Are we in for another winter of discontent?

. It's nothing to do with Brexit. The bottom line is that our GDP is now lower than it was in 2019. So people can't rationally expect to be earning more now than in 2019 - especially public sector workers who depend on the private sector for their wages. That's the way it works. This country has been living beyond its means for decades and we've been printing money to fund it. It can't continue indefinitely.

I know many people think that the nurses should be given a good pay rise, but if you look at it logically the nurses are the least deserving - except possibly for the rail workers - because:

1) The reason that we're in so much debt is that we have printed so much money. That was partly because of Brown's credit crunch and more recently because Sunak printed even more for furlough.
2) The reason that we introduced furlough is because we had to pay for lockdowns.
3) And the reason that we "had" to lockdown is to "save the NHS".
4) Who were the greatest beneficiaries of lockdown? The nurses and doctors - and the rail workers of course many of whom didn't even have to go to work to get 80% pay.

So the nurses have been protected by a money printing scheme which has caused inflation. Yet they're now saying that they want their pay to be raised to compensate for inflation. Fuck off. Unless the govt have completely lost their marbles (entirely possible) they will completely reject this. They're very well paid already. And raising their pay will just mean that we can afford even fewer nurses. I suggest we lower their pay.      

I have in numerous posts said that the only credit I can give to Thatcher is that she made wild cat strikes illegal.

I also recall that it was not the Unions that caused so many problems, it was jumped up troublemakers on the shop floor who took advantage of the many pissed off workers who felt they had been used and abused for too long.

I also recall that inflation had been dramatically reduced in 1978/9 to around 9% and the Trade Union Congress had agreed with the government to push for a wage claim of 5%. Many disillusioned workers decided they wanted a larger pay rise. Especially the very low paid.

I remember those days very well. One of my first student vacation jobs when in uni was at Merrets Bakery making hot cross buns. I had to stand at a conveyor belt wearing a piece of kit right out of ghostbusters that worked like a petrol pump oozing a runny dough that made the cross, standing opposite a co worker that was similarly kitted whose spray gun sprayed sticky bun wash

As a tray of 48 buns in a 6x8 array came out of the proving oven my colleague sprayed them with bun wash in an up and down movement then I had to pipe the dough up down up down up down up down left right left right….

Over four weeks I crossed a million hot cross buns. Not many toilet breaks iirc.

It was years before the smell of cinnamon didn’t make me want to vomit.

The bakers union took a fixed sum from my pay every week, which was paid ‘a week in hand’ actually nearly two weeks as pay day was a Thursday.

On the last week i worked there I had to work five hours overtime two and a half hours on each of the last two days and payroll told me they could not pay me the money for that in my final full pay packet they admitted they’d fucked up and said I’d have to come back to get the cash (those were also the days a pay packet held real money) the week after.

As the factory was barely a mile and a half from home this was not really a problem.

Except when I went back I only received half what I was due. The bakers union demanded, and got, a flat fee from every pay packet. So half my overtime went to them.

My MP at the time was a chap called James Callaghan. You
Might remember the name …

His reply to my complaint the union had stolen half the money owed to me by an employer error was that he could do nothing to correct it. For years I framed the letter and kept it in the hallway to tell labour canvassers if they didn’t get off my fucking drive right now I’d ram it up their area frame and all.

BUT

While I remember the flying pickets whose concrete block killed the taxi driver taking a blackleg UDM member to work (I think it was the A467 dual carriageway not the M4 by the way) were brought to trial, the Communist Party Officer who directed their picketing and was found by police in the portakabin that served as strike HQ shredding papers for all he was worth was later given high office in the Labour Party after becoming Pontypridd’s MP and later went on to be both a member of the Privy Counsel and our a Companion of Honour, all at Blair’s recommendation

That was really my point. Not the rightful destruction of corrupt union power handing control to the Communist Party through Militant Tendency the granddaddy of Momentum, but the way Communist Party Officers were welcomed into the party mainstream and feted with high office.

I suppose I shouldn’t knock it too much.

The proceeds from that, and a fortnight working in upmarket retailer Howells, a department store I swear to god was the inspiration for Grace Brothers, the head of ladies footwear looking a dead ringer for Captain Peacock, paid for Moira’s engagement ring. But those were days when jobs at the NMW end of the scale received wages that paid all the essential bills council house rent, rates, water rates and gas and electric bills. You even had something left to pay for food.

Yeah, it was a different world then.

I had a paper round from age ten, which kept me in pocket money all through school. But it was my last year that showed me what a real community meant. The shop owner died of a heart attack while I was out on my round, it was all over and the body removed by the time I got back. His widow literally stepped over the corpse to serve an unwitting customer !! But by 10am a rota of volunteers had been drawn up to keep the place going until she could sort her act out and sell up

Over the next few months my younger brother took over my paper round while I put the hour I would have done it serving at the shop (paid) and worked there all the weekend hours it was open. Various parents of the other paper boys and girls stepped up to muck in.

This went on for about three months while the guys widow sorted the business paperwork and stuff out, then sold the shop and flat above it on as a going concern and retired to west wales if I recall right.

I’m proud of what we did for her and I think rightly so. But all the state did was send me a demand for five quid in income tax the same year they denied me a vote on leaving the common market. Wilson’s infamous referendum. In which at 17 years 9 months old I was too young to have a vote. But as I said not too young to be slapped an income tax demand.

I was about to sit my A levels and go to Uni. I had all sorts of student jobs cleaning factories, that one at Merrets and a couple of clerical assistant / clerical officer jobs in the civil service too. And numerous factory jobs. They paid my bar bills and actually a fair bit more. They even paid for the honeymoon.

to this day I look at the office cleaners, shop shelf fillers, factory assembly line workers etc and my first thoughts are “yeah, I once did that” and perhaps if more of our politicians were able to say the same this would be a very different country