cuts

A special edition of ‘Brighton & Hove Solidarity’ – the bulletin of Brighton Solidarity Federation is now available to download, to coincide with the announcement of the emergency austerity budget today. You can download a pdf here. Contents includes: Class war budget, strikes off and redundancies on at Sussex Uni, a local teacher’s view on academy schools, local council cuts and an article on the hidden side of the World Cup – workers’ exploitation and resistance.

Leaflet we wrote after 115 redundancies were announced at Sussex university, where several of our members work or study.

Our Jobs under threat

Across the country, education is under attack. In the past month, job losses have been announced in many places, including 200 at the University of Cumbria, 130 in Manchester MMU, £35m cuts at Leeds university, and of course 116 redundancies at Sussex. Politicians from all parties are united in wanting to make ordinary people pay the costs of capitalism in crisis, and they are starting with higher education.

May 2010 will see a general election where the main parties will compete with each other in promising cuts in public expenditure and attacks on public sector workers pay and conditions.

This offensive is egged on by the media and parts of it are fast becoming accepted wisdom - even if the supposed facts underpinning this version of events are wrong.

While the media like to talk about public sector bureaucracy, the vast majority of public sector workers do things that are useful – nurses, doctors, street cleaners, library assistants, meals-on-wheels drivers, carers, teachers – are just a few examples. Whoever gets in after the next election, these groups of workers are a prime target for cuts to balance the State’s books after the multi-billion pound bank bail-outs. The bureaucrats will for the most part not be the victims of these cuts, but those doing the cutting.

In 1997, councils across Britain came to an agreement with unions to undertake ‘Single Status’ job evaluations to end the discrepancies between manual and white collar jobs. Parallel to this, claims made about the historic pay discrepancies between traditionally male and traditionally female jobs were won at various Employment Tribunals. Historically, workers in female dominated jobs (such as those working around childcare) have been paid significantly less than those in jobs usually seen as ‘men’s work’, such as refuse collection.

Since the Equal Pay Act in 1970 these pay discrepancies had been open to legal challenge, but Single Status was supposed to be an across the board solution that would see every job within the councils evaluated and regarded equally based on the content of the job. In theory, this was of course a good thing.