I Am Waste, Come & Get Me

I know about certain stuff that not a lot of other people know about – or at least, not in such mind numbing detail. And I make a living out of it by hiring myself out to local authorities and other bits of the state. It’s cheaper for them than actually employing someone who knows about the Stuff I Know About (SIKA). So, yup, I’m a consultant.

You remember all that stuff about ‘Waste’ in the Leader’s Debate? That’s me, that is.

For 25 years I was employed in the not for profit sector where I did a range of things, including developing my alleged expertise. But I had to do other stuff as well – the meat and potatoes business of managing people and stuff. Let’s get real here: I was never a Captain of Industry or a Hero Innovator of the Managerial Classes. I fell into that dread category, Middle Management. I really never liked it – like a lot of folk I found managing people basically either stressful or boring 90% of the time. But I did it because that’s what you do if you get restless working at the coal face – you look for something more ‘challenging’ to occupy your time. It wasn’t that I was a bad line manager per se, it was just a role that never really fitted and I always felt like that proverbial dog walking on its hind legs. But somehow along the way I developed a certain grounding in the SIKA. I like my SIKA. & it is genuinely technically useful and necessary, not one of those faddish cult-things like Change Management or Systems Thinking.

So, in my late forties, I thought ‘sod this for a game of soldiers’ and tootled off to my back bedroom to become a self employed consultant. Everyone, it seemed, was a winner: my former employer found a younger, more energetic person to do my job, I got to work on stuff I actually liked and other organisations could hire me without getting stuck with some moderately expensive but not often used technical skill on their payroll. I could be a Charles Handy case study.

I’m not alone: pop down to the Royal Festival Hall or the British Library cafe anytime during a weekday and you’ll find little groups of self employed consultant-y type folk like me sitting round with their laptops having meetings. & a good half will be out sourced Public/Voluntary Sector types like me. A lot of low-mid level consultancy is retail, rather than PWC-style wholesale.

So, anyway, here I am in my early fifties now and I’m targeted as Waste. The only question seems to be whether I’m Waste to be cut out this year as Mr.Cameron thinks, or at some point in the next four years as the other two main parties think. Oh well, I suppose I could aim to be the oldest holder of those coveted five stars on a McDonald’s staff badge.....

Ah – but what about my SIKA? Think of it as a kind of specialist oil which, in its own little way, helps the bit of the public sector I’m concerned with work better. You don’t need a lot of it, but without any of my SIKA the whole engine begins to work less effectively – and more expensively.

I'll leave you to join the dots in terms of the political implications of all this for any cuts programme.

New Deal Provider Shoots Itself in Foot?

Now at first glance I'd have to say that this is just plain wrong. Someone on the New Deal gets their benefits suspended for criticising the New Deal Training provider on the web and setting the training computers homepage to Ipswich Unemployment Action.

Andrew Coates of the Tendance Coatsey blog is a 'dyed-in-the-wool' but self depreciating far leftist. I remember him from 30 years ago when we did the same course at university, but he won't recognise me as I don't use my real name on this blog and in any event we weren't anything more than nodding acquaintances then and we haven't run across each other since. I didn't agree with him politically back then and there is still much on his blog that I disagree with today. I can quite imagine he might be a fully paid up member of 'the awkward squad'.

But... this is just bloody outrageous. He is perfectly entitled to criticise any aspect of the New Deal. He is perfectly entitled to use what the provider might consider intemperate language in doing so. If the YMCA - the Training Provider - can actually show he was writing the blog during time he should have been absorbing the 'training' he was so critical of they might have a case. But they have no moral or legal right to employ sanctions of any kind, never mind ones of this draconian nature, if he's been writing this stuff in his own time. & as for resetting the homepage of the training computers as a reason for cutting off his benefits life support...well, get a bloody life I'd say.

I think this one is going to run and run.

Update: Ah. Footshooting halted. Benefits restored - or at least a new claim encouraged. (I'm not sure there is much difference given the inflexible nature of many computer systems). 'Training' to recommence in autumn, once new provider is in place. Read all about it over at TC.

Political Economy as Art

I know I'm well behind the curve on this one but I'm finally catching up with The Wire. Whether or not it's as good as The Sopranos I'll leave others to judge, but it really is up there in the best 5 TV series I've ever seen. (Go get the 4 min summary of the first four series if you don't believe me).

Anyway, we're on series two now, and the centre of the action has shifted from organized drug dealing in the overwhelmingly black projects to the decaying 'all-but-post-industrial' world of the containerised docks. The few remaining longshoremen are predominately white, unionised and turbulent in a recognisably - forgive me Merseyside - scally like manner. Work is sporadic - they talk about getting odd shifts here and there. Drinking starts at breakfast time. A sense of decline hangs over the place and demands for major industrial rejuvenation - 'dredging the channel' - are dismissed as impracticable even by their own leaders.

The dockers are still organised though - they have a sense of identity and community. So when their leader comes into conflict with the local Police Chief and the cops are harassing them in various ways they can strike back. They nick a Police van and load it into a container and send it on its way somewhere or other. They're also organised enough to be taking rake-offs from organised crime to turn a blind eye to various at first unspecified smuggling activities.

But it's all too small scale and old fashioned. The Police Chief manoeuvres bureaucratically for permission to put a team of 6 detectives on the longshoremen's case in order to put away their leader, who is automatically - and rightly as it happens - assumed to be engaged in skulduggery. It genuinely shocks the dockers when the smuggling they've been assisting turns out to be person trafficking for the sex trade, and a dozen or more dead young women turn up in a container. The programme brilliantly contrasts the ruthlessness, modernity and sheer scale of both the State and, more to the point, organised crime with the faltering, traditional and frankly amateurish efforts of the dockers in trying to protect their own interests.

There's a metaphor here for the labour movement in this economic crisis. You don't need me to join the dots for you.

Polanyi Again

The Great Transformation again. This time on the differential effects of pre-existing class structures on the 'birth marks' left on the working class movements in Britain and on Continental Europe:

".....there was no comparison between the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or copyholder of direct ancestry, who found himself helplessly sinking into the social and physical slums of some Northwestern factory neighbourhood....and the Slovakian or...Pomerian agricultural labour changing overnight from a stable dwelling peon into a industrial worker in a modern metropolis. ...the English yeoman's son or the evicted cottager certainly did not feel his status raised...the recently emancipated farm labourer of the continent [had] a fair chance of rising into the lower middle class...[and] even the bourgeoisie, which socially towered above him, was politically in the same boat, being almost as removed from ranks of the actual ruling class as he was himself...In England the middle classes...were strong enough to vindicate their rights alone, and not even in their near revolutionary effort in 1832 did they look to the labourers for support...while on the Continent the still semi feudal aristocracy did not intermarry with....the bourgeoisie and the absence of..primogeniture hermetically insulated them from the other classes. Every successful step towards equal rights and liberties thus benefited Continental middle and working classes alike...it was part of the Continental tradition that the working class would help fight the battles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, if only...to be cheated by the middle class of the fruits of victory. But whether the working class won or lost...its experience was enhanced, and its aims raised to a political level...While the British worker developed an incomparable experience in the personal and social problems of unionism and left national politics to 'his betters', the Central European worker became a political socialist, expected to deal with the matters of statecraft, though primarily with those that concerned his own interests....The Continental worker needed protection..against the normal action of factory and labour market conditions. He achieved it mainly by the help of legislation, while his British comrades relied more on voluntary association – trade unions – and their power to monopolise labour. While economically the difference be over rated...politically its consequences were great. On the Continent trade unions were the creation of the political parties of the working class; in England the political party was the creation of the trade unions."

This, I think, is closer to Anderson and Nairn than Thomson's Peculiarities of the English, but I don't want to re-open that debate. I merely quote at such length to ask whether a leftwing party need be based on the trade unions. I don't think it does, I don't even think it is desirable because it muddies certain waters in terms of roles - which is why I fear people like Phil and Stroppy are radically mis-reading the potential and significance of NO2EU, which looks to me like a train-crash about to happen.

When & Why Did the Left Become Burnhamite?

Credit crunch? But that's soo last month darling...
Well, the Red Newt disagrees. Here is the Newt's conclusion after looking at a new Harvard Business School paper:
"Financial circulation has been restored in the core of the system. But circulation is stopping in the periphery of the system both geographically and in terms of financial markets within the most economically developed economies themselves. This is now where the credit crunch is most advanced. In addition to the importance of this development itself a key issue will be whether the poisons being produced from this financial gangrene will invade the core of the financial system again."

What's interesting to me is how many left commentators - see Richard Murphy this morning, or Tom at Labour and Capital, or Stumbling - see a key part of the problem revolving around the autonomy of management from ownership. Now, to any one educated in 1970s style sociology like me this immediately calls up memories of James Burnham - rather than, say, C.Wright Mills, who also worked on elites but stressed their cohesion, not how they were divided. I dimly recall a noticeable slice of the set reading for my degree was devoted to Marxist and otherwise leftist critiques of Burnham - but here we have a whole host of leftist commentators seemingly taking him as their starting point. Whilst this approach does undermine the pristine theory - well, pristine fairy-tale - of shareholder control, it also leaves a lot less space for the kind of traditional bosses v workers class struggle analysis so beloved of the left. There is a second tension: between owners and the robber barons of management who have effective but not titular control of any organisation's assets and strategy.

Or perhaps it simply shifts the ground of class struggle. Here's a link - via Casino Crash - to a very clear summary by a SOAS academic . His key points?

1. Real improvements in the distribution of income are needed. Increases in unemployment benefits, real wage gains and progressive tax cuts are vital to the restoration of economic stability.
2. The public provision of housing, pensions, education and health care needs to replace private provision through capital markets. Privatisation of these services has passed onto individuals not only their costs, but also the financial risksassociated with illness, labour-market uncertainty, and instability of investment.
3. Mass public investment programmes that bolster both demand and productivity are critically needed. We need a form of Keynesianism which helps wage earners, not financial capital.

Things Really Were Better When I Was Your Age

Anne Pettifor of debtonation provides this wonderful graph. To me it suggests two things:

1. There is a lot of mileage in the Marxist/Left Keynesian idea that our easy credit economy has developed to head off what would otherwise have been falling demand as working class people have lost ground in respect of their share of the national cake.

2. The workers have never had it so good, at least relatively speaking, as in the early-mid 1970s. As the son of manual workers who hit puberty at that point I can't but help find this obscurely comforting. Things really have been downhill ever since...

Education, Education, Education

Thirty years ago I was taught that of all the myriad of educational statistics – and my, doesn't the world of education like its' statistics – the one that best correlated to a child's final education achievement was the social class of the mother. But it looks like correlating them with which ever parent counts as the 'head of the household' still works pretty well.

Fascinating social class categories: I'll return to this.