John O’Farrell warns that the language used when discussing voluntary redundancies may hide the fact they are more compulsory than you think.
The Westminster government has a way with words. It does things to words like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Words and phrases like ‘Living Wage’, ‘rewarding those in work’ and ‘building democracy’ are ample demonstrations of the facility for language that a very expensive education can buy. The Secretary of State Theresa Villiers is equally fond of this tactic. In her own manner, Ms Villiers reads the script prepared for her by (and on behalf of) HM Treasury, unloading words and numbers of any factual weight.
For instance, her repeated claim that the Stormont House Agreement gifts to the Northern Ireland Executive ‘an extra £2 billion or so in extra spending power,’ with the implication that this represents a huge act of generosity from London when it is forced to make tough decisions and so on.
In fact, only £650 million can be considered as additional funding and that is restricted to:
- £50 million per annum for 10 years to fund capital investment shared education services;
- £30 million per annum for five years to fund various commissions and bodies dealing with ‘the past’.
The rest is loans, of which £700 million is earmarked for the Northern Ireland Civil Service’s ‘Voluntary Exit Scheme’. The VES is being paid for by borrowing cash from HM Treasury, and ‘allows’ the Executive to borrow £350 million extra provided all £700 million pays for redundancies. That means £350 million that we could have borrowed for investment is now exclusively earmarked for payoffs.
The details of the redundancies suck the meaning out of ‘voluntary’. Ulster University are now in talks with their unions on cutting 210 jobs as a result of a cut of £8.6 million. These efficiencies involve scrapping whole departments, Modern Languages in Coleraine and Psychology from Magee, with cuts to Maths degrees.
The University and Colleges Union have accused management of ‘intimidating’ staff into applying for voluntary redundancy, and not carrying out adequate consultation. Not to be outdone, Queen’s University sent an email to staff in September admonishing them for not taking up the kind offer of being one of the 236 redundancies announced last April to cover its £8 million cut. If more volunteers have not appeared by early October, then ‘formal processes will regretfully require to be implemented.’ This means compulsory redundancies, despite the waffle about ‘strategic reviews.’
The QUB Branch President for the UCU, Alan Harpur, said that staff ‘don’t know who will be targeted for compulsory redundancy’ and that ‘the unions have not yet been provided with the necessary information in terms of staff numbers involved or indeed the amount of savings that the university is short by.’
The row in universities over what is compulsory and what is voluntary is worth watching closely, because it involves workers who are unionised and articulate and not fearful of speaking out. That is not the case across swathes of the public sector which employ people through agencies (such as social care), or by individual headmasters (such as music and language teachers).
We are bombarded with the language of ‘choice.’ Despite the strong hopes of Ms Villiers the Northern Ireland Executive has proved incapable so far of enforcing welfare reform, privatisations and corporate tax cuts. So she made the choice for us, to get the ball rolling on mass redundancies.
Which leaves these two questions, posed long ago by Lewis Carroll: “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
