The Shiv Sena - It's History & Future

 

Access to justice is no longer a worker’s right, but a luxury

Aditya Charkrabortty in The Guardian


Laws that cost too much to enforce are phoney laws. A civil right that people can’t afford to use is no right at all. And a society that turns justice into a luxury good is one no longer ruled by law, but by money and power. This week the highest court in the land will decide whether Britain will become such a society. There are plenty of signs that we have already gone too far.

Listen to the country’s top judge, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who admits that “our justice system has become unaffordable to most”. Look at our legal-aid system, slashed so heavily by David Cameron and Theresa May that the poor must act as their own trial lawyers, ready to be skittled by barristers in the pay of their moneyed opponents.

The latest case will be heard by seven supreme court judges and will pit the government against the trade union Unison. It will be the climax of a four-year legal battle over one of the most fundamental rights of all: the right of workers to stand up against their bosses. 

In 2013, Cameron stripped workers of the right to access the employment tribunal system. Whether a pregnant woman forced out of her job, a Bangladeshi-origin guy battling racism at work, or a young graduate with disabilities getting aggro from a boss, all would now have to pay £1,200 for a chance of redress.

The number of cases taken to tribunal promptly fell off a cliff – down by 70% within a year. Citizens Advice, employment lawyers and academics practically queued up to warn that workers – especially poor workers – were getting priced out of justice. But for Conservative ministers, all was fine. Loyal flacks such as Matthew Hancock (then employment minister) claimed those deterred by the fees were merely “unscrupulous” try-ons, intent on “bullying bosses”. Follow Hancock’s logic, and with all those time-wasters weeded out, you’d expect the number of successful tribunal claims to jump. They’ve actually dropped.

At each hearing of Unison’s case, the judges have wound up asking to see actual people for whom the fees have represented a barrier to justice. One was sure that“if the statistics … were drilled down to some individual cases, situations would be revealed that showed an inability on the part of some people to proceed before an employment tribunal through lack of funds”.

Should the supreme court judges want the same thing, they could meet Liliana Almanza. They’d find her a compelling witness, although she finds it hard to sit down for too long due to three herniated discs in her lower back, which make her feel like she’s lugging around “a lot of heavy weight” and which send pain shooting into her hands, legs, shoulders and neck. She also has sometimes severe depression and anxiety. The physical pain and the mental illness can feed off each other.

Almanza has worked as a cleaner at the University of London since 2011 and never kept her conditions from her employer, an outsourcing company called Cofely. Then came a new supervisor, who Almanza felt had it in for her and who piled on extra work. Almanza was sent to the “punishment floor” – actually three floors, normally handled by two people, but she had to do the work on her own and in little time. The extra workload, especially the pushing about of a hoover and a mop, caused her so much pain that she sometimes felt dizzy. Yet when Almanza complained, she says the supervisor either laughed or told her to sign off sick. Despite being required under law, there was no adjustment for her disabilities.

Almanza, who is Colombian, remembers the supervisor telling her how Latin Americans were a bunch of beggars. Other times, she’d call Almanza a “bitch” and a “whore”.

On the worst days, Almanza would walk over to Euston station and stand at the platform’s very edge. She’d wait for the tube to come. Then “a light would come on” and she’d pull herself back.

Almanza did exactly what ministers would want and submitted a grievance using Cofely’s in-house procedure. It was rejected. She appealed and did not hear anything for months. However desperate her situation, she would never have found the money for a tribunal. Some are exempt from the fees, but Almanza and her husband – both cleaners – apparently earned too much money for her to qualify. Nor does the means-testing account for living costs, even though after renting a single room in a shared ex-council house in London and paying bills they have almost no money each month.

Her union, the tiny Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), pitched in some money to go to tribunal and helped crowdfund the rest. As soon as she did, Almanza remembers that her employer made a number of adjustments and lightened her workload.

I contacted Engie, as Cofely has been rebranded, for its response to Almanza’s charges. Its statement reads in part: “We do not tolerate discrimination in the workplace and all claims … are investigated thoroughly. Following extensive investigation of the allegations brought against Cofely Workplace, all claims were denied and Cofely was formally discharged from the proceedings by the court on 24th May 2016.” The court documents actually show that Cofely was discharged because the contract was taken over by another company, which also reached a settlement with Almanza.

Without charity and the shoestring resources of the IWGB, Almanza wouldn’t have been able to file a claim. If she could testify to the supreme court, what would she say? “I would tell the judges if I hadn’t been able to go to tribunal I don’t think I’d be here today. If I’d continued like that, I wouldn’t have been able to tell this story. Maybe it sounds like an exaggeration, a movie. But it’s one thing to talk about it, another thing to live it.”

In this Brexit vote, the poor turned on an elite who ignored them

Ian Jack in The Guardian


 

Shipbuilders in Sunderland in the 1980s. Photograph: Sally and Richard Greenhill / Al/Alamy


Just as the pound was reaching its peak, Iain Duncan Smith said: “Turnout in the council estates is very high.” It was about quarter past ten. When he added a few minutes later that he’d been in politics for 24 years and couldn’t remember seeing an equivalent council-estate turnout before, David Dimbleby wondered about its significance: was it good news for the Brexit campaign? Duncan Smith said piously that he couldn’t possibly say, but we knew that he thought it was. By midnight, the pound had begun its fall.

My wife and I grew up on council estates – small, well-gardened ones, a hundred miles from each other across the border of Scotland and England. Almost everyone we knew lived similarly. People of our parents’ generation thought of public housing as a blessing, compared to the shabby and cramped homes they had lived in before. “They talk about council estates as though they’re slums,” my wife said as we watched the coverage. Or native reservations, I thought. Earlier that day on our London high street, a canvasser for remain told me how they divided the work: the Greens got the tube stations, Lib Dems did the shoppers, Labour went “round the estates”.

And, outside Scotland and London, they were mostly ignored. “A large constituency of working-class voters feel that not only has the economy left them behind, but so has the culture,” the American political philosopher Michael Sandel said in a recent interview. “The sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour, have been eroded and mocked by … globalisation, the rise of finance, the attention that is lavished by parties across the political spectrum on economic and financial elites, [and] the technocratic emphasis of the established political parties.” A lot of the energy animating Brexit, said Sandel, had been “born of this failure of elites”.

Sandel refers to a failure common to the western world. But when did the elites begin to fail Britain in particular? An economic historian might point to a period in the late 19th century when Germany overtook Britain in chemical research and technical education and, together with America, began to replace it as the world’s supreme industrial nation. But that was an unconscious failure; active betrayal has come within living memory. As a journalist working in the 1960s and 1970s, I grew used to the story of the factory closure, but only in the 1980s did these apparently random events accumulate to become known by a word, deindustrialisation, that implied a process governments either couldn’t stop, chose not to stop, or took steps to encourage.

The effects across large parts of Britain were spectacular. The big industrial cities had stored up enough capital in terms of public institutions and professional jobs to survive and sometimes prosper as regional capitals. But their hinterlands – the settlements strung along smoky valleys and perched on the oily river’s edge – began to look as abandoned as goldrush towns. Coatbridge, Consett, Hartlepool, Merthyr, Sunderland, Burnley, Greenock, Accrington: unless a senior football team played or a murder took place, they dropped from the national consciousness.

The depth of their oblivion was exemplified when, in a referendum debate on Sky TV, Michael Gove spoke of how his father’s fish business in Aberdeen had been “destroyed by the European Union”, which had “hollowed out” communities across Britain. In fact, a report in the Guardian showed that the senior Gove had sold his business rather than closed it, and that factors other than the EU were then shrinking Aberdeen’s fishing industry, including over-fishing.

What nobody remarked on was the absurdity of Gove calling the EU a job destroyer, when far heavier destruction was inflicted by British government policy during those years. When Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979, manufacturing accounted for almost 30% of Britain’s national income and employed 6.8 million people; by 2010, it accounted for 11% and employed 2.5 million. And, unlike Mr Gove, a welder who was thrown out of work by a closing Sunderland shipyard had no business to sell.

In no other major economy was industrial collapse so quick. For a time, well-meaning journalists reported the catastrophe, and then gradually the sight of empty towns and shuttered shops became normalised or forgotten.

It seemed there was nothing to be done. At one time, the country’s prosperity had been underpinned by the spinning, weaving, stitching, hammering, banging, welding and smelting that went on in the manufacturing towns; much of the country’s former character was also owed to them – non-conformist chapels, brass bands, giant vegetable championships, self-improvement, association football. Surely nothing as significant to the nation’s economy, culture or politics would ever emerge from them again? And then it did: grievance. Actually, more than that: the sudden discovery that in certain and perhaps unrepeatable circumstances, the poor could use their grievance about all kinds of things to change at least one.

It first became apparent in the Scottish referendum of 2014. Only four local voting areas out of 32 returned a majority for independence and all of them bore the scars of vanished industries. The SNP had broken through years of eroding Labour tradition to capture the loyalty of people in the big housing schemes, for whom the leap in the dark of constitutional change offered promise rather than threat (after all, what else had worked?). By the time of last year’s general election, thousands of underprivileged local authority tenants felt themselves for the first time to be part of a political movement. I noticed the paradox after Nicola Sturgeon addressed an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow, and wrote: “Only now, with the west of Scotland nearly expunged as an economic force, does the political will of its people keep the rest of the country awake.”

On Thursday, much of northern England went to vote in a similar mood. Immigration, actual or potential, mattered too. There may also have been Spitfire enthusiasts. But betrayal, grievance, dispossession: these were surely what counted for most. I feel sorrow that the British story should have such an unexpected end – murdered by the poor and neglected English who were already inside the keep.