Bucking the trend

That's what Grangemouth refinery management said when workers seeking to defend their pension scheme went on strike for 48 hours last month.

It's what Network Rail is saying in response to the decision of rail union RMT to ballot 17,000 maintenance and signalling staff over two separate issues of harmonising terms and conditions and defending pay levels.

Workers do not vote by a margin of 100 to one for action unless they are utterly frustrated by a lack of progress in tackling their grievances.

Workers do not take industrial action, losing substantial amounts of pay, unless there is a good reason for doing so.

And that good reason is usually management foot-dragging.

Many of the plethora of private companies that used to do rail maintenance work offered pay and conditions that were below the Network Rail norm.

Now that these maintenance workers are coming under the Network Rail umbrella, justice dictates a single set of terms and conditions.

Workers' awareness that the company is looking to reduce its maintenance budget by 12 per cent must set the alarm bells ringing.

If they rely on the goodwill of Network Rail, they will be disappointed. Far better to let Network Rail know that there will be no shilly-shallying and that they want results.

The same goes for the signallers and other operational staff who are not prepared to see the value of their pay packets eroded.

Even in these days of co-ordinated neoliberalism as the official creed of all three major parties, working people can still improve their situation through unity and determination and, in so doing, buck the trend of falling trade union membership.

Is caring so difficult?

WHENEVER the government announces a period of consultation on a spending issue, it's always predicated on an implication that current expenditure is unaffordable.

And so we can anticipate that it will be thinking in terms of what insurance industry representative Nick Kirwan calls the industry's readiness "to play a full part in developing safe, simple and affordable products to help people plan for the part of the cost of providing care that will be their responsibility."

That is completely the wrong direction, allowing an industry with a dreadful record of profiteering and fraud to handle the finances of social care.

The National Pensioners Convention is correct to lay down basic principles of government-funded free care for all and the abandonment of means testing.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson tries to frighten us by talking in terms of care costs rising by £12 billion by 2026, but that's less than a quarter of what the government used to bail out one bank.

Nine years ago, a royal commission into long-term care advocated the free provision of all nursing and personal care.

The government got it wrong then. It should change course now.