If you are interested in what the class and power relationship is like in Britain today, just look at what "regulation" means to the workforce and what it means to companies. On the one hand, regulation amounts to the introduction of increasingly strict restrictions that make it difficult for workers to protect their interests, if this in any way threatens the interests of employers. On the other hand, for companies, regulation means the further removal of all remaining restrictions, even if it threatens the interests of working people in the most monstrous way.
Last Thursday, the government adopted a new law that allows companies to hire free labor in the event of a strike to replace the strikers - practically, strikebreakers with the blessing of the state. "It used to be a crime. Today it is in accordance with the law," tweeted Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, thus revealing to us about the state's positions in the field of labor law, probably more than he intended.
The new law is a response to a series of strikes that were organized last month, as well as announcements of the coming "summer of discontent". After a decade of wage stagnation, faced with inflation approaching double-digit rates, many workers have come to the conclusion that further reductions in real wages are unacceptable.
It is the last act in a 50-year crusade that began in 1971 with the adoption of the Industrial Law, which aimed to neutralize unions, suppress strikes, outlaw all forms of solidarity, such as joining strikers in protest, and giving the broadest powers to companies that have acquired the right not only to break strikes, but also to give notices and unilaterally change employment conditions.
It was not the first attempt by the government to pass such a strike-breaking law. The Conservative Party's 2015 manifesto called for "the removal of senseless restrictions preventing employers from replacing strikers with additional labour". The proposal did not make it into the Law on Trade Unions 2016 because the regulatory board concluded that it was counterproductive and "did not meet the objectives set".
The same proposal was adopted this time. For workers, "regulation" has become legal submission to the interests of employers, despite the fact that the proposed laws are clearly bad and criticized by employers and employment agencies themselves.
On the day of the adoption of the anti-union law, the investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire ended after almost 4 years of public hearings and a little more than 5 years after the fire that claimed 14 lives on June 2017, 72. The findings of the investigation clearly indicate the true meaning of the above statement: "It used to be a crime." Today it is in accordance with the law".
The investigation exposed all the immorality of a system that ignores and despises ordinary people, a system designed to take away their voice, and some even their lives. The investigation revealed the full scale of incompetence and corruption that pervades all spheres of public life in modern Britain. It shines a light on the practices of the private sector, which, in the words of Peter Apps, a journalist who has distinguished himself with some of the best reporting on the investigation, makes no attempt to hide "a callous indifference to anything - morality, honesty, safety - that does not bring financial benefit".
The companies hid the results of fire tests that showed the disastrous properties of the materials used to cover the buildings, and with full knowledge of this, obtained improper certificates and insisted on their use, even though they knew how dangerous they were. "Our main job is to lie," boasted one employee.
This was allowed by institutions and legislators who, in the words of Apps, "rejected everything that disturbs the status quo, showing murderous cynicism and determination to protect the reputation of institutions at all costs." It's not just indifference at work, but also an obvious intention to remove all the obstacles that prevent big companies from doing whatever they want. Companies are practically given to define the rules themselves, all in the name of "fighting unnecessary bureaucracy". A year before the fire, the government announced that the inspection time for fire protection systems had been reduced from 6 hours to 45 minutes and boasted of this as a great success.
When six people died in a fire at Lacanel House in south London in 2009, investigators issued recommendations to change fire safety regulations. Brian Martin, the official responsible for building fire safety guidelines at the time, dismissed the proposals as "baseless" and advised the government to respond that it "has no intention of changing anything". "We have a duty to answer them, not a duty to kiss their bottom," he wrote to colleagues, insisting that further regulations "would not be in the interests of corporate Britain". Those who expressed concern on this occasion were accused of creating problems where there are none.
When it comes to workers, the government insists on regulations that will hold them back in their attempts to defend their standard of living. When it comes to 'corporate Britain', regulations give companies the widest possible rights, even if it results in endangering and sacrificing people's lives.
"A disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least to neglect, persons of poor and average condition" is "necessary" to us, although in it "is the cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments," wrote Adam Smith in 1759 in The theory of moral feelings.
That "spoilage", he explained later in To the wealth of the people, stems from the fact that no society can "progress and be happy" if "the majority of its members live in poverty and misery". But we need that inclination "in order to establish and maintain differences in social positions, as well as that social order" that is necessary for the functioning of the market. Since "the riches of the rich provoke the fury of the poor," the rich must be protected by "the mighty hand of justice ever ready to punish" the poor.
Two hundred and fifty years later, almost nothing has changed. Many resent the inequality. And many agree that the state must do everything in the "interests of corporate Britain", from further deregulation to cutting corporation tax, believing the law's purpose is to continue to protect the rich from "the fury of the poor" by further restricting the rights of unions and strikers. Such is the relationship between class and power in Britain today.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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