What a waste… July 10, 2014

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy

I’m not a big fan of Fintan O’Toole (and his comments on comments are irritating), but his column on waste collection and Greyhound in particular isn’t too far of the mark. As he notes, no one every consulted him, or me, or you, about pushing waste collection to the private sector, and now that it is in the private sector as ‘customers’ we have no purchase at all on what the company, and its like, do whatsoever. But beyond even the fact a service which was not just good, but more importantly essentially invisible because it was good, has worsened appreciably, his point that we have been forced unwillingly and with no choice to collude in worsening the conditions of those working in Greyhound. Of course our collusion in their impoverishment is actually a collusion in our impoverishment too further down the line. By the way this piece here by Shane Ross from a few years back is well worth reading…

Reading in the SBP about the current dispute in Greyhound it is difficult not to come away with a sense of the futility of privatising these ‘services’ in the first place.

Greyhound claims that its new lower wage rates are still slightly better than those paid by rival companies. Cost has become a major factor in the competitive world of privatised refuse collection.

It’s an entirely artificial competition. There aren’t fleets of bin trucks from competing providers filling our streets, at least not in the north inner city, and it wouldn’t be a good thing if there were either. The competition, such as it is, is more drawn out and across a longer time period and in such a way that cost benefits (from the perspective of consumers) are minimal.

Some good reports from Monday’s protest both in terms of turn-out and the rhetoric coming from SIPTU. Let’s hope that latter will be matched by support and action.

There’s also the thought that it may all be pointless in a broader sense. Anna Karpf in the Guardian at the weekend noted the following:



Hilary Wainwright, in a powerful new booklet – The Tragedy of the Private, the Potential of the Public – describes water, health and education as “the commons” – an excellent term. What’s remarkable, and hitherto fairly undocumented, is how all over the world a quiet process of remunicipalisation is taking place. Wainwright gives examples from Newcastle to Norway. In the UK, she found over half of 140 local councils bringing services back from the private sector. In Germany, by 2011 the majority of energy distribution networks had returned to public ownership. Even in the US, a fifth of all previously outsourced services have been brought back in-house.

It’s also not difficult to understand why, when ‘privatisation’ has generated faux-markets, we have seen an attrition in service provision, impacted negatively on consumers and workers. Nor is it a simple return to business as usual models of ownership. Karpf also notes that …

….new social forms of ownership are emerging in which public utilities are run by coalitions of workers and service users. Theirs isn’t just a defence of public services but an attempt to democratise them so they are not the top-down bureaucracies of old or simply job-saving strategies (important though these may be). They become what Wainwright calls “new forms of collectivity” – unions and public managing common resources together for shared benefit.

Of course there are dangers in that too, as in any human effort, but compare and contrast with what we face with respect of one of the most basic and yet important of services in our daily lives. Those sort of genuine reforms which place workers – both as workers and as users of services – at the heart of communal endeavours are a world away from what has actually happened.