Enough is Enough - Why I voted to reject my public sector pay offer of 1%

Today I received a consultation email from UCU asking whether our negotiators should reject the "full and final" offer of 1%.  After three years of begrudgingly accepting the miserable pay offers being inflicted on the public sector, well below the level of inflation, I feel that the time has come for public sector unions to say no to the austerity measuring being doled out.  My main reasons for rejecting the offer are as follows:

• Our union negotiators are recommending we reject the offer saying 

Your negotiators are clear that when set against current RPI of 3.5%, the employers are offering a real-terms pay cut for the fourth year in succession and once again refusing to negotiate at a national level on a range of issues in respect of UCU equality policy. 

• The austerity being doled out by the ConDem coalition is damaging our economy.  When they came into power in 2010 we were on the road to recovery, in these three years they have turned the recovery around and taken us into another recession.  Millions of public sector workers have seen below inflation pay rises for the past 3 years and have had to reign in their spending, hence less is being spent on the high street and the economy is faltering.
• Finally, the government insulted millions of low paid workers in the recent budget by reducing the higher rate income tax band from 50p to 45p.  Any illusion that we were "all in this together" finally went up in smoke when Osborne gave the richest in this country a tax break.  As I pointed out in my blog post after the budget the facts and figures were massaged and the 50p tax band not given enough time to work so that the coalition could propagate the fallacy that the 50p tax rate was not bringing in any extra income into the treasury.

I urge my colleagues in UCU and those in all other public sector unions currently balloting on below inflation pay offers to finally say "enough is enough" and reject the government's collective punishment of public sector workers.

Finally I would call on all union activists to build for the 'A Future That Works' mass demonstration on 20th October called by the TUC, further details at http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-21056-f0.cfm

The Tories and their Lib Dem poodles plan to take us back to the eighties with their wreckless cuts

Many in the public sector were shocked when Osborne announced in the budget that he wanted 25% cuts across all departments except Health and International Development.  We all knew cuts were coming but this felt far too deep and would result in many job losses and poorer public services.

To then hear yesterday that Danny Alexander wanted departments to plan for 40% cuts was a real punch in the guts to public sector workers.  Many will now be seriously worrying about their jobs, as such drastic cuts could result in hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost from the public sector.

The only two departments which will not be hit quite so hard are Education and Defence.  Yet Defence is the one department where the most obvious cuts lie, in Trident and Afghanistan.  These cuts could be made with little effect being felt by the British public.  The chances are that in Education it will be seen more politically acceptable to make higher education face the largest share of the cuts, which would be an attack on a sector which is already in great financial difficulty.

The big question is what the government thinks is going to happen to all those public sector workers they make redundant.  There is no abundance of job vacancies in the private sector to absorb such job losses.  Without a doubt these actions will lead to the highest levels of unemployment and poorest levels of public services in decades.  It will take us back to the dark days of the eighties.

Despite the rhetoric these cuts are not unavoidable.  There are numerous commentators offering examples of less harmful measures to deal with the deficit such as:

• Scrapping Trident and leaving Afghanistan
• Raising capital gains tax to 40%, as this would not affect the poorest in society
• Leaving the NI rise for employers in place
• Scrapping the married couples tax allowance
• Hitting the banks harder, who after all are primarily responsible for the mess we are in
• Bring in a higher tax level for those earning over £100k

These drastic cuts have to be fought.  I am not a person who calls strike at the drop of a hat and was not prepared to vote in favour of industrial action over pay this year, but there comes a point when we have to make a stand.

The only answer to these drastic actions is for all public sector unions to join together and work on co-ordinated industrial action, before it is too late and we end up with millions on the dole and third-rate public sector.

At the end of the day there are alternatives and these cuts have more to do with Tory ideology than being faced with no other option.