08.06.1995

Workers unite to smash pay divide

This week both healthworkers and railworkers are demonstrating against the poverty pay which the bosses are trying to foist on them. The disgusting offers of one percent to healthworkers and three percent to railworkers come at the same time as the bosses are awarding themselves 65-75% pay rises. They will get away with this daylight robbery just as long as we let them

LAST WEDNESDAY’S British Gas annual general meeting saw a major revolt by ‘Middle England’. Seven thousand enraged small shareholders vented their collective spleens on the entire board of directors - particularly its chief executive, Cedric Brown, and the chairman, Richard Giordano, who were described as “the most despised” men in Britain.

For all genuine partisans of the working class the riotous atmosphere provided a much needed shot in the arm, as the meeting ended up as “a chaotic and catastrophic embarrassment for the privatised utility and a huge indictment of the system created for it by the Conservative government” (The Guardian, June 1).

It is hardly surprising that the shareholders were in lynch-mob mood, as the AGM marked the culmination of more than six months of public anger at British Gas’s decision to raise Cedric Brown’s salary to £475,000 while slashing the pay of its showroom staff - justified on the eminently reasonable grounds that British Gas had to be made more ‘efficient’ in order to prepare it for the stiff competition to come.

Brown and Giordano were publicly humiliated, as the meeting called upon the entire British Gas board of directors to resign, with not a single voice raised in their support.

When the rebel shareholders proposed two resolutions, one of which made the revolutionary suggestion that the directors revise their remuneration policy “in line with standards of best practice”, it looked like curtains for Brown and co.

But the British Gas board had a secret super-weapon at their disposal - the proxy ‘bloc’ City vote. The astonished investors were informed by Giordano that their unanimous vote of no confidence had been ‘trumped’ by the big City institutions. The myth of “people’s capitalism” almost received its deathblow at that moment, as one particularly furious investor accused Giordano of acting like an “Italian dictator”.

Inspired by Cedric Brown’s example, Clare Spottiswoode, the director general of the gas regulator Ofgas, has demanded a 65% pay rise on her £75,000 salary. This would take her pay to £110,000 and move her from the bottom of the regulatory bodies’ league to the top. Perhaps it is her idea of an equal opportunities policy.

The downtrodden Ms Spottiswoode revealed the job had taken up more of her time than expected and thus she had no opportunity to take other appointments, which “is a usual arrangement in jobs like mine”. Naturally, she deserved some sort of financial remuneration to compensate for the onerous burdens she has to endure. Workers of the world, get your Kleenex out.

The directors of Camelot, organiser of the National Lottery, have also been sticking their snouts in the pay trough, no doubt eager to keep up with the Brownses. They have announced pre-tax profits of £10.8 million, or about £300,000 a week. Tim Halley, Camelot’s chief executive, has already raked in £443,367, while the other directors have to make do somehow with salaries in the range of £145,000 to £205,000.

The bosses as a whole will continue to force down our wages and rake in the profits for themselves as long as we let them. They are motivated by profit, not ‘fair play’. They only give concessions when we force them to.

The workers’ unity needed to end the attack on our wages is beginning to take shape, very tentatively, with the united action of health unions and the rail unions, Aslef and RMT. But the action of the Royal College of Nursing, pulling out of joint negotiations last week, indicated how fragile and bureaucratic a unity this is.

Only workers’ organisation at a rank and file level can smash through the pay attack launched on all workers.

Ultimately only a working class vision of the future can rid the world of the Cedric Browns, Clare Spottiswoodes and Tim Halleys - and the barbaric lottery which is capitalism itself.