meetings will the real direction by a North East London PCSU rep LIKE THE unemployed, Jobcentre workers will see little of the £3.5 billion spent on New Deal. The State will waste most of it on subsiding miserly bosses to take on cheap conscripted youth. Instead of increasing the appalling wages and job security for Employment Service (ES) staff, New Deal is having the opposite effect. The government has allowed the private sector to run New Deal in eight ES districts and ES workers are being offered a derisory 2% wage 'rise' in April.
Simultaneously ES management have launched another major attack on workers terms and conditions by attempting to selectively open Jobcentres on Saturdays.
Even in areas where the ES is 'leading' New Deal, so called 'partners' in the private sector are poaching ES work. Yet the threat is more apparent in private-led districts. In Hackney and City, Reed Personnel Services were granted favour to deliver the whole of New Deal after their Chairman donated £100,000 to the Labour Party.
Although they declined to take on all the work and left some scraps to the ES, this partial privatisation has already cost dozens of civil servants jobs. Reed has replaced ES workers with their own New Deal advisers offering them £2000 a year less than ES equivalent grades and longer hours.
Reed will make a vast profit T! been conned into believing it will create jobs.
Civil Servants will have to fight battles on pay and privatisation without national leadership support. The Trade Union Left Alliance has an important role in trying to link up battles across public sector unions on these issues. Yet trades unionists should not necessarily trust Broad Left leaderships either. The Socialist Party dominated Section Executive in the ES * last year sold a miser-