- RSW 03  Page 8 -

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Workfare has been heading our way ever since Reagan smashed US trade unions in the 1980s. It's an old idea in new packaging: -

NEW, MODERN, FLEXIBLE... make the poor work for their subsistence. But you can ignore all the rhetoric about making the unemployed 'fit for work' or reducing the size of the social security bill. However much satisfaction it may give to right-whingers (not a spelling error - ed.) to see "the work-shy" forced to contribute towards their upkeep, or to dick-head liberals in the New Business Party for the help 'New Deal' provides to the "socially-excluded" - none of this matters. They don't care how much it costs, as long as it helps keep down wages and stops workers thinking they can have a say in fixing them.

You have only to look at the £millions the bosses and government are willing to spend on breaking strikes and on other kinds of repression - from police powers to the armed forces - to realise this fact. Pressure on the unemployed operates in the same way as concentration camps for political dis-sidents - it terrorises the bulk of the population into passive obedience.

WORKHOUSE ... LABOUR CAMP ... 'GATEWAY'... The keywords in modern capitalism are "productivity" and "flexibility" - in other words: increased rates of "extraction of labour" and decreased employee opposition to new methods of exploitation. As BMW's spokesman on Radio 4 said recently: "High unemployment is a result of high-er productivity." Also linked are casua-l-isation, job-substitution, "performance-related pay" and local pay bargaining.

The question for socialists is: can we contest this and, if so, how?

GIMME THAT OLD-STYLE REJECTION! There are still local campaigns against implementation of 'New Deal', mostly based on the Groundswell network that was set up to fight the Job Seekers Allowance, the main centres of which are in London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Oxford and Nottingham. Despite their relative weakness, such groups should not be ignored. For one thing, they organise the unemployed. For another they have had successes in forcing local councils, charitable organisations and businesses to pull out or refuse support to some of the worst projects.

Another approach is to try to politicise 'New Deal' recruits. This has already produced ones 'martyr' when a member of the Revolutionary Communist Group, Nigel Cook, was sacked from the job and had his dole suspended for attempting to unionise his fellow-workers. But neither is this necessarily a doomed tactic - in the USA Work Experience Program conscripts are now more willing to stand up against employers' gross abuses of their safety and security. This resurgence of militancy amongst casual and marginalised workers, recalling the old days of the IWW, is good news, but it's future is still unclear.

NO, TO A SOCIALIST EUROPE? A third angle is the wave of mass action that has arisen in other parts of Europe, especially France, Germany and Greece. Demonstrations, occupa-tions and riots have been the response of thousands of workers, students and unemployed to govern-ment attempts to impose the kind of 'reforms' that the working-class has suffered in New Zealand, the USA, the UK, the USSR and elsewhere. Not only have the planners been thrown into confusion, but also these shared battles raise the possibility of a new solidarity between sections of society whose common interests have not come together in this way for some time.

It may be that they have yet to experience the kinds of defeat which brought British workers to heel, or it may be that the diversity of trade unionism means that the TUC-Business Party type of stitch-up is not possible in those countries. While the odds of it happening here are slim for the immediate future, as the Ameri-cans have shown, it's not impossible.

THE THIRD WORLD IS DOWN THE ROAD... The main beneficiaries of workfare slaves in the US have been state and municipal governments and other public sector authorities using them to replace former direct employees, or even to re-employ the latter under new 'flexible', unprotected conditions. In the UK, the same process is slowly underway, but the job of administering the system has gone to private employment agencies as we see in the story of Simon Jones (see opposite). Other aspects of New Deal - 'training', etc are to be provided by conglomerates like Grand Metropolitan, formerly, and Reed International, currently. This continues Thatcher's policy: privatisation of the Employment Service. Unionisation of workers in this situation is a hard task - it will take the kind of daily grass-roots grind by co-workers that the Wobblies and the fruit-pickers union in California put into practice for years. Life isn't going to get easier in the foreseeable, but ...

RESISTANCE IS USEFUL! - Along with the Groundswell groups there are campaigns against employment agencies and casualisation (see Cymru Goch), and against gReed (see HSG).

Campaigns, events and contacts:- June 18th 1999: IMAGINE - Interna-tional Day of Action Against the Global Rip-Off. Internet: www.agp.org; e-mail discussion: J18discussion@gn.apc.org Brighton Against Benefit Cuts PO Box 2536, Rottingdean, Brighton BN2 6LX Cymru Goch (Welsh Socialists) PO Box 661, Wrexham LL11 1QU (monitoring job agencies in Wales) Haringey Solidarity Campaign PO Box 2474, London N8 (for campaign against Reed Group) European Marches Association, 104, Rue des Couronnes, 75020 PARIS Workfairness (USA): e-mail: iacentre@iacentre.org "Dole autonomy versus the re-imposition of work" very useful pamphlet, £1, from Aufheben c/o Brighton Unemployed Centre Ltd, PO Box 2536, Rottingdean, Brighton BN2 6LX