Councils will be required to invite bids for the services, whether they want privatisation or not. The targetted areas "competition" are: refuse collection and street cleansing, cleaning of buildings, ground maintenance, vehicle meantenance and catering services. This will involve thousands of jobs. A lot of the workers, particularly in office clean-
catering, be women, employed part-time and not well unionised
The restrictions put into the Green paper make it virtually impossible for in-house tendering to be competitive, particularly in areas such as refuse collection and street cleansing where the added burden of requiring at least a 5% return on capital costs must be built into the tender of the in-house wageg bid. Having revoked the "fair
clause passed special legislation waiving VAT to make privatisation more atractive for the huge companies, Jenkin then has the effrontery to write:
"It is of the essence of the Government's policy that competition between local authority direct employees and outside contractors should be fair. There should be no built in bias in favour of either
In-house bids cannot be artificially
"loss-leaders" of the multinationals can be. In-house bids will not be based on wages and conagreed levels. The government have deliberately legislated a built-in bias in favour of private companies and in order to savage the welfare state.
The only way that council labour can compete with the private companies is by revoking the rights of and rade union was. This option is and trade union rights. not acceptable for us.
The scandal of privatisation is that the Tories have given plenty of notice and have clearly spelled out their intentions. The union bosses have stood
watching workers trying to oppose it bit by bit. All the TUC has done is oraanised a few courses (run Tea people who know very det bout
fighting); glossy brochures; and talked about its opposition to privatisation in the usual vague way
The public sector unions still have no firm strategy for fighting. A NUPE national officer recently said that in the health service privatisation could not be fought nationally and had to be fought on a District to Distric asis! So much for solidarity. precendented attck on council services and public sector jobs. The only way to beat Jenkin's plans is by organisng joint action in boroughs and involving health workers as well. With the miners going back without a victory it will be difficult to motivate other sections of the working class to strike. Councils are particularly dif-
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