Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 23 April 2007

Incredibly, Royal Mail dared to tell CWU union negotiators last week that it was not going to offer a pay rise this year. Instead, workers could hope for a small local "productivity bonus", but this would be tied to cost savings - more job cuts - and radical cuts in conditions, office by office.

Of course, whether Royal Mail bosses will stick to this position, or whether they are just "testing the water" to see how far they can go, in attacking the pay, jobs and conditions of postal workers, remains to be seen. But it speaks volumes for the arrogance of the employers - both in the public and private sector today.

Indeed, nurses and other health workers have been offered a pay increase of just 1.9% - in two stages. So both the nurses' association, the RCN and the health workers' union, Unison, are threatening strike action, and the CWU has said it will too, if it Royal Mail does not change its tune.

In fact most workers, in both public and private sectors got rises of under 3%, i.e. de facto pay cuts over the past year - with pay rates falling compared to the cost of living.

Since last December, official inflation has been creeping up. In March there was a 3.1% rise in the Consumer Price Index, with a 4.8% rise in the Retail Price Index, which includes the cost of mortgages. But anyway, these measures of the cost of living always underestimate the real costs for working people.

But what is worse, is that in the past 18 months 22,300 NHS posts have been cut. (And that does not include the 10,000 junior doctors who cannot find jobs). As for Royal Mail , after cutting 30,000 jobs over the past 5 years, it wants another 30% cut in the letters division workforce over the next 5 years - which means up to 48,000 job cuts!

Everywhere workers are being told that the name of the game is "efficiency". Ever fewer workers are meant to work harder for less pay. This is the case throughout Brown's "booming economy".

But it is only booming for the bosses. And for them it is booming like never before. Chief executives of the top FTSE 250 companies gave themselves an average 14% rise in basic pay (to £700,000/year) and annual bonuses were increased by 34% (to £627,000)!

Of course, Brown has helped create the private profit boom. Not only has he given the bosses tax concessions, but he has been channelling public funds into private pockets by "opening the public sector to private competition", and by direct privatisation and PFI in the NHS and Civil Service.

Yet not even once, in the past many years has there been a real fight against the on-going attacks against jobs, wages and services. That is why the employers are so arrogant and it is why they think they can get away with their attacks.

But what if "no", for once, meant "no" - and workers turned the unions' threats into concerted action? Having had a free ride for so long, the employers - and Brown himself - would not know what had hit them.

British Gas is at present in the middle of a scandal because of the number of incorrect bills it sends out. In the six months to March there were 21,427 complaints - mainly about overcharging. So with a 30% share of the energy market, British Gas now has a 70% of the share of complaints!

Of course this is not such a joke. Not when the average annual energy bill in Britain is as much as £1,000 a year. In February, to much fanfare, British Gas announced a cut in its prices by 11%. That may have been more than the other energy companies which have cut their prices by between 3% and 5%. But between 2003 and 2007, all energy bills went up by 94% for gas and 60% for electricity.

Unsurprisingly, the number of households in "fuel poverty" - meaning they cannot afford to pay their fuel bills, grew from 1m to 3m in 2007. But the government's scheme to eradicate fuel poverty via "morally responsible social tariffs" - which would force companies to grant rebates - is only meant to take effect by 2016...

So in the meantime, the vulnerable will carry on getting hypothermia because they cannot afford to switch on their heating and the poor will have their electricity and gas cut off. Or maybe the government, which lets the corporate culprits of carbon emissions off the hook, expects global warming to heat us all up?