Update 9 September:

The Barnet careworkers continue their strike in protest at pay cuts today. There will be a rally outside Barnet House at 1pm: 1255 High Road, London N20 0EJ.

Update 7 September:

The Barnet careworkers who work for the private care company about which useless Barnet Council CE Andrew Travers boasts in the report below are on strike tomorrow. The careworkers’ jobs – all provide support services for disabled people – were outsourced to a now-famously-failed, profit-focused organisation called Your Choice Barnet in 2012. Over the next few weeks, the careworkers will take action in protest at a near-ten-percent pay cut, redundancies, Your Choice Barnet’s failed business model and management’s insistence that Your Choice Barnet will only become competitive if careworkers work for almost nothing in dangerously understaffed circumstances.

Details for the next two days’ pickets and strike action are:

Monday 8 September 2014 strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30am onwards.

Tuesday 9 September 2014 strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30 am onwards.

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Original post 3 September 2014:

Early days I know, but I’m calling it: Barnet Council chief executive Andrew Travers has sent September 2014’s twattiest and most disingenuous CE tweet.

Yesterday, Travers tweeted a picture of a group of people watching a Barnet worthy give a presentation.

Travers’ tweet: “Staff briefing to the Barnet Group sets out opportunities for growth.”

Staff briefing to the Barnet Group sets out opportunities for growth pic.twitter.com/M3cfzMwzRo

— Andrew Travers (@atravers60) September 2, 2014

That tweet implied very strongly that there were and are opportunities for growth at the Barnet Group. Unfortunately, Travers’ tweet neglected to mention a key part of the picture: that growth at this Group comes at the expense of careworkers and disabled people, and that the Group’s attacks on already low-paid careworkers’ wages and conditions have been so severe that careworkers will start strike action on Monday September 8. Travers’ timeline has been very quiet on that bit. I’ve been watching his feed for redress on this point, but so far – none.

The Barnet Group is parent company to Your Choice Barnet, a part of the profit-driven Group local authority trading company to which Barnet Council services for people with physical and learning difficulties were outsourced in 2012.

That outsourcing was presented to the public on a very big pile of marketing horseshit: the council claimed that the trading company would return mighty profits and that disabled people from all over would abandon their own local services and pay good money to travel absolute miles in the rain, etc, to participate in Barnet’s.

It was clear to anyone who thought about it for even two minutes that this “concept” was a complete non-starter. I’ve read a lot of council bollocks in my time, but the so-called business plan for Your Choice Barnet really took the biscuit. John Sullivan, the father of a Barnet woman who uses those services, described the whole notion to me as “mental masturbation.” It’s still hard to think of a better description.

The council business case was full of utterly unsubstantiated claims about profit opportunities and possible markets. In a report for Barnet Unison at the time, the academic and outsourcing expert Dexter Whitfield observed that there was “no assurance provided on the quality or reliability of data and assumptions used,” in the council’s business plan. He also noted that “ethical and moral issues concerning why adult services should be expected to have such high level of profitability are absent from the business case and the report to cabinet.” He wondered, in other words, why a company should be looking to make big money out of disabled people and why the council didn’t want to discuss that. It really is priceless stuff, this council business planning for the care sector. Basically, it involves sitting round in a boardroom and pulling random numbers out of your arse. Then you tell experienced careworkers that £7 an hour or whatever is reasonable money – for them, that is – and that they can live without weekend enhancement pay and decent sick leave. You do that sort of thing for a bit and then tweet about upcoming management triumphs. Brilliant.

Needless to say, the promised Your Choice profits never came to pass. Disabled people did not descend on Barnet in their masses to pay for and participate in Barnet services for disabled people. A year ago, the company resurfaced to bleat about debt and claim that the only way to claw money back was to cut careworkers’ wages and staff numbers. That has hit the services, all right. Barnet Unison says that about 145 full time equivalent staff were transferred from adult services to the trading company in 2012. After the “restructure” last year and cuts to shift allowance pay, only about 105 FTE staff are in place now – a 30% cut in staffing levels.

On Monday and Tuesday next week, those careworkers begin strike action against a 9.5% pay cut. They plan to meet up on Tuesday with the striking Doncaster careworkers too. This is an interesting and important point. The Doncaster careworkers, who were recently transferred from the NHS to the private company CareUK, have been striking for weeks in protest at CareUK’s cuts to their pay and conditions. They can’t live on that money and have already had to give up their homes. That fight has started to generate a lot of mainstream publicity. People are beginning to understand that careworkers are at the front of a battle for wages that people can actually live on. They are beginning to understand that these private companies make money by paying their workers almost nothing. If careworkers from different parts of the country are meeting up to join forces – well, that will give Andrew Travers something to tweet about all right. And if he can’t manage it, I certainly will. Monday and Tuesday next week, comrades. See you there.