Why go the public way? (Part two)

When I was much younger my mother used to tell me that one day if I ever needed a pay raise I should just go and ask my boss for one. In the 1950's when she was at work, be­fore hav­ing my broth­ers and I, this might have worked.

The first (and last) time I tried the tech­nique of sim­ply ask­ing for an in­crease in my pay I was un­cer­e­mo­ni­ously sacked. I had been paid be­tween 20 and 21 euros per hour over four years work­ing as a high school teacher of three dif­fer­ent sub­jects at an in­ter­na­tional school near the wealthy coastal re­sort town of Sit­ges and I had be­come, like my most of my col­leagues, frus­trated at also doing hour after hour of un­paid labour. Teach­ers in the Span­ish and Cata­lan pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem are rou­tinely crit­i­cised, some­times le­git­i­mately so, but their con­di­tions of work mean that they can­not be un­fairly fired from their jobs, as I once was.

Of course, it's not only pub­lic school em­ploy­ees and civil ser­vants that ben­e­fit from the pro­tec­tion that the state can give. A doc­tor or nurse with se­cu­rity of tenure has one less source of stress and there­fore is more likely to do their job bet­ter - pa­tients and their fam­i­lies may well re­ceive good care at least partly due to the fact that they are in the hands of peo­ple who have the re­as­sur­ance of em­ploy­ment that can­not be ter­mi­nated by a short-tem­pered em­ployer. Per­son­ally, this is just one rea­son why I think gov­ern­ment health care is prefer­able to pri­vate and my ex­pe­ri­ences with both kinds of treat­ment have so far backed this up.

It's also the case that pri­vati­sa­tion - gov­ern­ments sell­ing parts of the pub­lic sec­tor to pri­vate com­pa­nies - has largely been dis­as­trous for users of ser­vices that were for­mally run by gov­ern­ment or­gan­i­sa­tions. The com­pany be­hind Britain's first pri­vately run hos­pi­tal re­cently said it planned to pull out of its con­tract but in an ex­tra­or­di­nary piece of irony, blamed gov­ern­ment bud­get cuts for mak­ing it's emer­gency de­part­ment too busy...and nat­u­rally less prof­itable.

The rail­way net­work in the UK is a very clear ex­am­ple of how after pri­vati­sa­tion prices can sky­rocket, while trains are more crowded and late in ar­riv­ing - re­gard­less of which pri­vate firm is op­er­at­ing the line. Since as­sis­tance to job seek­ers in that coun­try was palmed off to var­i­ous com­pa­nies, some em­ploy­ees have claimed that they scored “brownie points for cru­elty” to the un­em­ployed and were con­stantly pres­sured to im­pose 'ben­e­fit sanc­tions' (mean­ing cuts to monthly pay­ments) on even the sick and dis­abled for no good rea­son.

In Aus­tralia, after the tele­phone sys­tem was sold off a large num­ber of rural fam­i­lies were told that they were not as de­serv­ing as oth­ers to have tele­phone lines, be­cause they were less “eco­nom­i­cally-vi­able” liv­ing in small towns. It is a cast-iron rule of eco­nomic 'ra­tio­nal­ism' that peo­ple can be 'ra­tio­nalised' just like stock.

Some gov­ern­ments are work­ing against pri­vati­sa­tion though. Late last year it was re­ported that Cata­lan of­fi­cials are seek­ing legal tools that might allow them to un­der­mine Spain's Rajoy ad­min­is­tra­tion in it's plan to pri­va­tise state-owned air­port op­er­a­tor Aena, which runs El Prat air­port. As well, the new na­tional gov­ern­ment in Greece has an­nounced that it is halt­ing the pri­vati­sa­tion of both the elec­tric­ity grid and Athens' port at Pi­raeus. It may be that cit­i­zens across Eu­rope are again start­ing to see the mer­its of going the pub­lic way.