The latest on the BA boss Willie Walsh's outrageous demand that workers give him one month's free labour - while threatening 4,000 job cuts and a pay freeze - is the big vote for him to go to hell by cabin crews. That was this Monday.
But in the meantime, BT has jumped on the bandwagon. It adopted one of Willie Walsh's other bright ideas - letting workers take one month to one year's unpaid leave. Only BT is so "generous" that it is offering to pay 25% of workers' wages while they are "off"!
Of course, just like at BA, job cuts are being used by BT as an instrument of blackmail - at BT 15,000 were cut last year and now another 15,000 are threatened. So if you want to keep your job, the cost is a 75% pay cut for a year! And just how are workers to pay a monthly mortgage, council tax, water, energy, etc., etc? Will the utilities and the council and the banks also give workers one year's payment holiday? Hardly! In fact most of these bills are going up!
So what happens to living standards when, on top of this, BT, like so many other companies, freezes workers' pay - imposing a de facto pay cut?
Subsidies for bosses, courtesy of tuc
It is not as if this is new. Since the crisis started biting, nearly all companies have cut jobs and/or wages. In fact car companies were among the first, when Honda workers got laid off for 6 months with only 33% of basic wages for the last 2. JCB, Honda, Toyota and Jag-Land Rover all forced workers into taking wage cuts - using the threat of further job cuts, on top of those already made, as blackmail to drive through their cost-cutting.
That said, this latest brainwave from the bosses of "unpaid leave" is all the more significant in the light of a scheme suggested to the government by the bosses organisation, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). They have come up with the "alternative to redundancy" scheme.
It proposes that "because companies are running out of cash for wages", staff should be laid off for up to 6 months and be paid a weekly allowance which is double the jobseekers' allowance (£64.30x2=£128.60 per week!). If they do not find another job, the company "could" take them back - or call them in earlier. Maybe it could even expect workers to be available for recall at all times? And at the end of this scheme, you could be made redundant anyway. In other words you would have double the dole for 6 months, then just the dole for 6 months ...and then nothing?
The TUC's Brendan Barber said this scheme: "...would deny businesses the support they need to vary hours and working patterns during a recession while leaving workers on poverty wages". He thinks bosses should be able to treat us as if we are pieces of elastic, and be subsidised for putting us on short time - just a different way of skinning us!
Anyway, both the CBI and TUC schemes let the bosses of the hook, by asking the government to pay bosses' wage costs out of workers' own taxes i.e., so bosses can retain skills and profit-making power! All very well for the CBI, to argue for this, but has the TUC no shame left at all?
Our solidarity would be unbeatable...
The TUC is not alone in going along with the bosses' blackmail and their lies about being broke. The BA branch of the union, Unite, has its own "alternative plan" to help BA regain its profitability! It said that it would accept a pay freeze for 2 years and has come up with other ways to cut costs so that BA can save up to £173m!
As for the CWU leaders at BT, they said: "summer sabbaticals are a great opportunity for staff to pursue travel, study ..., while knowing they have a job to return to." Presumably this official is thinking of the seat he will be able to return to at BT's table after his holiday, if he gets the workforce to swallow this colossal con.
Yes, in solidarity with the bosses, all the union machineries have devised their own special plans to help these bosses get through their "hard times". So workers can be clear about one thing. That if we have had enough of paying for the bosses soft landing and for the union leaders' soft seats, then we need our own plans: for instance, the-workers-say-no-and-are-preparing-to-fight-back plan.
And if we need a blueprint - there is one which construction workers have already used - when they took unofficial action across power stations and oil production sites up and down the country in order to get Total to reinstate 647 sacked workers last month. There is nothing like co-ordinated and united action - especially when it is out of the union machineries' control - to scare the bosses into agreeing to workers' demands.