YOU may not see it but Serco is in your life. It is there even if you are not one of the unfortunates being transported in its prison vans or languishing in a detention centre.
The opaque processes whereby privatising firms like Serco obtain public contracts — and their lamentable performance in carrying out these services — inevitably inspires distrust.
And so the demonstrations taking place against Serco’s “test, track and trace” contract to combat coronavirus deserve every support.
As it proudly proclaims, Serco is an FTSE top 250 company, managing over 500 contracts worldwide. Employing over 50,000 people, it operates in Britain and Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and the Middle East and across five sectors: defence, justice and immigration, transport, health and citizen services.
That claim — that on average Serco has 100 people working on contracts — does not necessarily include the many thousands of sub-contracted employees whose wages and conditions are, inevitably, lower than when these or different workers carried out this function as directly employed public servants.
The whole point of privatisation is to lower the main variable cost which is wages.
Serco’s reported operating profit at the 2020 half year point was £89.1 million, substantially up on the same half year point in 2019 when it stood at £17.2m. Its underlying “earnings” per share was 3.86 pence — well up on the 2.62 pence last year.
This profits pile is money which otherwise might have gone into improving public services and raising the wages of the people providing those services. Instead it has added to the immense mountain of capital accumulated by the parasite class that rules our lives.
Rupert Soames overcame the disadvantages of an Eton and Oxford University education and the barriers that being the grandson of Winston Churchill places on one’s career development to become the chief executive officer of Serco.
That Serco won the £45.8 million “test, track and trace” contract is a tribute to the fair-minded state functionaries who take these decisions. They generously forgave the company for its failures in carrying out a contract for providing secure accommodation for asylum-seekers, although not the £1 million fine that was imposed. And Serco’s apology for breaching data protection rules on its test and trace contract is similarly not regarded as an impediment to the continuation of the government’s agreement with the company.
As the Morning Star goes to press the government is in panic mode as the full implications of the A-level fiasco becomes apparent to Tory MPs.
The government could have tolerated a chorus of complaints from Labour about admissions if it solely affected the daughters and sons of the labouring classes who aspire to a university education.
But the perverse effects of applying a defective algorithm across such a wide spectrum of secondary school pupils has inevitably produced a storm of personal disaster stories in which the reasonable expectations of many thousands of bright students were dashed.
The normal functioning of the school system conceals any number of factors which compound the discrimination faced by working-class children but this is obscured by the fact that in the examination hall the human factor moderates, to some extent, the systemic class bias.
Now the arbitrary operation of the mechanism adopted by the government to “moderate” teacher assessment has resulted in a myriad of injustices, forcing a chaotic U-turn at the last moment due to mounting public pressure, including by demonstrations on the streets.
This is full-spectrum cock-up by the idiot in charge, though Labour felt unable even to echo the Liberal Democrats in demanding that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson resign.
The U-turn must not be allowed to detract from the struggle against an education system whose injustices have been made obvious by an algorithm imposing the prejudices of the Tory Party on working-class kids.
