All in the Game
James Undy - writing in the The Independent - continues to share his insightful views on how the unions are prosecuting their public sector pensions dispute.
Seems like he's not too impressed - so far.
So what would you do, muppet?
"An ex-union colleague texts me with a pithy request for strategic advice (well, that’s how I interpret it …) on the public sector pension dispute.
My answer – that I wouldn’t have been starting from here – is hardly original. But it’s not entirely flippant either.
In his autobiography Prezza! John Prescott recalls the Fire Brigades Union dispute of 2002/3:
FBU leaders “were coming out of the front door … effing and blinding to the press and their supporters, denouncing me – but they were also coming in the back door, where we got down quietly to working out a settlement without the public and press being aware”. In the end, a 40% pay claim was settled with a 14% increase phased over three years.
The former Deputy Prime Minister retails this with some satisfaction. What he doesn’t add in the book is that FBU General Secretary Andy Gilchrist lost the subsequent GS election.
Prescott and Gilchrist thought they were two men of the world playing a game to long established rules – like contestants in The Apprentice, bidding high then settling laughably low.
The actual firefighters, it turned out, seriously thought this was about 40%.
The problem with the old approach is that it depended first, on a limited stock of information being largely held within the negotiations; and second, on everybody understanding and accepting that it’s all a bit of a game.
But in a world of mass information availability the first is no longer possible. And the rules of the game increasingly look like dishonesty and duplicity. They’re especially baffling to private sector workers – who have a legitimate stake in how pensions are paid for, and take media reports of the tubthumping conference rhetoric at face value.
I don’t doubt UNISON when they say they want to negotiate (I do doubt PCS – like Brando in The Wild Ones, asked “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”, their approach to disputes is “Whaddaya got?”).
But I don’t believe it’s any longer credible both to engage seriously with the government and successfully play to the activist gallery. Because, like those FBU members with their 40%, those activists really want that general strike.
It was pretty gormless of Danny Alexander to keep the discredited game going with last Friday’s speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research – conflating and confusing negotiating bottom lines with public positioning.
But funnily enough, it was George Osborne who took the grown-up and transparent approach by announcing in the budget he was accepting all of John Hutton’s recommendations – including the principle of defined benefits, career averaging (better for women and the lower paid, not that you’d know it from union reactions) and preserving pensions already built up.
Perhaps he should have done it Apprentice-style instead – rejecting some key Hutton protections, leaving unions to claw them back then tell their members how much worse it could have been. And then, of course, to argue who was the muppet."
Seems like he's not too impressed - so far.
So what would you do, muppet?
"An ex-union colleague texts me with a pithy request for strategic advice (well, that’s how I interpret it …) on the public sector pension dispute.
My answer – that I wouldn’t have been starting from here – is hardly original. But it’s not entirely flippant either.
In his autobiography Prezza! John Prescott recalls the Fire Brigades Union dispute of 2002/3:
FBU leaders “were coming out of the front door … effing and blinding to the press and their supporters, denouncing me – but they were also coming in the back door, where we got down quietly to working out a settlement without the public and press being aware”. In the end, a 40% pay claim was settled with a 14% increase phased over three years.
The former Deputy Prime Minister retails this with some satisfaction. What he doesn’t add in the book is that FBU General Secretary Andy Gilchrist lost the subsequent GS election.
Prescott and Gilchrist thought they were two men of the world playing a game to long established rules – like contestants in The Apprentice, bidding high then settling laughably low.
The actual firefighters, it turned out, seriously thought this was about 40%.
The problem with the old approach is that it depended first, on a limited stock of information being largely held within the negotiations; and second, on everybody understanding and accepting that it’s all a bit of a game.
But in a world of mass information availability the first is no longer possible. And the rules of the game increasingly look like dishonesty and duplicity. They’re especially baffling to private sector workers – who have a legitimate stake in how pensions are paid for, and take media reports of the tubthumping conference rhetoric at face value.
I don’t doubt UNISON when they say they want to negotiate (I do doubt PCS – like Brando in The Wild Ones, asked “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”, their approach to disputes is “Whaddaya got?”).
But I don’t believe it’s any longer credible both to engage seriously with the government and successfully play to the activist gallery. Because, like those FBU members with their 40%, those activists really want that general strike.
It was pretty gormless of Danny Alexander to keep the discredited game going with last Friday’s speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research – conflating and confusing negotiating bottom lines with public positioning.
But funnily enough, it was George Osborne who took the grown-up and transparent approach by announcing in the budget he was accepting all of John Hutton’s recommendations – including the principle of defined benefits, career averaging (better for women and the lower paid, not that you’d know it from union reactions) and preserving pensions already built up.
Perhaps he should have done it Apprentice-style instead – rejecting some key Hutton protections, leaving unions to claw them back then tell their members how much worse it could have been. And then, of course, to argue who was the muppet."
