At the Speak Up For Public Services rally back in January, I heard an interesting point made in a speech by Doug Nichols of the CYWU. He said we often forget that the reason we have public services, run by the state, is that most of these originally started as voluntary efforts. After a while, it became obvious that you couldn’t coherently run a national system from a hundreds of local voluntary endeavours, so the state stepped in, and we got state-run policing, education, hospitals and so on.

This, he said, gave him pause whenever he heard of more and more local state services being transfered out to be managed by the voluntary sector. He worried that fracturing services in this way (along with more obvious privatisation) would result in services losing the scope to be consistent and efficient that nationalisation had brought them so long ago.

I was thinking of this whilst reading Jon Rogers‘ post on the ongoing dispute at Fremantle. Whilst not wanting to tar all voluntary or private sector provided services with this rather simplistic brush, the debacle going on in Barnet at the moment certainly highlights this potential for losing the service’s much needed consistency and efficiency.

Care staff have been TUPE’d over from Barnet Council to the non-profit Fremantle Trust, but have been told to sign away a huge chunk of their pay and conditions, or face the sack. Had the work stayed public, care work across Barnet would have had consistent conditions, and the same high standards of motivation and care could have been expected. If the Fremantle staff lose their dispute, they are going to be paying for the inefficiency of the new system, directly out of their own pay packets.

Good luck to all the staff at Fremantle, and the Unison & GMB colleagues representing them. If you’d like to chuck in your 2pworth, the woman to email is Fremantle Trust Chief Exec, Carol Sawyer. carole.sawyers@fremantletrust.org

Tragic news from Guatemala this week, as STEPQ dockers’ union leader Pedro Zamora was executed in broad daylight as he picked up his young sons from hospital on Monday. The murder looks to have been committed by rightwing paramilitaries, following threats over his union’s campaign against port privatisation in Puerto Quetzal. STEPQ are trying to ensure dockers are consulted in the changes to the management of the port, and favour a programme of modernisation without handing it over to a private concern.

“This gruesome killing recalls the darkest days of Guatemala’s decades of civil conflict, and the country’s reputation will continue to suffer unless action is taken to root out and punish those who commission and perpetrate intimidation and murder. This murder was planned and premeditated, and appears designed to send a message to those who dare to stand up for fundamental rights”. Guy Ryder, ITUC General Secretary

Please take just a moment to visit the ITF site, where they are running a petition to demand the Guatemalan government bring his killers to justice, and protect the dockers from further anti-union violence and intimidation.

(Hattip to Dave Osler for following this story.)

It throws another recent story into sharp relief, as the ETUC holds a petition to safeguard public services in Europe from the creeping spectre of privatisation in under the scary-sounding Bolkenstein directive. They’re hoping for a million signatures (well, that’s Unison kept busy then) to demonstrate popular support for quality public services, and convince the EU to give basic universal provision a better legal standing in the debate on public services modernisation. Modern doesn’t necessarily have to mean the current fashion for liberalisation - indeed, universal access to public services should be a fundamental right, something incompatible with a business run solely for shareholder profit. Written in endearingly obscure Euro-unionese (”Services of general economic interest”, anyone?), the petition and campaign pages on the ETUC site are also well worth another 30 seconds of your life. You can sign it here.

Brave people like Pedro Zamora are standing up daily for the ideal of universal public services run for everyone, not just those who can afford to buy them out, and available to everyone, not just those who can keep pace with the market. We, who have things a thousand times eaasier owe it to them as well as ourselves to keep that ideal alive wherever we are.