Unison sees proposals to widen “self-regulation” of meat hygiene as an attack on standards – and one that its members are determined to resist…
Proposals to ease meat hygiene regulations don’t pass inspectors
WORKERS, JANUARY 2009 ISSUE
We have heard much in recent months about the parlous state of what are passed off as pay campaigns in the public services, particularly in local government. One pay campaign hasn’t yet received much coverage but is an interesting and so far successful one. The Meat Hygiene Service (MHS) is a group of health inspectors whose job is to inspect the hygiene of the meat that we buy through butchers and other outlets throughout Britain. These highly skilled inspectors have in effect not had a decent pay rise to keep up with inflation over recent years, and are now subject to what they consider to be dangerous interference in the levels of regulation their service provides.
In effect, the Food Standards Agency is trying to change European Union regulations to widen the use of self-regulation in meat hygiene, as in so many other areas. They want the industry to be able to employ its own staff instead of independent government inspectors, who are usually Unison members.
This has already happened in the poultry industry but the union believes that it would fundamentally compromise meat and safety, and result in far worse pay, conditions of service and working conditions for meat inspectors. The current proposals made by the Service as part of pay negotiations are, in Unison’s view, “laying the groundwork for this move to self-regulation”.
In 2004 Unison ran a successful campaign when the Food Standards Agency last pushed for meat safety regulations to be relaxed; so successful a campaign that it went unnoticed. The union is now launching a new campaign in the run-up to 2010, when the EU will again review the relevant regulations. Meetings are being held of union members in York, Manchester, Leeds, Cambridge, Perth and throughout Wales, and industrial action is now on the cards.
In addition to the moves towards deregulation, crude attempts to save money by cutting payments to operational staff are also envisaged in the current “offer” to MHS inspectors. Unison says that under the current system, service failures are unheard of. The union believes that the current system gives the MHS all the flexibility it needs to provide a professional service, and therefore the proposals are not only unnecessary but clearly malign in intent.
The Meat Hygiene Service in line with many other Government departments is in effect seeking to impose an unagreed pay settlement. The Unison Meat Hygiene Inspectors recently undertook a consultative ballot as part of their opposition to these proposals and the result, in stark distinction to earlier reported pay ballots, was a high 75 per cent turnout and an 83 per cent vote in favour of taking strike action.
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| Talking turkey: union Meat Hygiene Inspectors have been listened to. |
Although this was a consultative rather than a legally binding ballot, the strength of feeling is underlined by the fact that a massive 94 per cent of workers voted in favour of “taking action short of strike action”. Apart from anything else, this gives some understanding of how much better workers’ feelings can be represented when the ballot is entirely under their control, and untrammelled by legal restrictions that are hedged about by the employers’ lawyers.
And how about this for an example of the length to which capitalism will go in Britain to attack workers: in at least one documented case in Merthyr in Wales, Hungarian “meat inspectors” have turned up unannounced, supernumerary, attempting to engage in the work of the meat inspectors. This is reportedly so that if Unison members do vote yes and if they do take strike action, there will be people, foreign trained migrant strike breakers, on hand to continue to run a scab service. That is how seriously our enemies take their pay campaign – we should take ours no less seriously.
Following the consultative ballot, and as reported in the last issue of Workers, negotiations re-opened, which have resulted in an agreement. A 2.99 per cent pay increase, backdated to August 2007, has been accepted by members and will be in pay packets in time to pay Christmas bills. While any pay settlement is only ever a truce, a truce on our terms is always preferable, and 2.99 per cent against a background of possibly plummeting inflation begins to look pretty good (as does the three-year NHS pay deal, but that’s another story!).
Clearly there weren’t enough EU meat “inspectors” to cope with the scale of meat eaten at British Christmas dinners!