The party conference season may be over, but the overbidding between the parties is still in overdrive. Of course it is. The election is on the horizon and each party is vying for the biggest share of MPs' allowances, after all!
Politicians of all the parties apparently find it very "unfair" that cuts in their personal allowances should be made - the very same politicians who are competing against each other to see which party can cut the most off working class incomes, services and jobs!
They all agree on one thing - that workers should pay for the crisis. But the last thing they want to do is to show us the real nature of the cuts they have in store, whether they be pink, blue or yellow...
Even pro-Tory commentators reckon that out of the £100bn "savings" by 2020, boasted of by both Darling and Osborne, that not more than £10bn has been spelled out so far.
Back in the real world, however, the bosses' offensive is marching on, and it is slaughtering more and more jobs on its way, right now, today, without waiting for any elections.
The war against our jobs continues
This week alone, BA announced 1,700 cuts in full-time cabin crew jobs by cutting 1,000 jobs and cutting the hours (and pay) of 3,000 more workers. Air Lingus plans to cut at least 676 jobs, as well as slash the pay of hundreds more.
Then there is Vauxhall. This government, (like the German government) is stepping in, to hand over a subsidy to Magna, which just bought Opel-Vauxhall from GM.
But instead of saying to Magna that it will not get a penny if it cuts any jobs - and indeed will have to pay a penalty, Mandelson will apparently allow Magna "to scale back some of these cuts, but it is not known by how much", according to the Financial Times.
Magna now intends to hold a beauty contest between plants and workers before deciding on where and how it will build its new models, with a reduced and casualised workforce, even though Ellesmere Port was already given the new Astra to build.
In all these examples, the workforce is meant to pay with their jobs directly for the crisis of these companies.
Posties lead a counter-offensive?
The only fight against the present policy of the government and the bosses is the one being waged by the postal workers.
Up to now their strikes have been limited to London, parts of Scotland and some of the regional offices. These workers have been striking against Royal Mail's imposition of job cuts and the replacement of permanent full-time jobs with casual part-time jobs. In other words, the very same thing which is happening in every private and public industry and in services, everywhere!
Of course, Royal Mail does not even have the pretext of the "crisis" for slashing jobs. It is state-owned, is a vital service, it doubled its profits to £321m in this "recessionary" year, though it does not even need to be profitable. What is more, to cover the employment costs of all the present postal workers plus all the extra hands required, it would take scarcely 1% of the billions given to the bankers. Yet, instead, the government wants to slash expenditure and expects the workforce to pay - and join the dole queue - the same dole queue which it claims to want to cut!
Postal workers already lost 53,000 jobs in the past 6 years. Another 40,000 are on the line, apparently due to the advent of "automation". Yet it is the shortage of those workers who cannot be replaced by a machine - door-to-door postmen and women, which is today's real problem!
So now postal workers have voted 3 to 1 for a national strike. Unfortunately, up to now, the postal workers' union leaders have chosen to waste strikers' energy by calling "rolling" 24-hour strikes once a week, for one section at a time. Yet if ever there was a section of workers with the potential of throwing a spanner in the works of the job slashers, then it is the country's 120,000 posties!
Indeed postal workers could win such a fight - provided they do not leave the control of their strike in the hands of the union leadership, which over the past 4 months of the dispute has shown that it wanted to avoid an all-out confrontation at all costs. And provided, too, that they realise, on a practical level, that their fight against job cuts is the same fight that the majority of other workers could and should be waging alongside them.