A rubbish wage for all

On Monday Brighton and Hove's refuse collectors and street-sweepers became the latest in a growing list of low-paid manual workers forced to go on strike against proposals to dramatically slash their pay.

Brighton and Hove Council has proposed to reduce the salaries of around 800 staff by between £2,000 and £8,000 - almost 40 per cent of their current pay.

And Brighton is not alone.

In Leeds 600 GMB and UNISON members have been on strike for 10 weeks over proposals to "level down" their pay by £6,000 from an average of £18,000.

Before them Midlothian Council workers, this time gravediggers, were forced to take industrial action for the same reason. It seems that there is a growing fashion among councils to take on manual workers.

What makes these attacks even more worrying is that in every case the council has not been upfront about the cuts, which are about budget restraint, but have tried to justify these attacks on the basis of equal pay between men and women. It is argued that because most manual workers are men and they are paid more than teaching assistants, who are mainly women, men's pay should be reduced in the name of equality.

Ensuring that everyone is on rubbish money is a funny way to achieve social justice.

We don't fight for equality by disrespecting manual workers who have never - I repeat, never - had the respect or status that they deserve in society.

The key inequality in society is not among those who eat economy beans on toast for their tea but between them and the rich and the powerful.

It's neither gravediggers nor refuse collectors who ensure that teaching assistants are on low pay. And all these workers require a living wage.

Let's leave aside for now the fact that working on the bins is one of the hardest jobs in the country and if it were not done it would literally lead to the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

Let's leave aside the fact that it is one of the lowest-status jobs in the country which no-one would actually do for minimum wage, making salary cuts poor logistics.

Let's also pretend we don't know that manual workers die younger, work harder and contribute more to society that virtually any other section of society.

We have to address the problem that more women than men are underpaid.

We don't achieve this by increasing the number of men who scarcely earn enough to support their families but by raising the shocking poverty pay of many jobs that are traditionally done by women, such as cleaning.

If we're to follow the council's logic to its conclusion, we'd have to say that because most council chief executives are men, one way of addressing the pay gap would be to reduce their pay.

However it seems that Brighton and Hove's new chief executive John Barradell has not volunteered to take a solidarity cut in his £160,000 per annum pay packet even though he's clearly in a better position to weather that kind of storm.

Funny that.

When talking to a union-friendly Brighton councillor on Friday, the day the strike was confirmed, it became clear that while equal pay was the surface justification for these pay cuts, the real meat of the argument was simply about trying to reduce the budget.

That makes attacking the council's use of ideas about equal pay even more important.

If we allow the real battles for equal pay for women to be turned into code for attacks on low-paid working-class men, we will risk workers turning against equal rights themselves.

Not a single woman will be better off for these cuts. But plenty of women will be worse off - both those who work directly for the council in the affected jobs and those in families which rely on salaries that have just taken an enormous hit.

The council appears so divorced from everyday concerns that it can make vicious attacks on essential workers and feel all right about it because it has dressed it up in progressive language.

We cannot allow it to get away with this. There is nothing in these proposals for working-class people of either sex to welcome.

These latest Brighton strikes deserve our support because attacks of this kind would be an outrageous miscarriage of justice if allowed to go ahead but also because our fight for better pay for women workers can't be co-opted by those whose every instinct is to cut working people's standard of living while justifying the sickening salaries at the top of the council hierarchy.

Brighton and Hove GMB official Rob Macey said of the dispute: "GMB members don't take this type of action lightly and we are conscious of the inconvenience it will bring to the residents of the city.

"We are confident that the public will support our members when they consider how they would react if they themselves were faced with pay cuts of up to £8,000 each through no fault of their own."

Equal rights are not abstract affairs but very practical matters. If these proposals go ahead it will destroy the quality of life for hundreds of people without any other injustice being addressed.

That cannot be allowed to happen under the banner of equality when there are still so many fights left to win.