Morrisons Pay Insult

This piece first appeared on the Activist a few weeks ago. As a shop worker myself I would urge any member sof USDAW who visit this site to vote for Robbie in the union General Secretary Election that is happening at the moment.

Last week staff at Morrisons were voting over whether to accept a pay deal negotiated by the union. That is if they knew about the ballot at all. Okay so we had a poster in store saying there was a pay ballot, but if you have only started at the company within the last year (like majority of the staff, at least 5% of the staff are replenished each month) and you don’t know that much about unions you probably won’t realise you are of the people who has a vote. Even for someone who is slightly more clued up like myself, I had to wait until the day after to vote as the personnel office where the ballot box is was closed.

A Morrisons worker

The terms of the deal are even harder to find out. A conversation with our union rep led to me finding out that the deal would probably mean an increase of £5 a week in our pay with our wage going up to £6 an hour in February next year. Considering that most workers at Morrisons earn 4p above minimum wage, there perhaps is a sense of at least this is going in the right direction a bit.
Later I found out more about the offer, but not from the union website which I looked at first and found absolutely nothing about the offer. Rather it was from an unofficial staff forum that I finally found out that with the deal pay will go up to £5.86 in October (when the minimum wage goes up to £5.73) and then £6 in February.Whilst this increase means that we will be an extra 20p an hour above the minimum wage in February next year it still means our pay will be very low, far below the European Decency threshold which stands at £8 an hour.
Furthermore, with inflation soaring this increase is likely to be swept away very quickly. Given the £612 million pre-tax profits Morrisons made last year, the surely much more could have been fought for?The lacklustre approach of the union leadership in relation to this is indicative of a great number of other problems Morrisons workers face and the union fails to take action over.
One of the biggest problems is understaffing which means that workers effectively have to do the jobs of two or more people, unsurprisingly this leads to accidents and taking short-cuts with health and safety. My department alone has at least one accident a day if not more!
John Hannett (USDAW General Secretary) gets £100,000 a year salary plus a free Jaguar – I wonder how closely he feels the pains that the members he is supposed to represent have to endure. What we need is a leadership prepared to fight, if they took the pitifully low wage we have to accept then their might be a fight for a minimum wage of £8 for all retail workers. Such a demand is in Robbie Segal’s programme as she stands against Hannett in the General Secreatry elections, which is why I shall be building her campaign in my store.

Branch Meeting: Low Pay

This fortnights meeting was on Low Pay by myself. I started off by discussing how the problem wasn't just pay itself - although the poverty level minimum wage and the public sector pay freeze is angering many. We've recently also seen increases in council tax, the scrapping of the 10p tax rate and huge increases in the costs of goods. At the same time revelations about just how good the rich are living adds insult to injury, not just details of MP's ridiculous expenses but with profits increasing for many energy companies and bail-outs of banks like northern rock when they get into trouble whilst nothing of the sort is offered to ordinary people.
I carried on by mentioning how the argument that wage increases inevitabily leads to inflation is inaccurate and briefly discussed Marx's comments on wage increases and whether or not that increases the prices of commodities in his pamphlet Value, Price and Profit.
From there we discussed what could be done about. The first obvious place to look is the trade unions - after all this is effectively their job, but unfortunately with some notable exceptions, many of the trade union leaders simply do not want to fight for these - either brokering bad partnerships like USDAW or saying that a better deal isn't possible (UNISON health). Thus we need to challenge these bad leaderships. The question of a political voice is also important as this can help strengthen such campaigns for better pay.
The discussion then led to comments about the petrol tanker drivers strike, with Sister J asking how the lessons of this can be used to help further other struggles, and also questioned whether their much higher income compared to many other workers would be used to divide workers. Brother K replied that this was indeed the tactic used by councils try to implement single status and we need to explain that we argue for levelling pay upwards rather than bringing some peoples pay down to increase the low paid (obviously we're not talking about people on several hundred thousand a year here!).
There was then a general discussion about what we could do locally to support workers struggles, with a discussion of what the branch had done up to now, and then talk of how we could take this forward and build a local stewards network as well as try and build support for the campaign for a new workers party locally. (Incidentally the CNWP conference is in London this weekend - Sunday 29th June - and looks to be fantastic - see www.cnwp.org.uk)

Notes of a Shop Worker

This is a letter that appeared in last weeks The Socialist. Part of the reason why I'm posting it is that it gives me the opportunity to plug The Activist (blog of Socialist Party members in USDAW - see links) and the new Robbie Segal for General Secretary blog www.robbiesegal.blogspot.com - the articles on both a pretty good.

I haven't been in my job all that long, but you can feel the discontent amongst the people I work with. Their main complaint is understaffing – there are never enough people working to do the job properly – which stresses us all out. In my department we cook and serve food, and the company has not too long ago launched a big drive on food hygiene. The problem being that all this training is rendered meaningless by the understaffing which means we can’t properly carry out all we’ve learnt. The company say that the understaffing is due to their high staff turnover, but of course this is the case when they only pay us the pitiful minimum wage and expect us to do so much. That said, even if they had more staff, we’d still be understaffed as that way they can squeeze more profit out of us.
Instead, what we need is the nationalisation of the major supermarket chains under the control of the workers so we can implement humane working conditions with a better wage that would benefit staff and customers alike.