I don’t often buy the Evening Standard as I find that most commercially available toilet paper is both softer and more absorbent.
Today however, the Standard is presenting press releases from the Taxpayers Alliance (a.k.a. the Tory candidates’ training ground) as an “exclusive” report on deficits in local authority pension funds.
The range of inaccuracies in the “reporting” from this “newspaper” will no doubt be exposed better by those with more expertise in this area. (I don’t think my GMB comrades will mind my pointing out that the Standard is wrong to describe their union as the “main local government union” for example!)
It is certainly astonishing that (presumably) well paid columnists think that police officers or teachers are paid out of the local government pension scheme (if public sector workers did as bad a job as Professor Philip Booth did in writing that article we would be dealt with under a capability procedure!)
The point I want to make here is that this report is an indication of the attacks which we can now expect upon all public sector pension schemes. The pensions of the highest paid are an easy target (and we might not worry to much if these were limited) but the reality of this is that the real attack is upon the pensions of the hundreds of thousands of local government workers who will get a small pension - not the small number who may get a hundred thousand.
We need now to prepare for the political and industrial action which will be required to protect our public service pensions, which should be a benchmark for workers in the rest of the economy and not an exception to be pilloried by Tory journalists.
If capitalism cannot afford decent pensions then the answer is not to get rid of decent pensions but to get rid of capitalism (sorry if that sounds a bit Dave Spart but it also sounds right).
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21 comments:
Hi Jon
I agree with most of your comments on the pensions issue. If and when I fear the tories get in our pensions will be under attack within two years of a tory administration. Eric Picklehead I mean Pickles who was the former tory Local Government shadow minister and hatchet merchant had an ideological hatred of Local Government pension schemes and public sector pension schemes in general.He vowed to scrap them when the tories got in.Indeed the tory party, the tory press,the Lib-Dems,and most political parties seem to want to stick the boot in our pension scheme.In times of economic woe we are always easy targets for the right wing they can divert their greed of failed policies of the past into blameing Public Sector workers, usually pensions, wages,our work record and alledged wasteful ways.We have a tough time ahead fighting such attacks, we dont want the days of pensioners living in poverty and living without dignity in old age to become the norm.Our enemies dont usually have to suffer such a fate, they have already moved abroad and took their ill gotten gains with them to sunny climes!
The majority of people in this country outside the public sector are paying more into public sector pensions than their own.This is simply unfair and unsustainable,salaries in the public sector now outstrip those in the private sector,so you should be able to fund your own fucking pensions!!!!!!!!!!
Congrats Jon!
It looks like you've been described by a dinosaur by the far-right Thatcherite Oxbridge moonbats of the TPA.
Must be worth a feather in any decent citizen's cap.
Apologies to all for the bad language from "niceonecyril" but I thought I would give a flavour of the rants that are inspired by the "divide and rule" between the public and private sectors which is intended to ensure that we ordinary folk pay the price of the crisis caused by the fat cats whose pensions are more than secure.
Hi Jon
I think your views are quite out dated. Whatever you say, the fact is that the pensions of the public sector are not sustainable and as each year goes by they will be more grabs from the government (who is ever in at the time) to maintain them. My council bill has just arrived and there is an extra 0.8% of pay costs that now has to go in to the PS pension scheme. So you are either taking it off the taxes payers or you are taking it from front line services, I will let you make this call. You can't keep spending and I would have thought that the current envirioment would make you reaslise this. My own view is that the public sector should pay more towards their pension schemes than they currently do. I pay 22.5% in to mine what do you or you memebers pay in to yours.
I've heard you or your union say that members contributions should go up.
On the contrary, I suspect that my views on this are ahead of their time.
A truly sustainable economy based upon social solidarity would provide decent retirement income for everyone.
In the mean time, if you add the employer and employee contributions together then most local authorities are paying far more than 20% (and before anyone objects to counting both contributions together it is clear that they both come out of the same overall pay bill and are therefore part of the package of remuneration of the workforce as a whole).
We should be demanding that private sector workers should have access to the public sector pension schemes (as some already do) and demanding that private employers pay their fair share of the contributions.
Private employers who cannot make a profit and pay decent pensions should be brought into public ownership and democratic control.
"Private employers who cannot make a profit and pay decent pensions should be brought into public ownership and democratic control."
Interesting comment by you Jon, my local council could not make a profit on the pension contributions they have had already so they are going to contribute more, not the employees (your memebers) but the employer i.e the tax payer. You just don't get do you?
Look forward to seeing you on the streets when the tories get in.
Economic literacy has never been a strong point of the political right has it?
Your local Council can't make a profit on its pension contributions?
I think you'll find courses on economics provided (in the public sector) at a local FE College...
Hi Jon,
I was interested in your comment on what should happen to companies that are unable to make a profit and support decent pensions.
I can see arguments for requiring companies to contribute to pensions
but what I don't understand is how bringing them into public ownership and under democratic control will help them to be profitable and make the money required to support the decent pensions, or are these pension contributions to come from state funds?
If a firm is producing a socially useful product and we, as a society, permit it to stop doing that because it cannot make a profit then we are allowing an ideological commitment to the private market to lead us to scrap useful productive capacity and forgo its potential products.
In the long run, as a socialist, I believe there to be a better way of organising society than the anarchy of the market, but in the short run it may well be cheaper for the state to take over "failing" companies rather than let them go to the wall and deal with the consequences in terms of lost tax revenue and increased unemployment benefits.
Better that our public money should be spent on wages and pension contributions than benefits.
Mass unemployment will do great damage to our society and to the millions of individuals who will be thrown onto the dole.
Thanks for that Jon,
What I still fail to grasp in that scenario, is where the money comes from, where does it get generated so that this 'failing' but useful business can be kept going with its salaries and pension contributions.
I'm also a bit unsure of what 'socially useful' means and who would get to decide it, or, what would happen to firms that were 'failing' but not socially useful. Would they be allowed to go to the wall and their employees onto benefit?
Very interested in your thoughts.
P
Pensions are postponed pay. End of. The Standard is crap. End of. The TPA is a front for the Tory right (i.e. all of the buggers apart perhaps from "the Shadow chancellor" (tm La Harman) Kenneth Clarke). End of.
Well "Sir Jasper" if we didn't permit the market to be the main engine of resource allocation in the economy we could rethink our whole approach.
As to who determines what is or is not socially useful - we as a society need to find a way to do that democratically if we want a world in which what is produced is influenced first of all by what is needed as opposed to what can be afforded by those with the money to spend.
In the short term, and we will sadly live in a market economy well beyond that, the point is that the state can find it more economical to support continuing employment than to subsidise unemployment.
What planets are some of you on - if people don't have a decent pension now (may change if the Tories get back in) the TAX PAYER funds the payments of minimum income guarantee, in order to secure a minimum income for pensioners. So the public purse pays it one way or another. Far better to take a percentage of our pay now to fund us in old age, than for us to blow the lot and let the State make up the lot in the end anyway.
This is how a civilisation works - you protect those in need (in this case, pensioners).
Jay
Thanks for getting back to me, for me it's a very interesting discussion, but I'm still not I'm clear on where, in your view, the money comes from.
I can see that there might be lots of ways of allocating it once you've got it, but somebody somewhere in the economy has got to generate the value that the cash is based on (just printing it doesn't work that's for sure). If they don't there's nothing to allocat. How should this best be done in your view?
Paul
"If a firm is producing a socially useful product and we, as a society, permit it to stop doing that because it cannot make a profit then we are allowing an ideological commitment to the private market to lead us to scrap useful productive capacity and forgo its potential products."
No, actually we are allowing the resources allocated to the firm to be deployed elsewhere. By preventing a firm that fails to produce saleable product going bankrupt we simply lock the economy into a mix of production that fails to maximise collective utility. Just think about the joys of living in North Korea or Cuba vs those of living in the USA if you doubt the fundamental correctness of this assertion.
, the cost of which exceeds the utility of those who would buy its products, to be redeployed somewhere
Steve, you take me back to A level economics, which means to me that I suspect you know that optimal resource allocation is an impossible dream of orthodox economics depending as it does upon market conditions which cannot exist in the real world.
Given that Pareto optimality is a purely theoretical construct of no real world utility, the idea that markets allocate resources efficiently is a profoundly ideological one (as evidenced by the misleading comparison of life in the wealthiest capitalist country with those in the two isolated vestiges of state socialism).
Mind you, I am not sure that the choice of life in the USA or Cuba is nearly as straightforward if you are poor. Speaking purely personally (and as someone with no intention of moving away from where I live and what I do) I would far sooner live in Cuba than in the USA.
For those of us who are not poor, capitalism has indeed shown itself very effective at creating ever more material things and greater wealth (as measured by per capita GDP). However it does not appear to deliver greater happiness with the passing years of economic growth, the environmental sustainability of which is increasingly called into question. And, as we are seeing, it periodically throws up economic crises with profound social costs.
The failure of the Soviet Union does not, of itself, provide convincing evidence that the market mechanism is the best means of resource allocation that humanity will be able to devise.
This is why, Sir Jasper, you are missing the point I think. All labour creates things of potential utility ("use values") - their monetary value ("exchange value") matters to the extent that they become marketable commodities. If we liberate our minds from the logic of the market then the questions ceases to be "where will the money come from?" but "how will we decide what is produced and consumed?"
Steve has set out the traditional defence of the invisible hand of the market as the best means of answering that question, which defence is fundamental to orthodox economics, yet is also highly questionable.
It is good that the legitimacy of capitalism is once more being called into question, as we saw on yesterday's demonstration through Central London.
Hi Jon,
Interesting.
Maybe I am missing the point.
My question is about where the value/utility comes from. Who generates it and why? If we decide to produce a socially useful hospital who does the building and what is their motivation to do it?
The money measure is just a useful if-flawed proxy for value but if one can't point to where it gets created in any economic system then it, at some point it will collapse. Ask the investors in Madof's funds.
Where in the socialist world does the value get created by whom and with what motivation?
Paul
Put the question like this, Sir Jasper, what is it that motivates the surgeons and nurses to create the use values which are inherent in healing the sick? Where is the motivation for the teacher who creates the use value of educating the young?
Most public servants - particularly those who have spent years of study to be able to do their jobs - have made a very deliberate choice to put service before self-interest.
Why should we assume that others cannot do this too?
There is no meaningful market in the delivery of these services, yet they are amongst the most important things that one human being can do for another.
I think our mixed economy proves well enough that we don't need the market to do some of the most important things that we as a society do for one another (indeed attempts to introduce the market into the delivery of these services has been a disaster).
From where we stand now I don't think we can see every contour of the future, but it is obvious that a future not governed by the market is a viable proposition.
Hi Jon
So what value do you add to society?
Why my anonymous friend, I provide this blog for you to express yourself on! :)
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