Good thing I won’t have to take David Cameron up on his stupid idea of bringing the kids into the office when teachers go on strike next Wednesday. I can just picture the chaos that would inevitably result.
The 11 year old would sulk in a corner all day long, telling anyone who politely introduced themselves that she really, really hated them and never wanted to speak to them ever again. Knowing my luck, she would demonstrate her awareness of the F-word within earshot of the chief executive.
The younger one would charm all adults in the vicinity, lisping and giggling as she happily skips around the building, innocently saying things like ‘what happens if I press that button, daddy?’
At that point, she would lunge for the button in question and irreversibly delete the firm’s principal database, compiled through decades of round the clock labour on the part of generations of wage slaves.
But no. Despite being a private sector wealth creator myself, I have taken November 30 as annual leave, expressly to show solidarity with millions of striking public sector slackers, all seemingly determined to leech off the fruits of my toil.
The way that some newspapers tell it, the big problem with this country is that ‘we’ – as in journalists and lawyers and PR consultants and owners of twee nick-nack shops on Stoke Newington Church Street – do all the work around here.
Meanwhile, ‘they’ – meaning hospital porters and coastguards and dinner ladies – sit around scratching their arses from nine to five, just counting off the years until they can qualify for their gold plated pensions. As most readers will be aware, things are just not like that.
With the exception of a two day temp job as a student, I have never worked for the public sector in any capacity. Yet I can recognise an attempt to divide and rule when I see it. All workers have a common interest in ensuring that pension entitlement is levelled up, not levelled down.
I will be there on the demo to say thank you to those teachers subjected to more face time with my evil offspring then I suffer myself, and to all the NHS staff who looked after me when I had an operation earlier this year, and the people who make sure that my rubbish disappears and that the streets I walk down get cleaned and that the restaurants I eat in maintain minimum standards of hygiene and do all of the thousands of other vital tasks the public sector undertakes.
If anyone else in my position has similar plans, get in touch and maybe we can form a private sector wealth creators’ bloc as a counterweight to those bloody anarchists. Maybe we could even turn up clad in business casual, just to make the point.
As a teacher who will be taking action alongside many, many other public secotr workers can I say how much I appreciate this support. I believe that David Cameron things workers are ignorant. He thinks we are all besotted by X Factor and the like. He could not be more wrong. He greatly underestimates the support from the general public who value public services and those who work in them. But I think also it can be said that those of us who work in the public sector also support injustice within the private sector too, many of very low wages and no pension. many of these have no union representation. Socialists must continue to fight oppression everywhere.
http://think-left.org/2011/11/27/public-and-private-workers-unite/
We must not allow the Tory-Libe Dem coalition to divide us. United we stand, divided we fall.