01.09.2022

After the summer of discontent

The strike wave is set to grow in numbers, militancy and coordination. Paul Demarty warns that Liz Truss could respond by imposing wartime measures

No reader of this paper, surely, can have missed the huge surge in industrial struggle over the last few months.

It is quite unprecedented in this writer’s time on the left, dating back to the mid-2000s. As the relative (albeit consumer-debt-fuelled) affluence of the Blair years gave way to the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, even the most pessimistic activists expected some kind of response from the trade union movement. But years into austerity, only the most modest upticks in days lost to strike action could be detected. The emblematic protest movement of the era was not a rise in industrial militancy, but the ephemeral success of the anarcho-liberal Occupy movement. Nor was the rapid growth of the Labour left under Jeremy Corbyn accompanied by any such rebound in confidence within the unions.

The cobwebs have now truly been blown off. Repeated strikes of RMT members on the railways have paralysed the transport networks. Unions representing other rail workers - Aslef and the TSSA - have also taken strike action. Dockworkers have downed tools for eight days in Felixstowe, Britain’s busiest container port. Bin workers in Edinburgh have made it a truly unforgettable festival season. So it goes on. Anecdotal reports abound, meanwhile, of a wave of illegal ‘wildcat’ strikes, here and there, on building sites and in Amazon warehouses.

Why now? The obvious answer is the cost of living crisis; after years of real wage stagnation (or worse), the dramatic rise in the price of basic necessities unavoidably poses the need for resistance. That is something that was lacking in 2008 and after: while the austerity policies of the coalition and Tory governments of the 2010s did push many into poverty, the worst affected were those least able to fight back, in extremely insecure or non-existent employment and certainly not unionised.

Now that it is affecting well organised and strategically significant sections of the working class, the machinery of the trade unions is shuddering into life (starting, naturally, with the more militant RMT). With unions taking action, it is not surprising that unorganised workers feel emboldened to take wildcat action in their wake. Hopefully Britain’s Amazon workers can follow the example of some of their American colleagues and build something longer lasting than the lunchtime sit-ins and short walkouts they have managed so far.

There are other contributing factors. The labour market is exceptionally tight at the moment. Hard Brexit has robbed British capitalism of its endless supply of cheap migrant labour, and the post-pandemic opening up of the economy has pushed us close to full employment. The unions are in an uncommonly strong position, as illustrated by the farcical attempts of the government to break the RMT strikes by using agency workers.

The government itself, meanwhile, is another factor in all this. Living as we still are under the lame-duck premiership of Boris Johnson, and fond as politicians are of a good, long summer recess, its response to the ‘hot strike summer’ has been unsurprisingly muted and incoherent. To be sure, Tory governments have long been in the habit of disingenuously refusing to negotiate with railway unions on the basis that the system is privatised (the reality of the matter being that the system is so centrally controlled and so utterly dependent on vast public subsidy that no franchise operator could seriously negotiate without the backing of the government); and that old line has duly been wheeled out again in the recent rail disputes. But paralysis is inevitable until such time as the new prime minister is sworn in.

The name of that PM is overwhelmingly likely to be Liz Truss. Her interventions on the topic are conditioned by (along with her Thatcherite fanaticism and evident stupidity) the need to appeal to the political instincts of the Tory membership - some 160,000-odd people who are, in the main, comfortably off, male pensioners in the home counties, slowly dying of Daily Mail brain poisoning. Her big wheeze is an extension of ‘minimum service levels’ to various industries, including transport and education - essentially the illegalisation of effective strikes in these sectors. RMT general secretary Mick Lynch, for one, has promised a stern response to any such legislation.

TUC

The success of any such response depends in part on coordination. Unite is bringing a motion to the upcoming Trade Union Congress to prepare for coordinated action; though secondary solidarity strikes have long been criminalised, no Tory government has (yet) found a way to outlaw two unions, each with their own grievances, walking out on the same day. Though the TUC’s historical record in this area hardly fills one with confidence, the motion has the support of most of the large unions, and will likely pass; and in this economic environment, there will be no shortage of occasions for coordination in the near term.

It is from this perspective that the response of Truss’s government-in-waiting seems so complacent. Until this week, her only proposed response to the cost of living crisis was that classic Tory answer to everything: tax cuts (or at least not proceeding with previously planned tax rises). With energy bills perhaps set to quadruple over the next year, never mind everything else, that really does not cut it. (At this point she now refuses to rule out more extensive help with people’s bills - getting her to acknowledge the gravity of the situation has been like pulling teeth.) In a situation where unofficial strikes are already making a comeback, further legal restrictions on trade unions - quite apart from being wildly and gratuitously undemocratic - seem doomed to failure.

Decades have passed, after all, since anyone really put up much of a fight. The current crop of Tory MPs, Truss included, are nearly all post-Thatcher arrivals. They have only ever known a cowed labour movement, under largely timid and pro-capitalist political leadership (and even Corbyn’s crew dared not threaten to roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws). Asked what her greatest political achievement was, Thatcher is apocryphally said to have replied, “New Labour”.

In such a situation, the Tories have become decadent. They have not faced a problem in a long time that could not be dealt with via hot air and tabloid demagoguery. But people cannot eat demagoguery. With its back against the wall, the working class has no option but to fight back with whatever tools it has at its disposal. Though union density has drastically fallen, it has done so unevenly, and the government will soon wake up to the reality that there are sections of the labour movement that really can, as the Tory cliché goes, ‘hold the country to ransom’. Truly draconian measures against labour militancy, all things being equal, would merely replace strikes with bread riots.

When within the next couple of weeks Truss arrives at No10, then, she can expect to be confronted by an army of worried civil servants. She will be presented with a series of policy options; we cannot know for sure what will be among them, but what will not be implemented is her current one - tax handouts to her base and belt-tightening rhetoric for everyone else. An intelligent Sir Humphrey (or Dame Henrietta) will prefer, perhaps, to buy off some unions temporarily, so as to confront and smash the worst troublemakers (like the RMT).

Wartime spirit

That is not to say draconian measures are impossible. Since the pretence is slowly dropping that the Ukraine conflict is anything other than a Russia-Nato proxy war, the possibility very much exists of wartime-type emergency measures. Tories have already had to get a taste for such things in the pandemic, however much ‘Covid socialism’ may have stuck in their throats.

Banning strikes may work - so long as the government ensures, by whatever measures necessary, that people’s heating stays on this winter, and their children’s mouths are duly fed. This was more or less the state of the economy during World War II, with tight controls on a fully mobilised workforce, coupled with rationing, which tended to constrain middle class diets, but even improve working class ones. (The rich, of course, had the black market.) That would be a bold move for a Tory government, of course; and it is rather contingent on the popularity of the war.

We raise this possibility for illustrative purposes. We have made the argument, after all, that within the existing rules of the game - including here both the laws and the complacent prejudices of Tory frontbenchers - the government is actually in a fairly weak position. There is thus an underlying impulse to change the rules. Perhaps even Liz Truss, under the right pressure, can learn the art of ruthless Tory statesmanship.

Thus, the political weakness of the labour movement remains a serious problem. It surfaces most obviously in the point-blank refusal of Labour to support the strikes, which is hardly surprising under the tutelage of Sir Keir Starmer: the leadership’s mode of opposition is rather to blame the Tories for ‘increasing divisions’ instead of ‘bringing people together’, and other meaningless bromides. If the crisis really does force an early election, we have the prospect before us of the most rightwing Labour administration in the party’s ignoble history.

We reported not so long ago on the RMT’s withdrawal of support for the hopeless Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Where next for Mick Lynch’s merry men and women? As it turns out … a protest group called Enough is Enough. Where does it stop, and the People’s Assembly begin (never mind the next few contenders for the crown of pre-eminent anti-austerity coalition)? How many of these things are - well - enough?

Such ‘grassroots’ campaigning organisations (usually astroturfed) are hardly objectionable in themselves, may win a victory here and a victory there, and so on. Yet if we look back at the last period of significant labour-movement strength, the sinews of war were not provided by demonstration stewards and social media under the direction of the labour bureaucracy, but by the Communist Party, which - in spite of its abject political opportunism - organised thousands of leading militants across industries and across the country. It was in a position to deliver the kinds of coordinated action that offloaded the Heath government in 1974, because in the end such coordination is the province of parties - even defective ones like the ‘official’ CPGB.

We obviously cannot hope for this role to be played by Sir Keir’s Labour. So who then will take the lead?

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk