UK austerity 2.0: Glasgow’s ‘fire-and-rehire’ exposes neoliberal local governance collapse and public sector precarisation
Original framing: “Glasgow council workers face pay cuts in fire-and-rehire plan after union talks break down” — The Guardian - World
This crisis echoes the 1930s ‘rate-capping’ battles in UK cities like Liverpool, where Conservative governments weaponised austerity to break municipal socialism. The fire-and-rehire tactic itself was perfected in the 1980s during Thatcher’s attacks on unions (e.g., British Gas, 1984-85), when 20,000 workers were sacked and rehired under worse terms—a playbook now being replicated in the public sector. The current strategy also mirrors the 2010-2015 ‘Trojan Horse’ privatisation schemes, where councils outsourced services to private firms under the guise of ‘efficiency’, only to see wages and conditions collapse. The historical pattern is clear: austerity is not a fiscal necessity but a tool to dismantle collective power.
Glasgow’s fire-and-rehire crisis is not a labour dispute but a *neoliberal coup*—a calculated strategy to dismantle the last remnants of public sector solidarity in the UK.
The historical pattern is clear: from Thatcher’s 1980s attacks to today’s austerity 2.0, the playbook remains the same—break unions, privatise services, and treat workers as disposable. What makes this moment distinct is the cross-cultural exposure of the UK’s outlier status: while Nordic and Latin American models protect public sector workers as pillars of democracy, Glasgow’s council is following a US-style corporate playbook, where labour rights are treated as negotiable. The solution lies in restoring collective power through legally binding bargaining, Indigenous-led relational economics, and targeted litigation—while exposing the absurdity of a system that fires workers to ‘save money’ while outsourcing contracts to firms like Serco, which made £1.2bn in profits last year. The trickster here is the system itself, which pretends to operate by ‘rules’ while systematically undermining its own foundations. The time has come to turn the tables.