More than 750,000 British public sector workers staged a 24-hour strike Thursday in a standoff with the government’s plans to reform public sector pensions. The reforms come as the government tries to trim its deficit and would require public workers to worker longer, pay more toward their pensions, and receive less upon retirement. Union members say they are bearing the brunt of a financial crisis caused by rich bankers. Across the UK, tens of thousands of striking teachers and civil servants joined with students to protest the cuts.
The UK strike echos protests across continental Europe against austerity measures aimed at reducing debt. This week in Greece thousands of workers staged a 48 hour strike and many took to the streets after the Greek parliament approved a raft of austerity measures that included spending cuts, tax increases, and privatizations as a condition for a massive bailout to avert the eurozone’s first default. Several thousand protesters in front of Parliament refused to leave unless the measures were changed or early elections were called.
Paul Mason and David Graeber talking:
750,000 people did not show up for work. About 20,000 people were actually on the march. There were actions, pickets, solitary actions all over London in the morning and then there was a march. We were expecting about 10,000, 20,000 people showed up for the march itself. So, that was pretty impressive, a lot more than we expected. The student movement people showed up in solidarity. We did a sit-in in front of the Department of Work and Pensions. It was more of a festive attitude, it wasn’t a militant action.
Three-quarters of a million people don’t go to work because of what they are calling pension reform. I think the word “pension reform” is a misnomer. It’s basically a pay cut. It’s a massive pay cut. The way the laws work here in the U.K., it is very difficult to have a massive strike like that. It has to be something on that kind of national scale because solidarity strikes are actually illegal here. This affected so many people that it was possible for all public workers to go out, or almost all. Even 90% of the people who take police calls did not show up yesterday for work.
This issue of attacks on pensions is not just occurring in Europe it’s occurring in the United States, throughout the industrialized world and increasingly people are feeling that the workers are being made to pay for the deficits created by the bankers.
it is happening everywhere because we’re facing the same sort of challenges. Essentially they think that people having an extremely short memory, that we’ve all forgotten 2008 and the reason that we have this crisis. There’s a brief moment when their talking about reforming the system that went by and now they’ve pretty much decided that they money is going to be taken out of the pockets of working people. The surprising thing is that it’s started to rebound. People really are not accepting the argument about shared sacrifice. Because it is so clear that the shared sacrifice is going to be shared by some people and not others.
there is a common theme to the protests that are taking place across Europe, and that is not just the public sector workers, as we saw here, defending their pension rights, but also a generation of young people for whom quite a stark picture is being painted of their future. They thought that their future would sort of, that life might start off as a 20 something worker, but in the end there would be something decent, the curve would go upwards. When they saw their own parents, people in their 40s and 50s, looking at working three, four, five years longer, and the pension pot being reduced, then the curve of their life for the next 40 years for these young people, seems suddenly to have turned down. This is actually what they have in common with a lot of the people were on the streets in Tunisia and Egypt. It is the sudden down curve of your future that turns people and makes them go to the streets. Of course in Greece it’s at the extreme of what we’re seeing everywhere else.
The Independent – In Britain, it’s talking about the average pension, 7,900 pounds for armed forces, civil servant pension, 5,000 pounds, health worker average pension is $5.5 thousand dollars. A fire-service average pension $13,000. Teacher average $10,000 and then it goes to the MPs, members of parliament. Average pension more than $21,000 pounds.
Which is a great scandal. They’re saying we have these gold plated pensions, but they’re talking about themselves.
The interesting thing here, in Britain, we saw yesterday — there are debates to be had about how effective that strike was. It was big, but maybe not as big as it could have been. Large parts of the public sector did not strike, let’s remember that. We are seeing the beginning of this kind of detachment between people on the street, people work force, people who with these real concrete issues and the parliamentarians.
Because of course, all three main parties said the strikes were wrong. As you say, I have just come back from Greece, where if you are, it’s not just the public sector workers it’s the middle class, people with small businesses, it’s of course the unemployed youth, if you want to reject the medicine that’s being offered, there are virtually no parties you can support, only at the extremes of the left and the right, and even to be honest not there. You get the expression of the anger. That is why the Greeks, that’s why I say “consent is burning”.
If it were just the labor unions in Greece as it was say a year ago that’s one kind of problem for a government, for a social democratic government. Now you’ve got middle class people, apolitical people, youth, pensioners on the streets. You can’t sort it out with tons of tear gas.
it’s something that will strike anybody who goes to Athens, the capital of Greece, is the way that vagrancy and low-level living is suddenly in your face on the streets of Greece. This has always been true for the large number of migrants, single male migrants, who have ended up in Greece trying to get into Europe. But now it is true of ordinary Greeks. There are non-governmental organizations who specialize in providing free health care to migrants on the streets who now face queues
of ordinary Greeks. When the medicine runs out mid-morning they shut the door. So, that’s what is happening to health care for Greek people.
You can say a lot of people in the public sector have effectively through the combination of rising pension payments that they have to make and falling wages and rising taxes, that they take now to the pay packet, lost something in excess of 30% of their actual real wages. Those are just two examples. This is before you talk to the youth on the street who are unemployed. They just want to leave the country.
the irony that it is a socialist government, that in essence has been forced to institute these reforms and what it means in terms of the left in Greece. but it is also quite interesting that Pasok, the Social Democratic Party, which runs Greece, was the first party that really told Greek people how bad things were going to have to be. So, they came in to power. They found that Greece was effectively bust, that the previous government and the European Union had connived to cook the books and they said we are going to have to have a really tough austerity package, people are going to have to lose money out of their pay packets. And what happened a year later they had to come back because the European Union, many people argue, mishandled this and they had to come back to you know what, they said we need another bailout exactly the same size, and the recession we have just been through, 4% of GDP, minus 4, we’re going to have to vote to double that, to something like 8% next year. We’re going to see a deep recession in Greece, and the problem is for a country that has no money to pay its debt, having another recession isn’t going to help it pay its debt. That is why the international financial community is so worried about the problem now.
almost everything that we were facing had to do with, was framed as a debt crisis. We have to think about debt and debt moratoriums, where I was, the work of Jubilee 2000, various groups that were arguing for debt cancellation on a global scale. And I became fascinated. What is debt? Because we talk about it all the time. It has an incredible moral power over us. I realized that no one has ever written a history of debt. They have written a history of just about anything else you can possibly think of, you know, cod, toilets, but no one has ever written a history of debt, even though it affects every aspect of our lives.
So I started looking in to it and discovered these political conflicts were not a new thing. In fact most revolutions, more revolts in human history have been about debt. It’s the most perennial tool that’s been used by people who are powerful to make the victims of structural inequalities feel that it’s somehow their fault. So I wanted to unveil that and show that we’re actually part of a very very long history. There’s also a lot of hope in it. Because the other think I realized is that much of the world religions grew out of social movements, which were exactly about “problematizing” debt. Basically saying, who owes what to who?
That made me think that we’re actually at a very strange historical moment because they’ve managed to convince people around the world that debt is somehow something sacred. I mean, a debt is just a promise, right? It has no greater moral standard than any other promise that you would make. Yet, here we have people accepting that it’s perfectly reasonable to say well, we can’t possibly keep our promise to the public, politicians say, to give you health care because it’s absolutely unthinkable we could break our sacred promises to bankers to give them a certain percentage of interest every year. How did that become a convincing argument? It’s utterly odd if you think about in terms of any kind of principle of democracy. As I say, if you look at the history of world religions, of social movements what you find is for much of world history what is sacred is not debt, but the ability to make debt disappear to forgive it and that’s where concepts of redemption originally come from.
David Graeber in this long history is there a qualitative difference in our era where you have essentially financial institutions that are far more powerful than any governments? Where you had a situation where during the 2008 crisis the United States government was bailing out banks in Europe that had been involved in investments here as well as its own banks, that this concept of too-big-to-fail for banks, but not for countries, or not for populations that end up having to suffer?
that marks a significant break in world history. I think when we look back at this, we’re gonna think of 2008. 1972 when the U.S. went off the gold standard was the first moment we sort of moved toward a system of virtual money where we realize that money is not a thing, it’s an arrangement between people. In 2008, where it became clear that the old global financial system is something that’s created politically and has to be periodically recreated, it doesn’t maintain itself, like they want us to believe. I mean, that really marks a break. The question is now that we understand that money is a political construct, that they really do just print it, it is a promise that people make to each other. Well who has control over that process of making promises? Who gets to make them and to whom?
The whole “what is debt?” is the other side of credit. Credit is what makes capitalism go, it’s what makes it possible to invest without having first to accumulate the money. And we are entering a situation where the entire system seems incapable of recognizing bad debt. The bad debt has been flowing around the system since Lehman. It was accumulated in ten years. What is debt? What is bad debt? It’s accumulated stupidity. And we don’t know how stupid we’ve been until somebody recognizes how bad the debt are, and we’re not prepared to do it.
Discussion with Paul Mason and David Graeber.
Paul Mason, economics editor for BBC Newsnight. His books include, “Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed” and “Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global.”
David Graeber, teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He is the author of several books, his newest book–”Debt: The First 5,000 Years” (Melville House) comes out later this month.
– from democracynow.org