On 29 May, comrades of the CPGB-ML visited the picket line of the ‘Enable’ strikers in Glasgow. This determined group of workers are the first to take strike action in what will be a series of strikes over the next two weeks.
The dispute finally erupted owing to long-term problems with low pay in the care sector, which are directly related to the outsourcing of this work to charities like Enable as well as to private companies. This has led to the delivery of services on the cheap, with staff pay and conditions being the first target of every outsourced employer looking to cut costs.
Indeed, low pay has become such an issue in the care sector that up to 30 percent of vacancies are now going unfilled.
Care workers do vital, skilled work caring for vulnerable people. Their work requires many years of training and the attainment of vocational qualifications, and yet they have been suffering from ever lower levels of pay for many years now.
In 2024, the SNP-led Scottish government promised to increase wages in the sector by providing £38m in extra funding, but this commitment was never fulfilled. The money that had supposedly been assigned for it suddenly disappeared, and the workers have been left with no alternative but to go on strike.
This particular strike could clearly have been avoided had the SNP government paid the workers what they had been promised, but there is also a bigger issue at stake, which is the steady destruction of Britain’s health and care services via outsourcing and privatisation.
The outsourcing of vital public services to charities and for-profit companies creates substantial profits for shareholders by cutting back on wages, benefits and pensions for staff. Overall, privatisation increases costs, meaning that even as the taxpayer is asked to pay more (in reality, to subsidise corporate dividends and executive pay), we get less in return in terms of the actual service being delivered.
Outsourcing and privatisation of public provision is a ruling-class policy that has been promoted by all the bourgeois parties in Britain since the 1980s – at both national and local level, by Tory and Labour governments and councils, and by Scottish and Welsh nationalists since devolution. Not only has the SNP failed to push back against this trend, but its administration in Edinburgh has openly betrayed care workers in the most cynical and manipulative manner.
In order that both those who need the help of carers and the workers themselves can get justice, all such services need to be brought back under the direct control of the government, centrally planned and funded, and with a national collective bargaining agreement in place for all those employed in the sector, in whatever capacity.
The privatisation of our health and care services must be completely reversed. There should be no profiteering from public provision to those in need!
The Enable workers’ strike will roll out across five days in different regions of the country, beginning in East Renfrewshire, and continuing in Aberdeenshire, Moray, Ayrshire, Edinburgh and Glasgow over subsequent days. The action will culminate in a march and rally at the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh on Thursday 12 June.
We stand in solidarity with the Scottish care workers and wish them success in this vital action!
