Serco that has its fingers in a lot of pies including welfare to work has announced that it will be cutting 500 jobs from its UK head office in Hampshire.

Describing these cuts as a way to `overhaul its management` it is obviously under financial pressures that needs to be seen in how it affects its other business interests, with emphasis on its dealing with the work programme and its ability to sustain and carry out its obligations to the unemployed.

Serco announces job losses at Hook office

Outsourcing group Serco has announced it is to cut 500 jobs, mostly at its UK head office in Hampshire.

The group, which provides back-office support for a range of public and private sector bodies, said it was overhauling its UK management.

The jobs will mainly go from its offices at Hook near Basingstoke.

Source; BBC

Serco sent my job to India in the 90s. Having been someone who has worked for a company that is going to cut a load of jobs and you've heard the rumours on the shop floor, I feel it everytime I go to my WP providers office.
I don't think the WP is going to last much longer, I can taste it everytime I'm there.

This company is like the Banks “too big to fail” as it has its sticky little fingers everywhere and is very influential (See the video on this company) to influential as a private company looking after military contracts.

I don’t think the government will let the WP fail, all be it the undercurrent is off impending failure but this could be the companies looking to put pressure on for better contracts with the assistance of the media.

While campaigns such as boycott workfare are brilliant for unsettling the ground, the real pressure will need to come from people on the streets, even burning buildings….. I don’t know if you remember the Poll Tax riots and how this ended Thatcher and the Idea. We are up against one of the biggest ideological swings since that time and again the Labour party is useless.

Well said - I was living and working in London at the time of Poll Tax and demo'd - we are reliving the 80's, a time of great socio-economic divide BUT, the solidarity has been lost by the Tory divide and rule philosophy. Whilst the working classes bicker about who should or shouldn't have benefits and assistance, the eye is taken off those that really are bleeding the country dry - the wealthy elite.

But this is the problem-they don't see themselves as working-class. 'I own my own home'-no you don't, you're renting it from the bank. It's the credit class! People who think they're rich because they have credit cards and mortages. These type of working-class (that's what they are but they would rather die than be called that) are the problem. They can't see they're the problem and the only thing that's bothering them a) people on benefits and b) bankers wages. Media smoke screen from our clueless politicians.

What do you think of this?

Review of Paul Mason's new book.

Why it’s kicking off everywhere

Why it’s Kicking Off Everywhere is an analysis of last year that firmly makes a case for it as part of the pantheon of radical history, standing alongside 1968, 1917, 1871 and 1848. But instead of a dry, Trot-lite chronicle of another year of revolutions, it is an engaging cultural, political and economic history that draws from the flashpoints of the present crisis in an attempt to understand not only its pedigree but also its novelty. From kids with smartphones to the credit bubble to the tent cities of the US, Mason seeks to tie together numerous threads of the last decade of capitalism to understand just why, exactly, it is kicking off everywhere.

We are undergoing a quite colossal re-organisation of both labour and capital, and we have no idea where it’s going. But, clearly, it involves not only the exploitation of the urban poor, but the re-consolidation of the middle-class. The lower middle-class of skilled workers are getting pushed back into precarious, temporary and unskilled work, and their children getting faced with huge bills for the university education that may, or just as likely may not, be the only route of escape. And it’s here that the ‘graduate without a future’, where the student of 1848, angry with the regime of Louis-Philippe, serves as the analogue for the student of 2011, falls down. It’s not the professional middle-class who are revolting (although they are stirring). Just look at who’s on strike: teachers, academics, social workers, electricians…

Two centuries ago, artisans and peasants were proletarianised, and once again the same demographic range of workers are being pressed into the precariat. Is it kicking off because we are, in fact, seeing the growing pains and anxious howl of a working-class for the new century, and a whole new family and industry of technologies? What we may well need is far more than islands within capitalism (as useful and refreshing as they are), but, in fact, a coherent left that wants to transcend it. Our present may be more comparable to the 1830s than 1848: the recently birthed working-class is only just coming to realise what it is. And who knows what will come of that; to paraphrase Lenin, maybe hipsters plus soviets will equal communism.

Source; Shift Magazine