the decline".

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We're NOT all in it together

I've come across two sets of information recently which have rammed home the point that we're not "all in it together".

The Sunday Times has published its annual "Rich List".  Even their own headline makes the point "The Sunday Times Rich List reveals that Britain’s wealthiest people are richer than ever despite the worst recession since the 1930s".  Even The Telegraph, that well-known friend of the poor, highlights the discrepancy between the rest of us and the top 1000 people: "Their total fortune has risen by just under five per cent since 2011, to £414 billion, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List.  That exceeds the previous record of £412.8 billion set in 2008, which came just a few months before the financial crash from which the wider British economy has yet to recover".

The second set of information has received a lot less publicity.  I found it via the blog of the economist Michael Roberts.  In this article on the weak US recovery, he highlights how as profit rates recovered, corporations hoarded profits, rather than reinvesting them, undermining the recovery of the wider economy.  The figures are staggering - he explains:

"US corporate profits have recovered dramatically since the trough at the end of 2008.  They surpassed their previous peak in 2006 by early 2010.  This was achieved by a massive reduction in costs (including labour costs) and a strike in investment.  But most of the recovery in profits since the end of 2008 has been hoarded and not spent on new investment.  According to these latest figures, undistributed profits have accumulated to $744bn from just $19bn at the end of 2008!   Profits are up around $1trn since then, but the cash accumulation is up over $700bn, so only 30% of the increase in profits has been spent on new investment.  This explains why the economic recovery has been so weak, with the US economy growing only barely at 2% a year (1.6% yoy according to the latest Q4’11 GDP data)."

So next time some millionaire cabinet minister (and most of them are) tells us that there's no money for decent jobs or for the services we all rely on, let's remember that there are individuals and corporations sitting on vast wealth which could be far better used by those who produced it.

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Inflation rises (again)

The latest inflation figures are out today, showing the cost of living (RPI) up 4.8% in the year to December, and even the artificially lower CPI that the government and media quote so much up by 3.7%.

Pay rises have continued to lag behind the increase in the cost of living for a number of months, meaning standards of living for most workers falling rapidly. As I've previously highlighted, this is one of the key planks of the effort to make working people pay to boost profits following the financial crisis.

These figures don't even include this month's VAT rise.

There can't be many workplaces where "productivity" hasn't been driven up over the last year or so, with fewer workers working longer and harder (for less). This means workers getting an ever smaller share of the wealth we produce.

Anyone want to join the union and campaign to protect our standard of living? You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think you could stop this on your own...

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Post, Privatisation, Wages, Beans and the Welfare State

There's a national "Keep Our Post Public" rally today against the government's plans to privatise Royal Mail, with Len McCluskey as one of the speakers.

Privatisation is a key plank of the government's strategy to increase profits at our expense, by opening up our public services as new markets for comercial activity.

Plank 2 is cutting real wages (in the public and private sector) by using mass unemployment to depress wages while letting inflation drift up. The latest inflation figures this week show CPI inflation up to 3.3%, while RPI inflation, which is a more realistic estimate of the rate of increase in the cost of living, is up to 4.7%. No wonder some members are being driven to take strike action to defend their standard of living - UNITE members at Heinz in Wigan start their strike over pay tonight.

Plank 3 is the assault on public services and the welfare state, by a combination of pushing costs onto individuals (as with education) and direct cuts in provision.

If we want to successfully defend our own jobs, standard of living and services, we need to support all those resisting any element of this strategy to make us pay for an economic crisis we did not create. Amongst other things, that means backing campaigns against privatisation such as at Royal Mail, campaigns to defend pay and pensions such as those at Heinz or the BBC, and campaigns against cuts in public service and the welfare state, such as the magnificent and inspiring campaign being waged by school, FE and University students.

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Why we all deserve higher wages

I posted recently about the trends in prices & wages. Since then, I've seen on Gill George's blog a couple of interesting articles in response to the government offer of a 3-year pay cut for NHS staff.

Gill's latest article picks up material from the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and what they say about inflation, which prompted me to go and have a look at the MPC's own web site, which has a wealth of useful information for trade unionists.

In the "costs and prices" data, this chart particularly caught my eye:
What does it mean? That real take-home pay has been dropping for several years, while profitability has stayed about the same. Or to put it another way - working people are paying the price for every bump and dip in the economy.

It's enough to make you think we need a union!

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