YESTERDAY, as is now routine, we were subjected to a blizzard of pious messaging from government ministers and the mainstream monopoly press valorising the routinely heroic work of essential workers.
No doubt, among the high officials, government ministers and the more elevated of media professionals there is a genuine appreciation that their health, safety and comfortable lives can proceed because of this essential work.
We will, for the moment, take this on trust. But a hint of the hypocrisy inherent in these utterances from on high is evidenced by the fact that as our official broadcaster transmitted these words of praise and appreciation there was a conspicuous failure to refer to the fact that it was International Workers’ Memorial Day.
There was no memtion that this takes place every year as workers' organisations, usually without a media fanfare, remember with respect the dead and injured at work and resolve to redouble our efforts to make work a safe environment.
The TUC confronts the issue with an honesty that contrasts with official hypocrisy.
Every year more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don't die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents.” They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority. International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) commemorates those workers.
The increased salience of these issues, not just the routine question of health and safety, but also the inevitable contradiction under capitalism between the drive for profit and the wellbeing of workers, means that among the millions of working people and their families there is stirring a sense that when this bloody war of attrition with Covid-19 has been fought to a relatively safe conclusion things will have to change.
This week the prime minister — whose return to work is due to the efforts of health workers whose deserved pay rise was stymied by his and other Tory votes in Parliament — resumed his duties.
Note how carefully he calibrated his insistence that a return to the routines of capital accumulation – which depends, under capitalism, on the willingness of workers to take home just a proportion of the values they create – was inflected with a hint that he intends to “refine the economic and social restrictions” that stand in the way of this.
Pointedly he said he could not “spell out now how fast or slow or even when those changes will be made,” but he did promise to say more “in the coming days.”
The sharp-eyed will notice that both the chief medical and chief scientific officers insisted that they offer evidence and that ministers decide.
Today is National Postal Workers Day. If any group of workers define in their daily labours the truth that there is such a thing as society it is postal workers who are literally the sinews of social life.
It is remarkable how they have maintained an ethos of public service even as their sector of the economy has been privatised, their workplaces turned into profit centres and their work subordinated not to social need or economic efficiency but private profit.
In the so-called “Royal” Mail they face an employer whose post code is profit. When Communications Workers Union leader Dave Ward says “When we come out of the other side of this there needs to be a revaluing of how workers in the UK are seen and recognised. We will not go back to ‘normal’ – we will create a new normal,” he tells us half the story.
Postal workers and their union have already begun the creation of the new normal when they turned in a massive near-total majority for industrial action both last year and this. Royal Mail bosses should not think that their employees’ willingness to prioritise keeping the nation connected during the pandemic means that mandate has weakened.
