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Tuesday, 28 June 2011

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER – WHY SOCIAL CARE WORKERS SHOULD SUPPORT THE PCS STRIKE

On Thursday 30th June education, public sector and civil service workers from four unions will go on strike over pensions and service cuts.

In Edinburgh the workers at the forefront of this strike are Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) members working in job centres and government departments. The PCS have made it clear that as well as taking this action to defend attacks on already meagre pensions they are also striking “for the alternative to the Con-Dem government's savage cuts in public services and jobs”.

This aligns Thursday’s strike action firmly with the interests of social care workers, service users and their parents and carers. Social care services are being hit hard by the government and local authorities’ cost cutting and privatisation drive subjecting some of our society’s most vulnerable people to sub standard care and in some cases, neglect.

In Edinburgh workers, service users and campaign groups successfully fought off attempts by the Council to sell off vital care and support services to poor quality, low cost companies with questionable track records. Since then however the existing providers of these services have been forced to absorb substantial cuts in funding that are beginning to impact on the quality of care they provide. Support workers are being cut back and the use of low cost, unqualified causal staff increased leading to vulnerable people with severe disabilities receiving a poorer quality of service from staff they don’t know. Pay and conditions of the care and support workers that perform arguably one of the most important roles in our society are being cut back. Union representatives at an Edinburgh provider of services for people with learning disabilities recently calculated that in 5 years their wages have lost 10% of their value. This is not an exception – in many other organisations without worker representation the situation is worse.

This is against the backdrop of recent high profile revelations about low cost, private care companies such as the neglect suffered by elderly residents of the Elsie Inglis home here in Edinburgh or Southern Cross Healthcare, the company that put the care of thousands of service users at risk by selling its care home properties for private profit.

 

As we suffer the double pain of falling income and poorer services so do the people we support.While cutbacks endanger the support services used by adults with mental health problems and physical or learning disabilities their income is also being threatened as the Government seeks to cut 20% of the benefits they receive. The scrapping of Disability Living Allowance and allowing private contractors, rather than medical specialists, to assess claimants’ eligibility for its replacement further demonstrates the Government’s intent to make the most vulnerable in society pay for the excesses of bankers and politicians.

This point brings us back to the PCS workers taking part in Thursday’s strike. Although these workers are walking out over attacks on their jobs, pensions, pay and conditions they are also taking a stand for disabled people on the benefits they administer and for all of us suffering the pain of service and job cuts. The PCS articulate very well that the Government’s excuses for cuts and privatisation are not justified. Businesses and wealthy individuals evade or avoid £100 billion in tax every year and the UK Government holds £850 billion in bailed out banking assets – more than the total national debt.

On Thursday workers from the PCS union UK wide and the education unions in England and Wales will strike the biggest blow so far in the fight against the worst attack on the welfare state since its creation. It is essential that workers everywhere stand beside them but especially social care staff, service users and their parents and carers. We stand to lose as much as anyone.

See below for full details of Edinburgh picket lines and rallies that you can join on the 30th.

 

Danny Oliver

Edinburgh Support Workers’ Action Network (SWAN)

Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2011

 

THE COLLAPSE OF SOUTHERN CROSS

 

Edinburgh Support Workers’ Action Network looks at the disastrous effects of privatisation on the care of our elderly and speaks to a worker at a Southern Cross home in Edinburgh

 

When the UKs biggest private care home provider Southern Cross announced on Monday that it could no longer afford to pay rent for its care homes and would cease operations it blamed falling local authority funding and rising rent prices. However, a closer look at the causes demonstrates the danger of allowing private companies to run essential public services.

Southern Cross, whose 750 care homes receive substantial funding from the tax payer, was purchased by US private-equity firm Blackstone in 2004. Blackstone floated the company on the stock market, making £630million in the process, and proceeded to strip its most profitable assets, making £1billion by selling off property belonging to the company. Southern Cross then continued to provide services by renting the care homes it previously owned. Blackstone sold its shares in Southern Cross in 2008 making a further £1 billion in profit and leaving behind a company crippled by the rising cost of rents.

Now Southern Cross has announced it cannot afford to pay its rent bill and the company will fold. As private investors make billions, the 31,000 elderly residents of Southern Cross' care homes face an uncertain future.
SWAN spoke to a care worker employed by Southern Cross who gave a worrying description of care standards at the private company;

“Very little of the profit the home made went towards funding the home as Southern Cross were clearly only interested in making money and didn’t seem to know or care about giving appropriate care”.

The care worker also informed us that very little had been communicated to residents or staff at the care home about their precarious future;

“I was told by the administrator that he had heard something but had been forbidden to tell us anything.  As far as I know residents haven’t been told anything about what will happen to the home”.

 

The Council and the landlord at this home are now searching for a new provider to deliver the service.

Southern CrossThis is a particularly disturbing example of what happens when vital public services are put in the hands of private companies; taxpayers' money generates huge profits for investors while leaving service-users exposed and vulnerable and the taxpayer yet again to foot the inevitable bill of cleaning up the mess that is left behind.


  




Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011

“SICK AND DISABLED ARE SUFFERING” : Protests planned at Centres for Disability Benefits Tests.

Protesters are due to descend on ATOS “asssesment centres” where people on disability benefits are tested to decide if their benefits are to be cut off.  The UK-wide day of action against benefits cuts on 14th April will see protests in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and at several locations in England.

“ATOS are a profit-motivated company and they are being paid half a billion pounds by the government to victimise sick and disabled people,” say Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty, who are organising the protest at ATOS's Edinburgh base at York Place.

From 4 April, the coalition government started a three year project to reassess all 1.5 million incapacity benefit claimants. The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) – carried out by ATOS - is designed to find many more people “fit for work”.  About one and a quarter million people, now on incapacity benefit, will lose £25 a week. Because of sanctions and compulsion, many will not be able to cope on Jobseekers Allowance and will lose all their benefits.  The ConDem legislation builds on measures
introduced by the last Labour government, who replaced Incapacity Benefit with Employment Support Allowance, and introduced a harsh new ‘medical’ test.

Many claimants are failing assessments because the ATOS computer test is so stringent and mismanaged that seriously ill people are regularly being
declared fit for work. The Citizens Advice Bureau’s chief executive has written that “seriously ill and disabled people are being severely let down by the crude approach”  while in February, The Herald newspaper reported the deaths of two sick claimants waiting for their appeals against the loss of benefits due to their being ‘fit for work.’

ATOS routinely ignores the evidence and opinions of sick people's doctors,
consultants and psychiatrists.  Meanwhile their own “medical
professionals” - including nurses and physiotherapists with limited
knowledge of many conditions -  sit ticking boxes on a computer as they follow a rigid, inflexible series of questions, and are ‘incentivised’ to find people fit for work.  40% of appeals against their decisions are won, rising to 70% of appeals where the claimant has had legal advice from the
Citizens Advice Bureau, while Edinburgh Council’s Rights Office has found success for 8 or 9 out of every 10 Appeal Tribunals they’ve attended.

Citizens Advice Scotland in a 2010 report wrote “Our evidence has
highlighted the cases of many clients with serious health conditions who have been found fit for work, including those with Parkinson’s disease,multiple sclerosis, terminal cancer, bipolar disorder, heart failure, strokes, severe depression and agoraphobia.”

Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty (ECAP) say: “These assessments have nothing to do with the sympathetic care and support of the sick and needy that should be the mark of a civilised  society , and everything to do
with making the vulnerable pay for a crisis that was none of their making.
This is being done in the name of ATOS but we should be saying loud and clear "NOT IN MY NAME".”

And ECAP urge those called in for tests: “Don't go alone – take a friend or adviser with you.  This is your right.  And if they do fail you – get advice and appeal.”


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