The coalition government is to write to public sector workers asking for ways to save public money. Here's a suggestion to get us started: Why not write a handful of letters to their elected representatives in the trade unions, instead of six million letters to each individual member?
The government is borrowing a tactic from public sector managers. Consulting directly with staff can be justified as a means to really engage with workers - it just so happens to exclude the trade unions, who are nominated by public sector staff to represent them in discussions.
Why do some people find the concept of collective bargaining so difficult to understand? In law, and in parliamentary democracy, we have no difficulty in understanding the idea that people can nominate another to speak on their behalf. When it comes to industrial relations, however, public sector managers – and now the government – reserve the right to speak to whoever is convenient.
And consulting staff directly will be very convenient indeed for the coalition government. It will allow them to pick and choose anecdotal examples to justify their strategy of cuts, using different views scattered across the workforce to validate a massive programme of cuts and redundancies. It is very similar to the strategy they are already using in welfare, where they are using the complaints of working families about unfairness in the benefit system to justify cutting their entitlements.
They will try to avoid consulting the unions about cuts because they know they will get a response they don’t want to hear: Why don’t you address the deficit with a greater emphasis on taxation, and why are you gambling with the economy and our members’ lives by cutting so quickly and deeply?
I suspect this is what the majority of public sector workers will really think. So if it is genuinely interested in consultation, the government can save itself a lot of time - and money.
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