This post represents my views and not those of my lovely public sector employer. It’s available under a creative commons CC-BY license.
For my generation, this isn’t about pensions. Not that I’m claiming ultra-militancy or anything, I simply don’t think any of us expect to get them. Public/Private sector, we think of pensions as something our parents got.
The stark truth of the matter is that by the time I get to what my Dad would call a retirement age we will either exist in a state of corporate feudalism, or scavenging and subsistence farming among the ruins of late capitalism. So, in many ways, whether we lose a huge chunk of our pension today or in the next round of austerity that we need to prop up our corporate overlords is irrelevant.
There’s a basic principle behind the public sector – we work to help people, we don’t work to make money for our bosses. The sustained attack by the government is an attack on this principle.
In this brave new world that is being ushered in – everything has to make a profit. Everything has to make enough surplus value to make rich people slightly richer. And if we can’t turn the required profit by our labour alone, we lose our terms and conditions rather than eat in to the pockets of the rich. The profit must be preserved at all costs.
The kind of things that the public sector does tend not to make a profit. Caring for, supporting and encouraging people seldom does. Sure, there’s been attempts to metrically measure and map in “added value”, or whatever heartsinking phrase is currently in vogue. But, deep down, we have committed the greatest sin of the 21st century – by doing things that don’t make piles of money.
You see this in the constant plea for efficiency savings, cuts to “back office staff” (whoever they are). We are trying to apply the thinking that has made profits for billionaires to the provision of the services and opportunities people directly rely on. It doesn’t work.
And we have suffered attack after attack because of this. We are a drain on the economy. We are pampered bureaucrats with gold-plated pensions. We are (memorably, and wonderfully) Enemies of Enterprise.
Which is odd, because when we do withdraw our labour, it apparently costs the economy rather a lot of money.
So that’s why I’m striking, and that’s why I’m marching. Because people simply need to stand up and say that not everything worthwhile turns a profit.
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