The company also announced record annual pre-tax profits of £1.6bn, a rise of 17.6% on the previous year. Needless to say, while whittling away the working conditions of the people who make these profits, senor management is busy giving themselves perks. Tesco's board will get a £11m bonus while its chief executive gets short and long-term share awards totalling £1.98m. His total annual salary and benefits package rose by just under 5% to £2.98m. Meanwhile, according to the GMB, his wage slaves have to work 79 hours a week to achieve the national average wage.
Clearly making profits of £1.6bn is not enough and more is required by refusing to pay its workers when they are off sick. Unsurprisingly, Tesco confirmed there was no plan to end sick pay at its head office, in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. A new variation on the old Thatcherite mantra that "to get the poor to work more, you pay them less; to get the rich to work more, you pay them more."
Obviously this will backfire as workers who are genuinely sick will haul themselves into work, spreading germs. This will bring down the overall productivity of the company as well as putting stress on people to attend work when they are ill. And are consumers really going to shop somewhere were sick employees are handling their food? What are the public health implications of this decision?
However, more is needed than just moral outrage. Collective action is required. The first place to look would be the trade unions. Any sensible union would be opposing this attack on their members' interests but USDAW has given a wary welcome to Tesco's pilot scheme. USDAW spokesman Kevin Hegarty said that the union had no objection to the pilot scheme, but added that this "was not the same as fully supporting it." He showed his short-sightedness by arguing that the trial was being run on a purely voluntary basis and would not affect any staff who already had contracts with Tesco. Nice to see union bureaucrats helping bosses divide and rule the workforce! Other unions said they were astonished at the USDAW cooperation.
So it is, as usual, up to workers to fight back themselves. One possible action is to take collective sickies at the affected stores. This would, in effect, be a form of unofficial strike action and would give a strong message to management. A mass "sneeze in" may be effective. Perhaps unofficial action could also pressurise the union bureaucrats to be less of a door mat. This is also a great opportunity to make links with consumers. Who wants their food with added germs? So a boycott of Tesco would make sense, particularly as it is likely Tesco's policy will spread across all industries if it is not stopped now.
Ultimately, this is more than just about sick pay. It is about the kind of society we want. Do we want one where work dominates our lives or one geared to human needs? With the defeats of the 1980s, collective action in industry has taken a blow. However, more individualised resistance continues. British workers are happy to "throw a sickie", to reclaim some of the time we have to sell to the bosses to survive under capitalism. It has become a staple of modern life, as we use it to find time for ourselves in overworked, underpaid rip-off Britain. Many wage slaves are not encouraged to take time off even when they are unwell. A recent survey by employee benefits firm Gissings found that more than 90 % of employees said their organisation doesn't encourage staff to stay at home when they are ill.
Capitalism is about extending work, turning more of our time into time we sell to the bosses. Recent research (and common sense) contradicts employers' claims that people work long hours out of choice. Such claims forget the factor of power, the relative strength between labour and capital. While we officially have the lowest unemployment for decades, this is not reflected in our working lives. The reality we face exposes the statistics for the nonsense they are. We feel under pressure as long hours and less job security take their toll. The work which often contributes to our illnesses is now making it harder for us to recover from them by attacking the sickie.
Sickies are one way of putting the odds in our favour when collective action seems, unfortunately, unlikely to happen. Yet the attack on the sickie exposes the weakness of isolated, individual, action. Without collective action and solidarity, the bosses (whether economic or political) will act to restrict our freedoms whenever they feel they can get away with it. Anarchists can and should play an important role in raising the awareness of the direct action and solidarity required to defeat these schemes and other attacks like them.