DWP orders man to work without pay for company that made him redundant

John McArthur is sanctioned by jobcentre after refusing ‘forced labour’ at firm where he was previously paid minimum wage

• Shiv Malik
• The Guardian, Monday 3 November 2014 17.27 GMT

John McArthur makes his one-man protest outside LAMH in Motherwell after having his jobseeker’s allowance cut. Photograph: Alan Watson/HE Media/South West News

A  man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.

Electronics specialist John McArthur, now unemployed, says he is living off 16p tins of spaghetti and without heating after being sanctioned by a jobcentre for refusing to work unpaid for LAMH Recycle in Motherwell, a Scottish social enterprise.

He says he was happy to work for LAMH under the now-defunct future jobs fund for the minimum wage in 2010-2011, but refuses on principle to do the same job unpaid.

McArthur, 59, says he is surviving on a monthly pension of £149 after the DWP stopped his unemployment benefit until January as punishment for his refusal to go on the 26-week community work placement (CWP).

For almost three months, McArthur has spent two hours each weekday morning parading outside the plant wearing a placard reading: “Say no to slave labour”.

“It was simply a case of: ‘Go here, work for nothing and if you don’t we’ll stop your subsistence level benefit,’” he said.

McArthur, who says he has been applying for 50 jobs a week without joy, said the CWP programme was “entirely exploitative” and came at the “expense of poor people who’ve got absolutely no choice”. He added: “They [the government] deny it’s forced labour, that you can say no, but forced doesn’t always mean physical, it can be psychological or economic.

“The person who is trying to survive already on subsistence level welfare has absolutely no choice in the matter … especially if they’ve got young children to look after.”

LAMH confirmed it has 16 people working for six months without pay under CWP but added that since the end of June, six had progressed into paid employment.

The social enterprise, which repairs computers and recycles tin and cardboard, says it helps dozens of people each year who are long-term unemployed, many of whom have health issues.

Joe Fulton, the operations and development manager, said he believed the scheme “worked for people who want to make it work for them”. He added that out of the organisation’s paid workforce of 39, 25 had previously been unemployed.

McArthur said there were no jobs for someone his age in the Lanarkshire area. He said support for his placard demonstration had been overwhelming and just one person had objected.

Following conversations with local councillors, North Lanarkshire council passed a motion in October strongly objecting to forced employment schemes saying it would not get involved itself. “This council will not provide jobs or placements without pay as a condition of receiving benefits unless it is truly voluntary,” the motion read.

“We do not support any mandation of unemployed people to work without pay that puts their benefits at risk.”

The motion added such measures were ineffective and could “further stigmatise and demotivate” the unemployed in their search for work.

Last Wednesday, the DWP continued to battle the information commissioner and hostile court judgments ordering it to reveal where possibly hundreds of thousands of people are being sent to work without pay, sometimes for months at a time.

At the tribunal, the DWP argued that if the public knew exactly where people were being sent on placements political protests would increase, which was likely to lead to the collapse of several employment schemes and undermine the government’s economic interests.

The DWP confirmed some of the UK’s biggest charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Scope, Banardo’s, Sue Ryder, and Marie Curie had withdrawn from the CWP scheme, causing a significant loss of placements.

Giving evidence, senior civil servant Jennifer Bradley confirmed that numerous charities and businesses were receiving cash payments as an incentive to take on the unemployed.

She said several DWP schemes used mandatory unpaid work as a tool to help people but stressed that it was written into the terms that charities and businesses could not use people out of work to replace their paid workforce.

The DWP said it could not comment on individual cases but added that community work placements “help long-term unemployed people to gain work experience which increases their confidence, helps them to gain vital skills and crucially, improves their chances of getting a job.

“We are not naming the charities and community groups involved in the scheme in order to protect them from those who seem intent on stopping us helping people into work.”

The age of player power

Players, emboldened by free agency, agents and endorsements, are now asserting their rights as never before - and management doesn't like it

Rob Steen in Cricinfo

October 29, 2014

  

Michael Holding is among those who feel the West Indies players have been cast in the role of sinners in the latest saga © BCCI

Big hitter wanted. Must be comfortable handling money, schmoozing Australian media magnates, worshipping at the Church of Broadcasting on an hourly basis, maintaining an unholy trinity of power, changing course at the drop of a hat, staging events that lack context or go on too long, and treating the talent like worker ants (which of course they are). Imagination, a working set of principles and a capacity to think more than five minutes ahead nice but not essential. Cricketing experience would also be nice, but ex-professionals need not apply. Did we stress "no women" enough? All right then, NO WOMEN.

The "Positions Vacant" column at ICC Towers or BCCI HQ could never adopt that precise wording, of course. The sentiments, nonetheless, wouldn't be terribly different, not in essence. Perhaps the fondest and most self-deluding perception we cricket fanciers suffer from is the idea that, as a species, the game's administrators have the game at heart. Or anywhere remotely near it.

This is why a globally respected former player told me last week, after I'd urged him, for the good of the game, to put on his best suit and apply for his mandarin's licence, that he would just as soon buy a return flight to the sun, or even a lifetime's subscription to the Sun. This is also the fundamental reason why cricket in the Caribbean has just been dumped into what may well prove to be the deepest, muddiest, smelliest bogthis grand old game of ours has ever had the nose-holding, arm's-length displeasure to behold.

As Michael Holding related in his column for Wisden India, the roots of the duel between Dwayne Bravo et al and the West Indies Cricket Board lie in the latter's quest for revenge on the uppity West Indies Players' Association. And not over the shenanigans of Chris Gayle or Sunil Narine - or at least, not directly - but over the insistence that the board honour a pay rise to the players approved by its former CEO, Dr Ernest Hilaire.

To be fair, the CEO had been "conned" - as Holding put it - into sending the incriminating email by Dinanath Ramnarine, the former WIPA president and chief executive (indeed, Holding took a current WIPA official out for dinner and made no bones about his anger at such a shameless stunt). That, though, was scant consolation to Hilaire, or the WICB.

There can be little question, given its lamentable track record in player relations - a track record that has made the WIPA one of the most militant players' unions anywhere - that the WICB deserves public humiliation. And public humiliation can propel even the most intelligent and far-seeing fellows to the most asinine of reactions. Trouble is, when it comes to cricket officials - or, for that matter, officials of any sporting, showbiz or political creed - presumptions of intelligence and foresight may be unduly kind.

Holding, it should be added, has never been a rabid advocate of players' rights. That underlying ambivalence - towards the WICB as well as his on-field successors - has been easy to understand. To someone such as him, a Jamaican for whom playing for West Indies meant something more than representing a region, the ever-rising emphasis on financial reward can at times seem odious. When he was skittling all those England batsmen at The Oval in 1976, Holding will assure you, a win bonus or enhanced contract was an additional, minor incentive, not a cause. The revolution he was fighting, though, has been more or less won; now another needs winning.

That's why Holding has been unable to contain his fury, taking up cudgels on behalf of players who he feels (and not without extremely good reason) have been shat upon from a considerable height and cast, inevitably, as scapegoats. That the owner of the calmest, coolest, unshrillest voice in the menagerie we call the commentary box should feel compelled to raise it to such a pitch should not, cannot, be dismissed lightly.

That Bravo et al cannot even trust their own union rep, Wavell Hinds, ironically a long-time friend of Bravo's as well as a pal of Dave Cameron, the WICB president, emphasises how toxic things have got. Likewise Marlon Samuels' non-solidarity.

****

One of the under-appreciated benefits of the IPL is that it has empowered the players. Now, finally, the wealthy (and not undeserving) few have a shot at controlling their own destinies, free of club or board interference. This has also led down a bumpy road to a spooky place, a place where national teams, for so long the focus and pinnacle of attention, no longer call all the shots, where the highest levels of the game are merely the hors d'oeuvres, net practice for those whose appetites extend to all-you-can-eat feasts in Mumbai and Kolkata.

Nonetheless, amid all this frantic and often confusing relocation of the goalposts, Bravo and company were still willing to take a pay cut if it meant benefiting those labouring on the lower half of their greasy, treacherous pole. How many of us, in our own jobs, would do likewise? Granted, exceedingly few of us earn anything like as much as Bravo or Gayle (or even Jason Holder), but how many bankers or surgeons are queuing up to take a pay cut to help clerks or nurses? Generosity is generosity. For that, surely, these rebels warrant our admiration rather than opprobrium.

That the WICB appears so eager to paint a diametrically opposed picture testifies to its members' desperation to maintain control at any cost to credibility. Before the forceful Ramnarine resigned in 2012, the board refused point blank to deal with him. Garth Wattley summed up the board's approach to the WIPA as "a mixture of conciliation, intransigence, and more often of late, arrogance".

	That Michael Holding, the owner of the calmest, coolest voice in the menagerie we call the commentary box should feel compelled to raise it to such a pitch should not be dismissed lightly

Once upon a time, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I was party to a similar collective effort to aid less fortunate colleagues. When Robert Maxwell suddenly closed the London Daily News in 1987, after the bouncing Czech had lured scores of journalists from safe jobs to launch the paper just five months earlier, those of us who had been on board from the start voted to take a 50% cut in our severance pay. We decided on this course in order to ensure that the latest appointees, who had left their previous publications but had yet to report for duty at the LDN (of whom there were a fair number), could be compensated. It didn't help them enormously but I like to think they appreciated the gesture. On the other hand, I was single and childless at the time; I'm not at all sure I would have backed such a vote 20 years later.

But let's not get distracted. The bottom line could not be clearer. In the centuries-old struggle between management and players, across all major professional sports, the workers, emboldened by free agency, agents and endorsements, are now asserting their rights as never before - and management doesn't like it one eensy-weensy bit. Particularly not when it breeds season-shortening strikes (witness Major League Baseball in the mid-1990s), let alone season-nullifying strikes (witness the National Hockey League in 2004-05). The abrupt cessation of activities in an ODI series, barely a month after FICA, the international brotherhood, welcomed the signing of a collective bargaining agreement between the WICB and the WIPA, is merely another small landmark on the long, steep, rocky climb to respect.

Nothing proclaims the extent to which the tables have turned over the past half-century than a remarkable statistic from the winter of 2012-13: for the first time since Major League Baseball owners consented to salary and contract arbitration in 1974, not one of the 133 players took his claim as far as a hearing, the upshot of the clubs' increasing willingness to sign younger players to multi-year deals, affording even non-stars a degree of security. Unfortunately West Indies cricket is neither wallowing in record attendances nor benefitting from equitable revenue-sharing.

The funny thing about all this - as in funny-peculiar rather than funny-ha-ha - is that this latest downing of tools should happen in India, where resistance to players' unions, among the players themselves, has been fiercest. For all the vicissitudes of the BCCI, the fact that Sachin, Rahul and Anil never felt much, if any need, to form one says a great deal about their contracts, but must also say something at least faintly complimentary about N Srinivasan and his posse.

By the same token, the reality is unavoidable: without Indian support FICA will remain toothless. Fearless as the WIPA is, the day that MS Dhoni and/or Virat Kohli declare public solidarity with their brothers in charms is the day the WICB, Sri Lanka Cricket and their ilk start pondering the wisdom of their conniving and bullying. Only then will professional cricketers truly feel that the pendulum has swung as far as it needs to swing.

It takes two to tango, but it takes a lot more to stop a rot.

Our bullying corporations are the new enemy within

The demands of business dominate our politicians and embed inequality. It’s a full-blown assault on democracy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 7 October 2014 20.13 BST

The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The more power you possess, the more insecure you feel. The paranoia of power drives people towards absolutism. But it doesn’t work. Far from curing them of the conviction that they are threatened and beleaguered, greater control breeds greater paranoia.

On Friday, the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, claimed that business is under political attack on a scale it has not faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was speaking at the Institute of Directors, where he was introduced with the claim that “we are in a generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market against people who want to undermine it or strip it away”. A few days before, while introducing Osborne at the Conservative party conference, Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, warned that companies are at risk of being killed by “regulation from ‘big government’” and of drowning “in the mire of anti-business mood music encouraged by vote-seekers”. Where is that government and who are these vote-seekers? They are a figment of his imagination.

Where, with the exception of the Greens and Plaid Cymru – who have four MPs between them – are the political parties calling for greater restraints on corporate power? When David Cameron boasts that he is “rolling out the red carpet” for multinational corporations, “cutting their red tape, cutting their taxes”, promising always to set “the most competitive corporate taxes in the G20: lower than Germany, lower than Japan, lower than the United States”, all Labour can say is “us too”.

Its shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, once a fierce campaigner against tax avoidance, accepted a donation by a company which delivers “tailored tax solutions to individuals and organisations internationally”. The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, cannot open his lips without clamping them around the big business boot. There’s no better illustration of the cross-party corporate consensus than the platform the Tories gave to Jones to voice his paranoia. Jones was ennobled by Tony Blair and appointed as a minister in the Labour government. Now he rolls up at the Conservative conference to applaud Osborne as the man who “did what was right for our country. A personal pat on the back for that.” A pat on the head would have been more appropriate – you can see which way power flows.

The corporate consensus is enforced not only by the lack of political choice, but by an assault on democracy itself. Steered by business lobbyists, the EU and the US are negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This would suppress the ability of governments to put public interest ahead of profit. It could expose Britain to cases like El Salvador’s, where an Australian company is suing the government before a closed tribunal of corporate lawyers for $300m (nearly half the country’s annual budget) in potential profits foregone. Why? Because El Salvador refused permission for a gold mine that would poison people’s drinking water.

Last month the Commons public accounts committee found that the British government has inserted a remarkable clause into contracts with the companies to whom it is handing the probation service (one of the maddest privatisations of all). If a future government seeks to cancel these contracts (Labour has said it will) it would have to pay the companies the money they would otherwise have made over the next 10 years. Yes, 10 years. The penalty would amount to between £300m and £400m.

Windfalls like this are everywhere: think of the billion pounds the government threw into the air when it sold Royal Mail, or the massive state subsidies quietly being channelled to the private train companies. When Cameron told the Conservative party conference “there’s no reward without effort; no wealth without work; no success without sacrifice”, he was talking cobblers. Thanks to his policies, shareholders and corporate executives become stupendously rich by sitting in the current with their mouths open.

Ours is a toll-booth economy, unchallenged by any major party, in which companies which have captured essential public services – water, energy, trains – charge extraordinary fees we have no choice but to pay. If there is a “generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market”, it’s a struggle against the corporations, which have replaced the market with a state-endorsed oligarchy.

It’s because of the power of corporations that the minimum wage remains so low, while executives cream off millions. It’s because of this power that most people in poverty are in work, and the state must pay billions to supplement their appalling wages. It’s because of this power that, in the midst of a crisis so severe that the world has lost over 50% of its vertebrate wildlife in just 40 years, the government is organising a bonfire of environmental protection. It’s because of this power that instead of innovative taxation (such as a financial transactions tax and land value taxation) we have permanent austerity for the poor. It’s because of this power that billions are still pumped into tax havens. It’s because of this power that Britain is becoming a tax haven in its own right.

And still they want more. Through a lobbying industry and a political funding system, successive governments have failed to reform, corporations select and buy and bully the political class to prevent effective challenge to their hegemony. Any politician brave enough to stand up to them is relentlessly hounded by the corporate media. Corporations are the enemy within.

So it’s depressing to see charities falling over themselves to assure Osborne that they are not, as he alleged last week, putting the counter view to the “business argument”.“We don’t recognise the divide he draws between the concerns of businesses and charities,” says Oxfam. People “should be celebrating not denigrating the relationship between business and charities”, says the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. These are good groups, doing good work. But if, in the face of a full-spectrum assault by corporate power on everything they exist to defend, they cannot stand up and name the problem, you have to wonder what they are for.

There’s a generational struggle taking place all right: a struggle over what remains of our democracy. It’s time we joined it.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities

• 
• • Paul Verhaeghe
  • theguardian.com, Monday 29 September 2014 09.00 BST

'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.

The Downfall of Max Clifford - the ultimate PR guru for the guilty

Hubris had been his metaphorical middle name for decades, a strain of madness was apparent from the way he virtually invited prosecution, and nemesis duly delivered her payload at Southwark Crown Court on Monday. Yet however familiar from Greek drama that progression may be, it would require a public relations operator of warped genius to portray Max Clifford as a tragic hero. And the only one with the malign chutzpah to attempt such a task is the one now awaiting sentence for eight counts of indecent assault.

I could have a feeble crack myself, by pretentiously pointing out that the distinctive hallmark of the tragic hero is the inability to see in himself the flaws that are blindingly obvious to everybody else. It took lack of self-awareness on a cosmic scale for this self-proclaimed profiteer from outlandish falsehoods to accuse his accusers of being“fantasists and opportunists” who told “a pack of lies” and “fairy stories” in the hope of selling their alleged confections to the tabloids without noticing an irony. Could you imagine a more perfect example of projection than this?

Yet all anyone charged with writing about Clifford could honestly wish to do is find that a waterproof lap top cover has magically materialised on the doormat. This is one of those columns that should be written in the shower, followed by the kind of skin-breaking scouring Karen Silkwood had to endure after being contaminated by a radioactive leak.

The detail that coats you in an especially thick film of voyeuristic filth is the one that led to this overdue corrective to the foolish misapprehension that, because of various acquittals, the justice system had no business chasing down ancient sex crimes. In the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations, Clifford went on television and cockily predicted that that there was much more to come. It came for him when police raided his Surrey home, and found a letter in which a woman reminded him graphically of the abuse he visited on her 35 years ago, when she was 15 and he promised to make her a star if she pleasured him.

“I had no one to turn to,” she wrote. “You were very clever. A+ in grooming children.” He bullied her into fellating the penis that incited such contradictory evidence about its size. He had persuaded her, falsely, that he had commissioned a photographer to record the incident with a long lens. “I thought my life had ended,” she said. “I was going to jump off a bridge.”

However repugnant the facts, more shocking was this. Detectives came upon that letter in the drawer of Clifford’s bedside table. My rationale for that geographical fact is brought to us in association with a family-size box of Kleenex. What are we to make of a man to whom an anguished reminder of how he wrecked a human life is not itself a source of anguish, but a masturbatory aid?

All I can make of it is that some people, usually male, are born missing that part of the brain’s structure of psychochemistry which confers the gift of empathy. Nothing known of Clifford’s early life suggests any environmental reason for him finding the torment he inflicted sexually arousing rather than desperately shaming. If that perversion is a random genetic accident, perhaps one should try to see it is a curse and such people as victims. There are limits to the cardiac blood flow of even the most bleeding heart liberal, however, and Clifford seems to delineate those. While the sight in which he hid was not as plain as Savile, and his crimes were neither as many nor heinous, it feels venal even to hint at a ranking formula for the psychological destruction of the vulnerable young.

Clifford, who after destroying David Mellor with the Chelsea football shirt invention piously announced he would expose the sexual hypocrisy of other Tory ministers in revenge for their maltreatment of the NHS, and whose web site continues to advertise his patronage of children’s charities, was as rancid a hypocrite as even the PR-red top interface could produce.

He bragged about earning a fortune from suppressing stories, but failed to perform that protective role for himself. Having enriched and aggrandised himself by exposing the private lives of other, he was belatedly brought down by the exposure of his privates. Poetic justice comes no more unpoetic. But it is justice that efforts to punish ancient sex crimes were vindicated. And it is justice that Clifford has been deposited, by the giant tongs of public disgust, into the dustbin of history, to rot alongside Savile as an emblem of that grotesque era when rapacious predators destroyed young lives with what for so scandalously long seemed  impunity. 

The real cultists are CEOs

The real cultists are not Maoists, they're CEOs

It is not only in religious or political circumstances where people are made to follow a leader unthinkingly

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 30 November 2013 18.04 GMT

Fred Goodwin is portrayed as a tyrant in a new biography. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

The great leader's followers know he goes "absolutely mental" at the tiniest deviation from the party line. He screams his contempt for the offender in public so that all learn the price of heresy. Go beyond minor breaches of party discipline and raise serious doubts about the leader's "vision" of global domination and that's the end of you. "You're toast," he says, and his henchmen lead you away.

In private, his underlings mutter that the leader is a "sociopath" with "no capacity for compassion". Even though he terrifies them, their hatred of him is far from complete. When he relaxes, the great leader can be charming. His favour brings reward. The further you move up the hierarchy, the more blessings you receive, and the more you believe the leader's propagandists when they hail his "originality" and "rigour". History is vindicating the leader. His power is growing. The glorious day when the world recognises his greatness is coming.

I could be describing Stalin's Soviet Union or the "Church" of Scientology. With last week's allegations that Maoists in south London kept women as slaves, I could be going back into the lost world of Marxist-Leninism. The British Communist party demanded absolute intellectual conformity. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's Workers Revolutionary party and the Socialist Workers party wanted absolute submission, including sexual submission from women. The UK Independence party meanwhile is looking like a right-wing version of a Marxist sect. Nigel Farage's cult of the personality allows no other politician to compete with the supreme leader and no Ukip official to talk back to him.

As it is, the portrait of a tyrant comes from Iain Martin's biography of Fred Goodwin(one of the best books of the year, in my view). Like a communist general secretary or religious fanatic, he was enraged by the smallest breach with orthodoxy: not wearing the company tie; fitting a carpet in a Royal Bank of Scotland office that was not quite the right colour. The propagandists who praised his rigour and independence worked for Forbes magazine, the Pravda of corporate capitalism. Goodwin took RBS from being a sleepy Scottish bank to a global "player". So history did indeed seem to vindicate him – for a while.

With Britain hobbling in to 2014 like a battered beggar, we should accept that corporations can be as demented and dictatorial as any millenarian movement. People resist the comparison because businesses seem such modest enterprises. The godly persecuted heretics and apostates and the communists punished all dissent because they believed the kingdom of God or workers' paradise could be theirs if believers followed the one true course.

Businesses don't want Utopia. They just want to make money. Dennis Tourish, Britain's best academic authority on how hierarchies enforce obedience, has no problem with the comparison, however. His latest book, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership,puts the Militant Tendency alongside Enron, the mass "revolutionary suicide" by Jim Jones's followers at Jonestown with the mass liquidation of Britain's wealth by the banks. The ends of an L Ron Hubbard or Fred Goodwin may be incompatible, he says, but the means are same.

In any case, the language of business has become ever more cultish. In the theory of "transformational leadership", which dominates the business schools, the CEO is a miracle worker. In Transformational Leadership, by Bernard Bass and Ronald Riggio, he is described, not by some gullible Forbes hack, but by two supposedly intelligent American academics. The transformational leader "inspires" his follower to "achieve extraordinary outcomes", they say. He "empowers them" to "exceed expected performance" and show ever greater "commitment to the organisation".

I don't see why anyone should find the comparison with fanatics so hard to accept and not only because the idea that CEOs can manufacture new and better subordinates matches Trotsky's belief that the revolution would create a "new man who raises himself to a new plane".

The nearest you are likely to come to experiencing life in a dictatorship is at work. Unless you are fortunate, you will discover that the management is the source of all ideas and all power. Executives will have privileges that bear no more relation to real achievement than the fat and ugly cult leader's expectation of sex. In 2012, the median pay for CEOs in the USA was $14.4m, the average salary for employees $45,230. In Britain, the High Pay Commission found that the average annual bonus for FTSE 300 directors had increased by 187% in 10 years even though the average year-end share price had gone down by 71%.

Above all, whether you are in the public or the private sector, John Lewis or Barclays Bank, you will learn that if you challenge authority you will lose the chance of promotion and if you challenge it in public, you will lose your job. To prosper in the workplace, as in the dictatorship, you must tell leaders what they want to hear.

Since the richest executives on the planet brought the west down, there has been an understandable interest in the psychology of corporate power. One experiment stays in my mind. Researchers divided volunteers into groups of three and gave one the title of "evaluator". Half an hour later, they gave each group a plate of biscuits. The evaluators grabbed more cookies and sprayed crumbs as they ate with their mouths open. After just 30 minutes, the conviction that they were managers produced greed and the belief that normal rules did not apply to them.

I do not doubt that, if required, the courts will deliver justice to the alleged victims of the Brixton Maoists. Justice is harder to find elsewhere. It is not merely that the banking scandals have not led to one prosecution. With the honourable exception of the coalition's push to protect NHS whistleblowers, there has been no interest in making public and private hierarchies less cultish. The left is not saying loudly enough that we need worker directors on all boards as a non-negotiable minimum. The right does not admit that the old way of doing business failed.

In these dismal circumstances, you must look after yourself. If you work in an organisation where you cannot challenge your superiors without fear of the consequences, get out. Stay and you will become a paranoid flatterer. You will suffer all the psychological consequences of living a frightened life in a playground run by strutting bullies. Dennis Tourish's words should be your prompt: the corruption of power may be bad, but the corruption of powerlessness is worse.

Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette

The dictate that one 'not speak ill of the dead' is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures

• 
• • Glenn Greenwald
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 April 2013 15.41 BST

Margaret Thatcher Photograph: Don Mcphee

News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. British Labour MP Tom Watsondecreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." Following in the footsteps of Santa Claus, Steve Hynd quickly compiled a list of all the naughty boys and girls "on the left" who dared to express criticisms of the dearly departed Prime Minister, warning that he "will continue to add to this list throughout the day". Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her."

This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown."

To demand that all of that be ignored in the face of one-sided requiems to her nobility and greatness is a bit bullying and tyrannical, not to mention warped. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Tasteless." Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez:

 " To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance."

Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. Any such objections would have been invalid. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him – a third of the country, according to some polls – a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." Chavez was indeed a divisive and controversial figure, and it would have been reckless to conceal that fact out of some misplaced deference to the grief of his family and supporters. He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies.

Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.