Below is an open letter to Paul Kenny from Brighton Unemployed Centre following the revelations by a blog posted at the unemploymentmovement (.com) website that the GMB endorsed Workfare, Followed by quotes from the Report that instigated the issue and a letter from a shop steward in the GMB in Brighton about the Report.

Saturday, 21 May 2011

Paul Kenny
General Secretary
GMB Trade Union
22/24 Worple Road
London
SW19 4DD
Fax to: 020 8944 6552

Dear Mr Kenny,

Two nights ago I attended a meeting to launch the Public & Civil Service Union’s new pamphlet ‘‘Welfare – An Alternative Vision’. Mark Serwortka, PCS General Secretary made mention of the fact that there was a trade union in Britain which had come out in favour of more privatisation of job centres in Britain and had even co-authored a pamphlet with one such pirate, the US Workfare company Kennedy Scott. It emerged that the union was the GMB.

Workfare is working for your dole, which is at the heart of the ‘Welfare Reform’ agenda. It originated in the Wisconsin W-2 program in 1997. As I am sure you will be aware, Wisconsin also ended recognition of public sector trade unions this year. I will leave it to you to work out the relationship between the two.

In 2001 GMB workers in Brighton occupied the waste depot in Hollingdean, Brighton. At that time the depot was run by the private company SITA. As a result of that occupation the service was taken back in-house by the Council. Brighton Unemployed Centre, as your national officer Gary Smith will confirm, gave total support to that occupation including loaning computer equipment and having activists stop scab vehicles from leaving a nearby depot and thus undermine the occupation. Perhaps you might like to explain why privatisation is wrong for the Waste Transfer & Disposal service but fine when it comes to running job centres?

If you want to know what the W-2 Welfare Reform programme means then the following is illustrative:

'W-2 truly ended the entitlement to assistance. Provision of cash grants is no longer based solely on income eligibility. Job readiness, rather than income, is the primary consideration for determining eligibility for cash assistance. Case managers can make a determination that an applicant is job ready, in which case the applicant will not receive cash assistance despite having low or no income.’

The Report you have co-sponsored, alongside PKF Accountancy Group and 4 academics from Portsmouth University, (including 2 criminologists!) argues for greater privatisation. The Report speaks of

‘the importance of outsourcing welfare to work provision to independent providers… The government should recognise that best practice is for contractors to have a presence in job centres’

‘the competitive tendering process, (the) DWP stressed its desire to contract delivery partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors.’

Who would have guessed that PCS and the civil service trade unions were unanimously opposed to CCT. The Report you signed up to informs us that redundancy can be a

‘once in a lifetime opportunity to start again. It is unlikely that the Jobcentre Plus will be able to provide suitable services for former professionals… conversely, a network is emerging which is based on voluntarism and social entrepreneurship.’

I won’t ask if you have officially become a signed up supporter of the Big Society but your support for ‘voluntarism’ and social enterprises, as some solution to unemployment, is indicative of your Tory philosophy and mentality.

In case you had forgotten, privatisation means lower wages and de-recognition of trade unions. Since Thatcherite privatisation, union membership has plummeted and that with the latest economic crisis (yes the bankers don’t get a mention in this report) it is the poor and working class who bear the brunt of restructuring capitalism (another word you don’t seem acquainted with). Yellow/business unionism is not the way out of this predicament, as the United States has amply demonstrated.

As with all PR documents with an academic veneer there is no mention of the less cuddly side of welfare to work, e.g. sanctions, i.e. starving people into work or the fact that workers who have paid national insurance all their life will be hounded the moment they are unemployed into accepting the first cheap labour job on offer.

The Report places great emphasis on America Starts in New York. Here is a description of what this success means:

‘Here's how it works: America on Demand, a staffing company that is a subsidiary of America Works, places job seekers in temporary positions. The employer has no obligations to hire at the conclusion of the subsidized wage period and has little or no risk during the period of subsidized employment because the staffing company is the employer of record. All of the paperwork involved in the program is performed by the staffing company. The employer may terminate the arrangement at any time.’

That a trade union, even a right-wing one like the GMB, should endorse and even encourage further privatisation of public services is an act of scabbing both on workers who have been made redundant and one’s own members.

These companies don’t create jobs they are parasites on the public purse, pure and simple. They get the state to subsidise low wages coupled with the employer being able to terminate the arrangement at any time. There are no employment rights because ‘the staffing company is the employer of record’ i.e. it is an agency employer.

If you have any decency you will resign forthwith and take your place on the Board of Directors of the companies you have given your support to. After all even Judas received his 30 pieces of silver and your entitlement should not be a penny less. If the trade union movement in Britain were to take your advice, it would become as marginalised and weak as US unions.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein
Secretary – Brighton Unemployed Centre

 http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2011/05/paul-kenny-judas-of-gmb.html