The Tragedy Of The Private, The Potential Of The Public
by Hilary Wainwright
(Public Services International/Transnational Institute)

At a time when public services are under continuing attack and with the threat of further cuts in the pipeline, alternative strategies are needed urgently, as this booklet by Hilary Wainwright so strongly argues. 

In recent times, the failures of privatisation have been emerging only too clearly and, as a result, even in that traditional stronghold of pro-private market ideology which is the US, services are being brought back in-house. 

Private providers have failed to achieve cost savings there, let alone maintain the quality of public services, while too much money has been siphoned off for private profit — the case too with providers of public utilities such as water in Europe. 

In Britain, despite the coalition government’s policies towards the public sector, over half of 140 local authorities surveyed in 2011 were bringing services back from the private sector in processes of “remunicipalisation” to improve efficiency. 

Savings are being invested in service improvements rather than distributed as dividends to private investors or bonuses to chief executives. 

In this booklet, Wainwright explores a range of examples where trade unionists and service users have come together to defend public services, presenting democratically accountable alternatives. 

These include campaigns against water privatisation in South Africa, Brazil, Uruguay and Italy which have been waged with considerable success, despite ongoing challenges. As the section on the Italian campaign reflects, “the struggle continues.” 

Key ingredients of the successes that have been achieved so far have included the unions’ abilities to create sustained coalitions with service users and citizens more generally. 

Water, the author argues, “is providing a cornerstone on which to rebuild the broadest possible horizon of democracy and commons. It is becoming a battering ram against the overall system of global privatisation.” 

As a number of European examples illustrate, alternative strategies have moved beyond being simply defensive to a recognition that there have been problems that needed to be addressed, Greece being an example. 

By drawing on public service workers’ own knowledge and experience services can be improved, Wainwright suggests. She cites the success of the Unison-led campaign against the privatisation of IT and related sector in Newcastle as providing “a laboratory of public service change” by engaging the creativity of the labour force.

She concludes by emphasising the importance of building trade union-community coalitions and provides international examples as well as quoting more local illustrations. 

These alliances have been most successful when they have been relatively autonomous from political parties — including those for which many of their members vote — because, Wainwright says, community-trade union struggles need to outlast “the temporal dynamics of electoral politics.” 

These are works in progress, however — part of building a global struggle for public services that serve the people. 

This essential publication will be highly relevant to Morning Star readers, trade unionists and community activists concerned with campaigning against austerity, developing alternative strategies for renationalising Britain’s infrastructure services, bringing other services back in-house and making them more local.

Available for free download from Public Services International, www.world-psi.org or the Transnational Institute, www.tni.org.