The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 1st December 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 1st December 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Around 500 low-paid workers across the UK who are employed by a wealthy organisation with £44.6 million in reserves and which had an income of £373 million last year, are taking industrial action for the first time in the organisation’s history.
Some 83 per cent of workers voted on an 82 per cent turnout for action that will involve strikes for more than 17 days in the course of this month, which being a major retailer will hit their bosses hard. They claim their pay has declined by a fifth over the last five years. In addition, a recent survey of their workers found that over the past year: eight per cent had used foodbanks, 22 per cent were unable to pay their rent and 34 per cent have had to choose between heating and eating.
The strike vote came after workers rejected a pay offer of £1,750 or six per cent (whichever is higher), plus a one-off taxed payment of £1,000 for the lowest earners, and after the employer refused to enter fresh negotiations. Their union accuses bosses of planning to undermine by using unpaid volunteers, which the bosses have condemned in the past.
Not all it workers are underpaid. It was able to afford to pay an overseas employee £340,000– £349,000 in the year to 31st March 2022. Four other overseas employees earned over £100,000. This was justified by saying it offered no pension.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Oxfam, the charity devoted to “overcoming poverty by fighting the injustices and inequalities that fuel it”. The aggrieved workers belong to Unite, whose general secretary Sharon Graham warned that: “Oxfam is an extremely wealthy organisation and can afford to put forward an acceptable offer without impacting its charity work in the slightest. Its workers have their union’s total and unflinching support as they strike to make sure that happens.”
Jamie Major, a regional co-ordinating officer for the union, added: “Like many other employers in the charity sector, Oxfam exploits its workers’ commitment to its aims by not paying them properly. That Oxfam is even thinking of using unpaid labour to break the strike and refuses to talk to its workers’ union, shows this is an organisation that is in danger of losing its way.”
As the workers are generally those who work at the HQ and its shops there will be a picket outside of Oxfam Headquarters at John Smith Drive, Cowley, Oxford next Friday or outside their first shop in the city’s Broad Street on the following Saturday, both starting at 10 am.
Oxfam was founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief by a group of Quakers and academics in the city to avert starvation in Nazi-occupied Greece. From a single employee in 1949 it now has a CEO on £120,900, which has represents a slight fall on the previous year. To be fair, this would be deemed a pitiful sum by commercial businesses with an income of £373 million.
In general has to be said that the top earners in the British charity sector are not those in the poverty sector. The average for the CEOs of the largest charities is £176,000, but this is dominated by the medical and scientific sector with the Nuffield Health director topping the table on £1.2 million. Only the Salvation Army whose “Territorial Commander” gets £25,000 for living expenses is notable for its restraint.
The Oxfam action is not the only recent industrial action involving charities. At the Citizens Advice Hull and East Riding (CAHER) branch, 60 employees needed four days of strike action to secure a £1,500 consolidated payment across all grades and a £425 non-consolidated payment. For 2024 they will get another £1,000 consolidated payment across all grades.
At the conclusion of the dispute, CAHER said that: “Winter is coming and the number of people asking for help is at the highest level we have ever recorded. We have an unprecedented increase in demand for our services, we will continue to be there for the community.” But for that you need to pay workers properly. Again this was under the auspices of Unite, which has a strong representation in the charity sector. It is, however, useful to measure what sort of density they have. The Oxfam dispute affects only about a tenth of its UK staff.
As reported in earlier issues, the homelessness charity St Mungo’s, which operates across southern England, was also involved in a long-running strike. Here again the contrast between the high pay collected by the CEO and lowpaid front-line workers was highlighted. At the start of the strike Sharon Graham commented: “The charity’s staff do not take indefinite strike action lightly but they face a desperate situation – they need St Mungo’s to listen and act. The indifference of the management to their own staff smacks of the corporatisation of the charity sector.”
She complained that: “St Mungo’s have executives on well over £100,000 a year and the same people insist their workers should exist on poverty wages with actual wage cuts.” This was after workers overwhelmingly rejected an offer from the charity’s bosses to raise the original salary increase by 1.75–2.75 per cent. In the end, strike action secured an inflation-busting 10.74 per cent or £3,125 in cash terms plus a one-off payment of £700 for most workers, with lower-paid workers doing best.
The present Oxfam strike provides us with an opportunity to look at the charity sector more generally in Britain. Many organisations that are registered charities are often not very charitable. The Institute for Economic Affairs argues that billionaires such as Historic Royal Palaces, which display royal treasures, and Oxbridge colleges etc, are all charities for the sake of the tax advantages the status offers. Here we will sidestep the question of which organisations are deserving, however, and focus on those that do good works of some sort for impoverished humans.
Oxfam right or wrong
The latest figures from Oxfam show that it has recovered from the pandemic. The pandemic lead to the loss of 350 jobs across the globe, which seems to have passed off without any serious protests. About a decade ago it suffered serious financial losses fol- lowing the scandals over its field workers in Haiti, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo who were frequent users of sex workers on Oxfam premises. In addition to the loss of small donations owing to the scandal (which was compounded by cover-ups by bosses), it lost a number of Government contracts for overseas relief work for a while.
These incidents, and the mishandling, were a godsend for those Tories, including than Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liz Truss, who were keen to attack charities for reminding us of the extent of imperialist-caused poverty across the globe.
Oxfam has come under fire from the right-wing for its political campaigning, including such serious offences as pointing out that 85 of the wealthiest people in the world have a combined wealth equal to that of the bottom half of the world’s population who amount 3.5 billion people. Some claim that these figures are not entirely accurate, but they are not far wrong. Just because billionaires often have huge debts, which is not a problem as they are able to service them, or they can sell of a yacht or two in hard times, they are not in theory as poor as people with no assets or debts. The fact that there exists great inequalities can thus be safely ignored as an accounting error.
Oxfam has a habit of caving in speedily to rightwing political criticism. Obviously, it has to tread warily and not put staff at risk in countries wracked by civil war by criticising authorities who could make life very difficult for staff in the field – but there are times when it needs to show some backbone.
Oxfam has no shortage of rival critics in the charity industry who claim it is undemocratic and merely addresses the symptoms rather than the causes of international poverty. It has been accused of accepting neoliberalism as a fact of life and taking on government roles.
Oxfam, however, opposes the excess of both free trade and protectionism. It opposes the dumping of often subsidised, surplus commodities from developed countries such as rice and sugar, which are then sold at low prices resulting in farmers in poor countries being driven off the land.
A major issue highlighted in the pandemic was restrictive patents on essential medicines, computer software and textbooks held by western multi-nationals. Left-wing parties have been saying that for decades – but charities saying so makes more people sit up and take notice. Not that it makes much difference.
Oxfam swiftly backtracked from supporting the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel when the Israeli government objected. Indeed, the Zionist Board of Deputies later co-operated with Oxfam on a project to train 25 people “to help fight global hunger” in exchange for Oxfam committing not to “call for a boycott of Israeli goods or to support groups that do so, and will not partner with organizations that advocate violence or oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict”. The Israeli government has still condemned Oxfam for building houses for Palestinians and for digging them wells for water that the Zionists hypocritically describe as water theft.
Oxfam at Home
In Britain, Oxfam is known on the street by its large chain of shops. In some poor areas they are a godsend for selling second-hand clothing. In other, posher, areas they are outlets for handcarved toys and ornamental elephants and CDs of tribal music. Controversy surrounds their chain of second-hand book shops that are said to have damaged the commercial trade as they do not have to pay for their stock, but canny commercial antiquarian and second-hand book dealers find Oxfam shops a valuable source of under-priced books. In some high streets of deindustrialised towns the Oxfam shop is sadly the local Harrods.
Recently it has come under fire for spending time discussing whether to ban the Harry Potter books from its shops because the author is a mainstream feminist unimpressed by men who want access to women’s toilets. No doubt that will be great cause of concern to refugees fleeing their villages under gunfire.
Setting up a charity can often be a commercial master-stroke. The Captain Tom Foundation founded during the COVID-19 pandemic was of immense value to the family of the foundation’s late founder. This is not the only such case.
Most readers will be familiar with those thin plastic bags that get pushed through letterboxes into which recipients are invited to deposit old clothes for a hitherto unheard of ‘charity’. In fact 99 per cent of the cash raised this way goes to the dubious companies doing the collecting. Simply mentioning the word ‘charity’ all too often makes people close their critical faculties and open their wallets. Thus the Charity Commission has plenty of work to do.
The Starvation Army
An American folksong called the Salvation Army the “Starvation Army” because it only offered “pie in the sky when you die” [The Preacher and the Slave by Joe Hill]. It seems to be making every effort to live up to that reputation at home and abroad. In the UK this charity has been in battle with the Pensions Ombudsman for refusing to pay pensions to hundreds of full-time officers who resign before their official retirement date.
In the USA has been caught-out paying people in their thrift stores as little as a single dollar a week, albeit with room, board and clothing. These people were “benefiting” from the “Salvationist” government-funded residential adult drug-and-drink rehabilitation programmes.
In Langley in Canada’s British Colombia province, however, 44 days of strike and picketing has resulted in the Starvation Army being forced to pay 35 truck drivers, assistant truck drivers and dock workers at a major warehouse a $4.50 per hour pay rise as part of a four-year deal when Local 114 Unifor (Canada’s version of Unite) at the Salvation Army have successfully ratified a new collective agreement.
Gord McGrath, President of Unifor Local 114, expressed pride in the accomplishments of this group, stating: “These workers showed that when we unite and stand together, we can achieve significant gains that can improve our lives and set a standard for the future.” Who says you don’t need a union when you’ve got Jesus?
Oxfam’s Rival
Oxfam has a number of rivals, such as War on Want (WoW) founded in 1951 by future Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It is much smaller than Oxfam, with recent annual income being around the £1.5– £2 million mark. This was the charity that exposed the powdered baby-milk scandal in which multinational companies gave away free samples to new mothers in the Third World so that they would dependent on it after their breast milk dried up. Although much powered baby milk is perfectly nutritious, it is expensive and needs clean water.
It was at War on Want that the colourful sometimes MP George Galloway first came to public attention when he expanded its work but came under fire for casual accounting.
Like Oxfam, WoW has come under fire for daring to mention the causes of poverty rather than simply dole out alms to deserving cases. In the 1990s it advocated a tiny tax on financial speculations. More than Oxfam it has been strongly involved in Palestinian rights, supporting boycotts of Israel which were investigated by the Charity Commission who said such advocacy was a legitimate part of its work. In January 2018, WoW was honoured by the Israeli government by being banned from entering that country.
It has also done good work in exposing the British Government’s Department for International Development for squandering hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to help multinational companies take control of food production in Africa and in supporting privatisation of crucial water services across the globe.
Exposures of the destructive environmental effects of Coca-Cola plants across the world and of sweatshops in Bangladesh are also to be credited to WoW. There is a great deal to be done to remedy these wrongs, however, and that will involve mass mobilisation of workers in Britain and abroad.