We’re now less than a week away from the largest co-ordinated  industrial action the UK has seen for decades – perhaps since the General Strike of 1926. Around three million workers will be out on strike next Wednesday – in effect, most of the public sector, from over twenty different trade unions.

That’s over twenty different groups of workers who’ve collectively said they’ve had enough of the government’s constant attacks on wages and conditions, and have now balloted for action – with the strikes  in most cases winning big majorities. A strike of this scale is virtually unprecedented: nearly every school in Scotland will be shut, as will large sections of the NHS, council services, universities and colleges, job centres and tax and benefit offices, courts and other public services.

30 November has huge potential to be a big show of strength. It will not, by itself, bring down the government, but an effective day of action can place enormous pressure on them, and hopefully lead to more. This is absolutely crucial – so far the government have offered only token concessions in the dispute over pensions, with new proposals on line to make employees work longer, pay 3 percent more in contributions AND receive a lower pension at the end of it. But the strike is about much more than just pensions – sparked by years of relentless attacks on public sector pay and conditions, compounded by a three year pay freeze.

So what can you do on the day?

Next Wednesday can be a mass day of resistance for everyone in the public sector and beyond. Walkouts, occupations, pickets, demonstrations and marches – all are useful tactics in turning the struggle into Every school, uni and college is likely to be shut on the day, giving students the opportunity to pour onto the streets in support of the strikes. Student feeder marches have been organised in both Glasgow and Edinburgh on the day, ahead of the main trade union organised rallies.

Picket! If you work somewhere going on strike that day, effective picketing can be hugely important in shutting down a workplace and ensuring the day is a success. If you’re not striking, you can still go and show your support – UK Uncut have made a national call out for people to go and show some solidaritea at their local picket lines.

Demonstrate! March, rallies and events are happening across the country. Find a local action here: http://www.n30strike.org/

Walk out! Most schools, colleges and unis will be shut due to staff striking – but in the even of your classes running, organise a walkout and head to the nearest rally or picket line.

Retweet! Share! Propagandise! The Tories and their chums in the media have already gone on the offensive, trying to create a fake division between public sector workers and those in the private sector. Speak to everyone you know and tell them the facts about the strikes.

GLASGOW

Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.

By 2018 (2 years earlier than previously planned) the retirement age will be equalised for men and women, and then by 2020 everyone will have to work on until they’re 66.

You’ve probably heard the argument from right wing tosspots about why this needs to happen: we’re all living longer than we did in the past. As a result of socialist ideas like the NHS people don’t always drop down dead in late middle age any more. The problem with this argument is that it treats retirement as if it was something in isolation from the rest of the universe, and decisions that need to be taken about retirement as being completely unaffected by anything else the government does.

By saying that because people are living longer they will therefore have to work longer, the government isn’t stating a fact, it’s making a choice. And that choice is to make workers pay more for their right to a decent life in old age, and to let the super rich and big companies get away with paying fuck all.

The retirement age is a promise that we as a society made to working people as they got older. That promise was: pay in to the social security pot by national insurance coming out of your pay. In return, you’ll get to retire at 60 or 65 and have an income to live on. People have worked their whole lives based on this promise. Now the government wants to break that promise, to betray workers and make them get less out of retirement, and work closer to the age at which they’ll die.

They’d rather do this than by putting very moderate taxes on the rich and big business. They’d rather finance the ongoing bloodbath of the Afghanistan occupation than let us have a decent old age. These are the choices being made, the priorities exposed.

The other problem, as most reading this will already know, with the “we’re all living longer” argument is that the average life expectancy is just that, an average. It includes the high end of the rich who will live in healthy conditions all their life and have access to the very best healthcare at all times. And it includes the low end, the people who do hard, physically demanding work, can’t afford to eat well and live in polluted communities, who die much younger. In fact, research published this year found that health inequality is worse now than during the Great Depression, and life expectancy for poorer people might actually start to fall. Health and wealth are easily proven to be directly related, and the more the government encourages the rich to hoard it, the sicker the majority will become.

That’s why it’s particularly unfair that those who need to be least worried about the attack on the right to retire, because they can afford private pensions, are likely to live longer than those who this will directly affect. Work in a capitalist society is hard and alienating, especially since the economy has moved from one where people made things to one where they answered phones or other less socially useful service businesses. Brutally put, hard work can kill you, and the effect is obviously going to be more serious for those who work harder. And hard work isn’t restricted to manual labour; even working class desk jobs are still stressful enough to have a serious impact on your health.

School students in Bordeaux fight back against raising the retirement age

That’s why society has for about 100 years recognised that there reaches a point in your life where you should get to retire. Older people have earned this right, more than that they’ve paid for it all their working lives. Why should the right of the rich to hold on to the majority of wealth in our society be prioritised over this right?

But it’s not just unfair on older people today and in the future. Raising the retirement age is also a disaster for young people right now. Youth across the UK are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis, with way higher than average unemployment rates. It’s not hard to work out why – if we can get a job it’s likely to be insecure with little rights or conditions, i.e. the people that get the sack first if a business is making less money.

In a context where young people desperately need jobs, raising the retirement age is the opposite of solving the problem, because you are forcing people to stay on in jobs they could have retired from and opened up for someone else. The government wants to do this to save money that they would be paying out in pensions, but they’ll have to be giving it out in dole money again from people that could have got that job.

Raising the retirement age is the issue that’s driving the brilliant mass movements of strikes and protests France, that has seen school students and unemployed youth linking up with workers. High schools across France have been shut down by their pupils. French youth understand raising the retirement age is an attack on them, not just older people.

GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BASTARD

And as if that wasn’t all enough, let’s not forget about the hidden contribution of retired people that has been completely ignored. Think of how much Grans and Grandads do for their families in terms of unpaid babysitting – if they’re still stuck at work it’s going to make it all the harder for younger parents. Then there’s all the unpaid voluntary and community work contributed by pensioners. The National Pensioner’s Convention says that there’s well over £30 billion worth of work done by these voluntary contributions. The government are taking that away exactly at the same time as they’re cutting back public services that people rely on, which will make life more difficult for everyone.

In fact, if we were looking at the situation properly, as a society what we would do would be to lower the retirement age. The only real solution to the economic crisis is to have massive investment in things we as a society need – public services and ecological restoration to prepare for and try and prevent climate change. This could employ most of the people desperate for a job. At the same time, we should be reducing working time, so that people can retire when they want to and have to work less of the week, while raising the minimum wage to a liveable level. This would create loads of work, and leave everyone healthier, happier and able to do more things with their lives than just working all time. It’s a great idea, but the Tories and Lib Dems will never even discuss it, because they’re a government for themselves, for the rich.

Socialism is about us all having a decent life, where the work that we do is meaningful and is something we want to be doing. To be able to build a decent and better society, as a first step we need to reduce the amount of work those who are working too hard are doing. Defending the right to retire is defending the rights of everyone.

mass demonstration in Toulouse

Three million people took to the streets in towns and cities across France today, in a mass display of opposition to the French government’s austerity plans, which include raising the retirement age by two years.

Today’s demonstrations follow a week of unrest, which has seen a general strike on Tuesday and continuous strikes across different key sectors which are ongoing. Workers at every major fuel refinery in France have walked out, with blockades erected at their gates – it’s been so effective that the country’s main airports may run out of fuel by next week. School students have been out in force, with tens of thousands coming out to join the street demonstrations, and barricading shut the entrances to their schools. Even in small towns, thousands have been coming out onto the streets, such is the level of anger at the government’s proposals, which are being spearheaded by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who came into office promising to be a French version of Thatcher.

Protests are being stepped up ahead of a parliamentary vote on the proposals this coming Wednesday. Another general strike has been called for Tuesday, while lorry drivers are expected to come out on Monday.

There’s now speculation that the unrest could transform into the kind of action which halted the government’s last go at pension reform – in 1995. Then, three weeks of non-stop action by public sector and transport workers forced the government to capitulate on their proposals, which similarly included a raising of the retirement age.

Across Europe, government’s are making a concerted attempt to force the working class to pay for their massive bail-outs of the rich, with ideologically driven austerity programmes that seek to destroy what remains of the welfare state.

In Scotland, we’ve still to see anything near the level of militancy shown in France over the past week. But as the impact of the cuts begins to be felt, it’s vital that we too have a mass movement of resistance – in the streets, in workplaces and in our schools and universities.

On Wednesday, Chancellor George Osborne will line up the details of the Coalition’s austerity plans, with billions of pounds worth of cuts in public spending across the board. In Scotland, we have our chance to show our opposition to them on Saturday, with the STUC demonstration in Edinburgh. Although it’s unlikely we’ll see the kind of protest that’s hit France, Saturday is an important step in building the resistance in Scotland. See you on the streets!

Students in Paris blockade their school

High school students face down the polis in Lyon

By McMeg, additional writing by me, blogging fae Athens on today’s demonstrations protesting the Greek parliament’s vote to bring in destructive “austerity measures” in the wake of Greece’s near-financial collapse.

PAME demonstration of around 10,000 in central Athens

Athens is a city that is acquiring a reputation for itself. When a taxi driver asked where we were headed with our suitcases, our response prompted him to ask “Athens? Will you no get caught up in they riots out there?”. It would seem that the combination of constant reporting of Greece as overtaken by bomb-strewn madness and the main Scottish reference point when it comes to riots – the Poll Tax Riots – has given people a distorted view of what’s really going on here. The fact is, the IMF are being sold Greece under the table by the ‘Socialist’ government (Read: Greek version of the Labour Party), and their conditions for giving Greece money to bail out its failed banks is that the Greek government goes about systematically destroying any vestiges of a welfare state. It’s understandable why the people are angry. But they are expressing it in a way that is altogether more concise and class conscious than any pictures of anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails at riot police while stray dogs look on cooly can convey.

What we attended today was not a Poll Tax riot. No banks were burnt down, no statues were defaced. What we attended was an eye opening experience that allowed us to see two things:

1. The diversity and competence of the Left in Greece
2. The sheer extent of the unbalanced and jaundiced way in which the international press have reported this situation.

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Former SSY members not happy about their pensions

Pensions might seem an odd topic to write about on the Scottish Socialist Youth blog. It’s surely decades until SSY members’ need to start worrying about retirement, right?

But the fact is, if the UK government have their way, we’ll suffer when we’re older in a way that hasn’t really been seen since the establishment of the welfare state. For local government workers today, they can look forward to living on an average of £4000 a year. But it gets worse than that – when you take out the fact that men still earn more than women, you realise that women get just £2600. That’s just £50 a week!

The situation for people who work for a private business is even worse. The vast majority of private companies have in recent years got rid of any kind of decent pension scheme for their workers. Most don’t provide anything at all. This is because their workers haven’t been able to be organised enough to defend their rights, and company directors have seen pensions as an easy target as they to try to make their businesses more profitable, and themselves more rich. Their workers are forced to survive on the basic pensions provided by the benefits system, barely enough to survive.

Workers in the public sector have been slightly more successful in defending their rights, because they have more powerful unions to represent them. But, as you can see from the figures above, it’s still a poverty ridden old age they have to look forward to, and in fact unions negotiated reductions in pension entitlements under the previous Labour government.

The ConDem government is determined to make those of us who are working today get less when we’re old. To do this, they’ve tried to make people believe that public sector pensions are in crisis, and that the state can’t afford to pay people what they’ve been promised as they work hard keeping schools open, rubbish off the streets or supporting vulnerable people. Workers have paid into pensions with their own money. The government wants them to pay more, receive less for their money, and work longer.

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