Workers beware

I have tried to awaken people to the dangers that working people are being reduced to sophisticated modern forms of slavery. Everything that the authorities do in the field of labour relations only confirms my fears. Vince Cable's widely acclaimed success in watering down the Tories plans for no fault dismissals should not deflect our attention to what the Lib Dems have agreed to. Britain openly boasts that it seeks the most flexible labour force in the Western world. Flexible means that the working person has no protections and no guarantees. Cable's attempts to dilute Tory plans is only a holding action that will allow us to become accustomed to the reductions of our employment rights and make us less resistant to the next dilution of our rights and liberties.

The excuse for these measures is the old saw that we must make it easier to hire and fire, and that such measures are attempts to clear the ground for increased employment opportunities. This is of course garbage. The increased employment opportunities being planned by our masters are in part-time, temporary, low wage jobs where you are being increasingly expected to work unlimited unpaid overtime. Flexible means being prepared to work for no wages, (as the modern confidence trick of offering work experience has been shown to be the reality for many people) no pension entitlement and without employment rights. This is the increasing reality in modern Britain. Most of these measures are being put in place in preparation for a massive assault on the workforces in the public sector, particularly the health service which is seeing, and will continue to experience, its services outsourced to the private sector and the delights of the neoliberal labour market. This labour market is increasingly approaching the Thatcherite neoliberal dream of a truly free market with no regulations on its activity.

What must always be remembered is that the 'right to manage' is a different thing from the right to do what you want, and employers are demanding the right to do what they want, unrestricted and unregulated.The dilution of our employment rights is only one factor in the wider plans to dilute all of our rights and liberties and remove any resistance to the complete domination of our neoliberal elite and their accumulation of unrestricted wealth and power. When your employment rights are stripped from you, then it will be a simple matter to strip the rest of your civil liberties. Working people have only one option at their disposal if their conditions become intolerable and unacceptable, that is the ability to remove their labour. Should working people lose that ability, which is one of the most fundamental of human rights, then you will be in the position of  being at the total mercy of the employer. If you must accept whatever conditions you are offered, and have no redress other than to refuse to work in such conditions, and that refusal results in you forfeiting all you benefit rights so that you are left with no income whatsoever, then you have been stripped of choices. If you take the work and are then sacked for simply trying to complain or raise your standard of employment, then you are truly in a situation of having no rights. That is a form of slavery, and that is what is coming in the United Kingdom. You have been warned.