The ConDems' "bonfire of red tape" is back on the agenda. This means, once again, yet more attacks against the working class.
Because, of course, there is no question of removing the huge rolls of red tape which shield the wealthy and their companies from the Treasury and allow them to avoid paying dozens of billions in tax each year. Nor is there any question of dealing with the mountain of red tape, known as "commercial confidentiality", which has prevented the bankers' criminal role in causing the present crisis from being fully exposed.
No, the only "bonfire of red tape" that the ConDems plan, is one which is designed to ensure that the profits of big business are protected from the recession - by trying to remove some of the few rules protecting workers and society against the effects of the bosses' greed.
Unacceptable hazards
One of the targets chosen by the ConDems is health and safety. They claim that present regulations are an unnecessary hindrance for bosses and they want to end compulsory inspections for hundreds of thousands of "low-risk" companies.
This is a farce. The trimming down of the Health and Safety Executive, under both Labour and the ConDems, and the watering down of regulations, already mean that only 2.2% of all workplaces are inspected each year. Inspecting all of them just once, would take 45 years!
What's more, the proportion of prosecutions brought by the HSE against employers, following fatalities and major injuries, has dropped by half over the four years up to 2011, down to 0.56%!
So, not only are the bosses already getting away (literally) with murder, due to an underfunded, lax system, but now the ConDems want to reassure hundreds of thousands of bosses, little and large, that they have nothing to fear should they breach H&S regulations! No way! Our health and safety is worth more than their profits!
Hire, yes - fire, no!
The ConDems' next target is unfair dismissal. Business secretary Vince Cable made a big thing of his refusal to concede to the Tory demand that the right to claim unfair dismissal should be scrapped. But the measures he plans, together with those already announced, will make such claims far more difficult to make.
Already, from next year, workers will need to have been 2 years in a job (instead of 1) before they can claim unfair dismissal. They will have to pay a fee to make the claim, plus another to get a hearing - a total of £1,200 - which is hardly affordable for someone who's just been sacked!
Cable now wants "voluntary settlement agreements" which would allow employers to blackmail workers into giving up their right to go to tribunal in return for a "good reference". In addition, he wants to drastically slash the maximum compensation for unfair dismissal, from the current £72,300 down to £26,000, or a year's pay, whichever is the lowest - meaning that the low-paid would lose out most!
Cable dares to claim that bosses don't create jobs because of the cost of sacking workers. What a lie! The compensation paid in 50% unfair dismissal cases is less than £5,000! And since when do bosses want to create jobs? What they want is to screw more work out of fewer workers!
A question of balance of forces
Ministers have repeatedly argued for making it easier for employers to sack what they call "underperforming" workers.
But what about "underperforming" bosses who kill their workers on the job, pay them wages out of which they can't make a living, while lining their own pockets and those of their shareholders - and without the slightest concern for the interests of society? Shouldn't they be "sacked", and their companies taken over by workers to turn them into socially useful facilities?
And what about this profit system, which is not just "underperforming", but bankrupt, to the point of "creating" tens of millions of jobless since the start of the crisis and destroying tens of thousands of factories? Shouldn't it be "sacked" and replaced with a social organisation driven by the needs of all, instead of the greed of a few?
For the time being, however, the main issue for workers is to stop the rising threat of unemployment, deteriorating working conditions and the steady fall in our living standards. And if the bosses and their government try to tamper with our rights, they should find us in their way, determined to stop them, and determined to reclaim, not just the rights they are trying to steal from us, but everything else they've stolen as well!