Fighting for fair pay
The Greens are more than a party simply for the environment.
By Sian Berry Published 04 March 2008 11:27Last Monday I helped to launch the
At the launch in Westminster were fellow patron John Cruddas MP and the chair of the Fair Pay Network, Karen Buck MP, as well as representatives from network members NUS, Unite, UNISON, the Fawcett Society, and Oxfam. Not forgetting campaigners from probably my favourite organisation in the capital (after the Green Party):
During the event, I spoke about fair pay for women. I've become a patron of the Fair Pay Network to demand decent wages for all workers, but it’s a simple fact that women workers are furthest from this modest goal. Low pay is worst among part-time and temporary workers - the workforces that are majority female.
As a result, women in Britain are 14% more likely to be in poverty than men. Close this gender gap, and we're well on the way to a fair deal for all workers.
I’m also very proud of the Green record on this issue. Green London Assembly members were instrumental in setting up the London Living Wage Unit, which carries out the annual assessment of the pay level needed to provide the basics of life in the capital, and Green AM Darren Johnson last year helped persuade the London Fire Authority to vote for all the cleaners in its fire stations to be paid a living wage.
There are no environmental reasons at all for my involvement in campaigning for fair pay. It’s all purely for reasons of social justice and equality – but these other facets of the Greens’ philosophy seem to be too much for some to take in.
Extremely curiously, Channel 4 insisted on removing a section covering the fire station cleaners’ story from our ‘Political Slot’ – an annual three-minute broadcast, which was aired by C4 on the Thursday before the Fair Pay Network launch.
This year, we decided to focus our film on the achievements of our two London Assembly Members, with me topping and tailing the piece with a short plug explaining how, ‘when voters put the Greens in positions of influence, we really get things done.’
After clearing the script with the producers and recording the piece without incident, the final cut was deemed ‘too election focused’ by Channel 4’s lawyers. Fair enough, we thought, and awaited a version without my plugs for electing Greens. However, in the final cut, all that stuff remained in and, instead, the entire section on low pay had been taken out.
Very, very odd indeed. We still have no idea why, but it has made us wonder about rates of pay at Channel 4. Whistleblowers and conspiracy theorists, please get in touch (about this, not about free energy, 9/11 or Diana).
Oh and of course you can watch the original cut, including the section on living wages on our http://youtube.com/watch?v=sSSjGnj6g7k">Green Party YouTube channel.
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8 comments
After Sian has made her allegiances known to all, asking Londoners to vote for her and Ken, she must not be surprised to become socialist breakfast, as it seems already before the election.
Channel $4$ obviously decided that issues of social justice are not her historic backyard and hence cut it out. We must not assume that broadcasters are au fait with the principles of political parties.
That they should have done it without asking or communicating is fishy and regrettable, but not unusual for BBC ilk.
The larger message of a failed socialist capitalism has never entered the ears of noLabour voters, or politicians for that matter.
How can socialism be social, when it is not advanced around the principles of sustainability, therefore enableling future generations the same socialist principles their fathers enjoyed. But no, they are all still stuck in the 1970's with their collective brains and lack of spine, yes sayers who easily could jump that little gap between Labour and Tory values, a fag paper between them now.
By voluntarily becoming the breakfast for tired, sad and emotional socialists who represent the best Tory party Britain has ever seen, Greens merely excuse the mismanagement of Londoners taxes, Kens awefull scheming and male chauvinism to boot, which will do nothing for fair pay or a living wage in an unsustainable London. Me, I'm not worried, eventually it will flood. ingo
Perhaps change is in the offing as a “forced-choice”.
Endless economic growth is the shibboleth of the rich and powerful in our time. But the days of reckless domination of the Earth and its environs may be numbered, it would appear, because the idolatry, the magical thinking, the wishes and the selfish intentions that have driven endlessly expanding large-scale corporate activity and insatiable wealth accumulation could be about to run their course. The plans of the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians for ‘manufacturing’ “bubbles” and big-business boom times could lead the family of humanity to be threatened by the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and the unintentional destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Are unsustainable activities recklessly driving economic globalization taking the family of humanity toward some sort of colossal ecological wreckage?
What could be happening?
Perhaps powerful people and huge human institutions are driving the relentless, and soon to be unsustainable, expansion of the global political economy, that is requiring unbridled increases of economic production/distribution capabilities, conspicuously unrestrained per-capita consumption of resources and the continuous growth of absolute global human population numbers.
But why?
As we having been observing in recent months, another huge "bubble" has been "manufactured" by economic powerbrokers and allowed to grow ominously within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, the sub prime "bubble" is doing now what bubbles eventually do. Bubbles burst. We can readily observe how the credit markets of the world banking system are seizing up, stocks are tumbling and the value of the dollar is sinking. Who knows, a financial meltdown of the economic system worldwide could be in the offing.
How could this be happening?
For a moment, let us consider that the organizers, managers and Wall Street whiz kids overseeing the global economy (and the unraveling of the worldwide sub prime swindle) are running the artificially designed economy of the human community as a pyramid scheme. This is to say straightforwardly that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth rises pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated endlessly. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. In the 1980s, this global financial operation was called a "trickle down" economy. We have been told over and over again how this economic scheme "raises all ships." From this limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources in 2008 appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The 'ships' carrying these billions of people do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Could anything be done to beneficially change these unfair, inequitable and, in so many billions of instances, intolerable circumstances?
Of course. There is plenty to do. The global economy is undeniably a manmade construction. Because the world's economy is a product of human activity, our economic system is known to one and all to be imperfect. Afterall, human beings can better themselves and their imperfect products can be ameliorated. Only works of God are perfect, I suppose. With this in mind, if it is so that the human economy is imperfect, it is just as obvious that the global economy of the family of humanity can be re-designed, modified and otherwise changed, as necessary. The system of economic globalization can be reorganized, "downsized" and "powered down" so that the global economy meets the primary needs of majority of people. In this way, the economy of the human community could be sustainably reconstructed so as to realize more fully and more equitably the principles of democracy.
What are the principles of sustainable ENVIRONMENTAL ECO:NOMICS?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
The larger message of a failed socialist capitalism has never entered the ears of noLabour voters, or politicians for that matter.
fair pay? Trickle-up economics?
bloody communism! :P
Sian, while I agree that women`s pay is an important issue, you ingnor the fact London is awash with cheap immigrant labor. You, the Greeeeens and New Labour, simply aren`t interested in fair pay. Brown blathers about his £5.73. It should be more like £8.00 ph in London and to give you an idea, which I`m sure you`ll know...the going rate for a private house cleaner in London is £8.00ph. Real pay equals higher tax revenue, less credit and more high street spending.
Maybe we should be really progresive and container in some cheap Chinese and undercut European migrants....I could then afford a team of household staff.lol
A lot of people don't understand what is actually going on, Brown increases minimum pay by 21p per hour to low paid workers who are probably receiving tax credits. For every pound that goes over their threshold, will be taken off the tax credits, thereby canceling any increases.
Another example of the governments attitude towards low paid workers. The 10% tax rate is being abolished in April to 20% overall. Now work out how much more tax you will pay a week, then work out how much that 21p increase works out for your working week, and you will find that your increase will be about the same as your increase in taxation. THAT'S YOUR GOVERNMENT FOR YOU, THE BETTER PAID WORKERS GAIN WHILST THE POORER GET WORSE OFF.