Dumping on Workers: SOVA’s (Ineffectual) Soma

And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering.

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Humans like to help one another, but under capitalism such activities are curtailed somewhat, not least by the ill-serving doctrine of rampant competition that is incessantly rammed down our throats. Nevertheless humans continue to work together, and usually try their best to lend a helping hand to those who need it.

Capitalists correctly see any such displays of solidarity as a meaningful threat to their ongoing exploitation of the working class. So the ruling class strives to ensure that mutual aid is constrained to the dictates of capital. This involves actively encouraging trade union bosses who serve the capitalists own narrow self-interests, and ensuring that charitable activities are largely contained within a world of corporatized organisations — perpetuating the capitalist system that causes the problems that both unions and charities seemingly seek to redress.

Whilst David Cameron’s “Big Society” is the latest manifestation of capitalist attempts to regulate good-will, such capital-friendly ideas of ‘community’ have a long pedigree amongst liberals. Take for example David Astor, the longstanding editor of The Observer (1948-1975) who prided himself on being a dedicated opponent of trade unions.

Contrary to the supportive role provided by immensely popular working class newspapers like the Daily Herald, Astor used his own paper as a bully-pit from which he actively attacked workers for daring to collectively defend their economic rights. His preference was that workers organise in any way but through trade unions.

To facilitate this organisational shift he founded all manner of allegedly apolitical organisations to promote the nebulous concept of “human rights”… as a stand in for economic rights. Some of the better known of these human rights groups include Amnesty International and various prison reform organizations like the Longford Charitable Trust, the Butler Trust and the Koestler Trust.

None of this should cast doubt on the commitment and dedication of the many good people who work and/or volunteer for such charitable organisations. It is simply that many of the charitable organisations that currently exist under capitalism are intent on emulating the newly reformed Labour Party. That is, they have little or no internal democracy, and work to undermine, not strengthen working class interests.

In this way, the ruling class has helped nurture what many authors have amorphously referred to as a non-profit industrial complex. This newly emergent non-profit industrial complex forms a “natural corollary” to the profit system, “manag[ing] and control[ing] dissent by incorporating itself into the state apparatus, functioning as a ‘shadow state’ constituted by a network of institutions that do much of what government agencies are supposed to do with tax money in the areas of education and social services.”

Profiting from Privatisation

This brings us neatly to SOVA (the Society of Voluntary Associates); a charity that was formed in 1975 by a group of volunteers working within the Inner London Probation Service, that now “works in the heart of communities in England and Wales to help people steer clear of crime.” All Cameron’s talk of the need for a “Big Society” apparently had an effect on SOVA, and earlier this year they stepped up to the Tories’ mark by forming a highly profitable side-project named SOVA Recycling Ltd.

In February 2012, the newly minted SOVA Recycling thus became the subcontractor to manage five Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) in Sheffield, allowing the city’s primary waste services contractor, the multinational Veolia, to profit handsomely from a costly privatisation programme. A scheme that was first brought in by a Lib Dem council and is now strongly supported by a Labour council.

Workers at SOVA Recycling however, are not profiting from privatisation, despite the fact that the services they render are vital for Sheffield, and actually turn a tidy profit for both Veolia and SOVA Recycling. So while the recycling workers only receive minimum wage, SOVA Recycling claim that they are being “forced” by the financial crisis to attack their workers’ pay and conditions.

Wise to such newspeak, and determined that they would not personally pay for a financial crisis that has been caused by bankers — and which can be solved by simply making the super-rich pay their tax — the GMB members working under SOVA started an indefinite all-out strike on 23 June.

This of course was a last resort for the workers who had already taken more limited strike action, and had organised a protest outside the town hall “to demand that the council ends cuts and job losses at Dump-It sites in the city.” During this protest each GMB member wore a mask of the face of Jack Scott, the Labour council cabinet member for the environment, whose “behaviour in refusing to discuss or enter into negotiations with the GMB has earned him an especially hated place in the minds of most of the workers.”

SOVA and Company

Since 2009 the president of SOVA has been all-round do-gooder and Lib Dem member of the House of Lords, Baroness Linklater of Butterstone. In the early 1980s the Baroness had helped found the aforementioned Butler Trust (of which she is now a patron), and she currently serves on the advisory board of the Koestler Trust. In addition she is a board member of “one of the largest independent grant-making foundations in the UK,” the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

This liberal foundation distributes around £35 million per annum, and their web site notes:

Our aim is to improve the quality of life for people and communities in the UK both now and in the future. We do this by supporting organisations that work in the arts, education and learning, the environment, and social change.

Such nice-sounding claims should be taken with a large dose of salt. The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, like other elite-run liberal philanthropies, is simply there to help patch over some of the many glaring inequalities caused by capitalism. Systemic solutions like those proposed by the Socialist Party are strictly off-limits.

This helps explain why a recent addition to the foundation’s board room has been Sir David Bell, the former chairman of the Financial Times (1999-2009). Likewise it is immensely appropriate that the chief executive of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Dawn Austwick, has just been made a board member of Big Society Capital.

Launched in April 2012, Big Society Capital is a £600 million financial institution, that David Cameron spends hours day-dreaming about, that was “established to develop and shape a sustainable social investment market in the UK.” The main man behind this workers nightmare is Sir Ronald Cohen, a private equity guru who also spends time as a trustee of the war-mongering International Institute for Strategic Studies, which was cofounded in the late 1950s by right-wing Labour Party operative, Denis Healey.

In the context of this article, one particularly noteworthy adviser to Big Society Capital is businessman-turned-community worker, Matthew Bowcock, who is presently the chair of the Community Foundation Network. This Network is currently headed by the former chief executive of the Christian relief and development charity (Tearfund) and the Network describes itself as a “charity that leads a movement of community foundations committed to positive social change in the UK through the development of ‘community philanthropy’.” …Not negative social change, eh?

A fellow member of the Community Foundation Network’s board of trustees is Rob Williamson, who is the chief executive of the similarly named Community Foundation, which is based in Newcastle. This charitable group brings us back to SOVA, as for the past six years the vice president of the Community Foundation has been Mike Worthington, who until recently was the chairman of SOVA’s board of directors.

Worthington like so many of his elitist colleagues who like to “help” the poor is a member of quite a few “Big Society”-styled programs. He is thus the former chairman, now patron, of Tyneside Cyrenians, a group that “integrates socially excluded people back into society”; where he serves alongside fellow prison “reformer” Lord Ramsbotham (who works with the both the Longford Charitable Trust and the Koestler Trust).

Between 1994 and 1997 Lord Ramsbotham was the director of international affairs for the private military corporation Defence Systems Ltd (1994-7), a firm that he founded in 1981 and then staffed with former members of the SAS (who of course had been trained to great skill at the tax payers expense). In 1997, the year that Defence Systems was purchased by Armor Holdings and became ArmorGroup, senior staffer Major-General Stephen Carr-Smith told a British reporter:

Who are the sorts of people that would be our clients? Petrochemical companies, mining or mineral extraction companies and their subsidiaries, multinationals, banks, embassies, non-governmental organizations, national and international organizations. Those people who operate in a very dodgy, hostile type of environment.

With no sense of irony Lord Ramsbotham currently serves alongside Iain Duncan Smith as a patron of the Wave Trust, a group allegedly “dedicated to making the world safer by reducing the root causes of violence, including child abuse and neglect.” The Wave Trust counts New Labour ideologue Geoff Mulgan among their advisors, a man who amongst his other community-service duties acts as a board member of Big Society Capital. (Mulgan is perhaps most famous for being the founder of the New Labour think tank, Demos.)

SOVA’s “Workfare” Scheme in Sheffield

To add to the ridicule and contempt that should be rightly heaped upon the capitalists who (mis) manage SOVA, it is sickening to read that in Sheffield one of SOVA’s many ways to aid “long term unemployed people” is through their Sova Work Programme. A programme which is funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, via fellow service providers, G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor), SERCO and A4e (Action for Employment).

It is strange to say the least that SOVA, who like to think that they are helping ex-offenders, has chosen to ally itself with G4S and Serco. These being two multinational corporations that derive their massive profits from ever-increasing incarceration rates. Here one should observe that G4S is now one of the top private military (“security”) firms in the world and counts the aforementioned ArmorGroup (of Lord Ramsbotham fame) amongst its many profitable subsidiaries.

Thankfully such brutal corporate profiteering does not go unnoticed. Just last week, Socialist Party comrades in Leeds joined a NotoG4S picket at the School of Law, where a conference entitled ‘Private Sector Involvement in Criminal Justice’ was attended by managing directors from both G4S and SERCO.

Likewise campaigns continue around the country to highlight both companies’ ongoing efforts to undermine any semblance of human rights; not to mention the economic rights of their employees. If all this wasn’t bad enough, special concerns were raised last year by the Prison Officers Association’s union, when in Birmingham, for the first ever, a public sector prison was contracted out to G4S.

The background of SOVA’s second work programme partner, SERCO, like G4S makes for unsavoury reading, and they are considered to be amongst the key corporate vultures in the ongoing privatisation of the NHS. It is appropriate to note here that in the not so distant past, current A4e board member, Jo Blundell, spent 10 years with SERCO where she focused “on developing business in SERCO’s markets in Health, Local Government, Education and Facilities Management.”

Much like fellow capitalist, Charles Allen, who is currently embroiled in the 2 Sisters’ industrial dispute in Leicester, the founder of A4e, Emma Harrison, has similarly starred in Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire. (These capitalists only want to help you know!) Fat cat Harrison however recently had her comeuppance, and in February was forced to resign from the chairmanship of A4e and from her position as David Cameron’s personal adviser on problem families. This was “in the wake of her firm being investigated over allegations of multiple fraud.” As the Daily Mirror reported in February:

Former Work and Pensions Minister Margaret Hodge even went so far as to describe Harrison’s dividend as ‘ripping off the State’ and has urged ministers to suspend all work with A4e. Now four ex-employees at her company are at the centre of a series of fraud investigations. But none of this has stopped A4e from being named this week as the preferred bidder for a £15 million Government contract to rehabilitate prisoners in London.

Luckily for Harrison, amid all this controversy she can still retire to her twenty bedroom Gothic Mansion, hang out with her “green” friends at the Eden Project, or alternatively drown her sorrows in the cosy confines of her husband’s range of traditional and contemporary pubs to be found scattered across Sheffield.

The same escape options are not of course available for the employees at Sova Recycling who, even prior to going on strike, were struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage. Nor are such comforts an option for the thousands of the unemployed individuals currently being forced to work for free through A4e’s much protested against workfare programmes. One would be forgiven for thinking that the slave-like work schemes currently forced upon prisoners themselves are actually being rolled out to free citizens as well!

It is interesting to note that the longstanding civil servant who was chosen to replace Emma Harrison as the chair of A4e earlier this year is Sir Robin Young. Young is the chairman of Dr Foster Intelligence, a mysterious company which pioneered the publication of patient outcomes in health care, a process that has facilitated the ongoing dismantling of the NHS. Indeed, in reward for their good efforts, in 2011 Dr Foster’s cofounder Tim Kelsey was named ‘Reformer of the year’ by the influential right-wing think tank, Reform.

Finally, another significant board member of A4e is Sheffield businessman, Sir Hugh Sykes, who serves on the advisory council of the free-market think tank, Politeia. Unfortunately for the British public, in 1998 Sykes wrote a pamphlet for Politeia titled “Welfare to Work — The New Deal: Maximising the Benefits.”

Fellow member of Politeia’s advisory council is right-wing Labour Party MP for Birkenhead, Frank Field, whose reactionary plans to reform the benefits system were too radical even for Tony Blair to stomach. Field’s background is worth reviewing because until recently he served as a board member of the neoconservative Centre for Social Cohesion. Field also currently sits on advisory boards of both Reform and the military think tank Global Strategy Forum: where on the latter he sits alongside Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is chairman of the NHS vulture, Alliance Medical Ltd, and the former chairman of ArmorGroup (ring any bells).

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his antiquated views on immigration, in 2007 Frank Field cofounded an environmental group known as Cool Earth, which promotes an explicitly free-market approach to social change. His cofounder was Johan Eliasch, the president of the Global Strategy Forum, and advisor to Iain Duncan Smith’s misnamed Centre for Social Justice; while the man chosen to head up this project formerly served as the director of equity research for the banking behemoth Morgan Stanley.

Undermining SOVA’s Soma

In his classic book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley referred to soma as something akin to a tranquiliser for the masses. Capitalists working through charitable ventures like SOVA are thus attempting to administer their own charitable soma, in a vain effort to placate growing popular resistance to their control of society for the benefit of the few rather than the many.

However, as ever, collective political action by the working class is revealing the class basis of society to ever greater numbers of people, who are now joining the political struggle to change the world. That there is a need for revolutionary change is beyond doubt, but for now, important reforms are vital as well.

For a start we could demand that the £120 billion a year that goes missing every year from rich tax dodgers be collected by our government. Furthermore, in the case of supporting the immediate needs of the striking workers at SOVA Recycling, the Socialist Party “has suggested that the GMB sets up a support group and appeals, not only for finance, but for supporters to help the strikers picket each site 24 hours a day in order to stop the full skips being emptied.”

Once adequate support has been supplied it will then be necessary to demand that Sheffield’s waste services be “brought back in-house and run under democratic workers’ control and management,” as not only would this allow for the provision of “a better service, [but] it would be cheaper as well.”