WeeklyWorker

08.11.2001

Class struggle fightback

Alan McArthur, one of the organisers of last weekend?s Unions Fightback conference, reports for the Weekly Worker. Comrade McArthur is a member of the Alliance for Workers? Liberty and the industrial editor of Action for Solidarity

Unions Fightback, founded at a lively conference in London on November 3, aims to play a role in building a movement across the membership of the unions that can make the unions fight.

The conference brought together over 100 activists from every major union. Participants included Mark Serwotka, Christine Blower, Greg Tucker, John Leach, Norman Candy, John Page, Maria Exall, Jeremy Corbyn, Sharon Hayward and Jimmy Nolan. South African anti-privatisation activist Trevor Ngwame gave an excellent speech on South Africa?s ?new apartheid?: class.

The conference agreed to set up an ongoing campaign, taking its aims from the statement circulated as the basis of the conference. You can read and sign up to the statement at www.unionsfightback.org.uk (see also Weekly Worker October 11 - ed).

The conference also agreed to appeal for united action around other anti-privatisation initiatives. In particular, we agreed to approach the conference on November 24 called by the Public and Civil Service union?s Left Unity about joint activity and calling a united conference in the new year. We will be circulating a unity statement, the text of which will be posted on the website. It is very unfortunate that the founding conference of the Unison United Left clashed with that of Unions Fightback. We are going to organise a meeting for Unison activists.

We agreed to make our main campaigning priority a drive to get the unions to act on the often good but mostly ignored paper policies, and in particular to call a cross-union national demonstration against privatisation on a weekend in London. We should support and build the Unison /TUC lobby of parliament on December 5, but clearly chatting to a few MPs and then having a bit of a tub-thump in Westminster Central Hall falls far short of what is needed to actually beat privatisation. We should be pushing for a real industrial and political fight, and, at branch level, recruiting and educating members in preparation for the battles already opening up right across the public sector.

We want action from the national union structures but, of course, we should not sit around waiting for John Edmonds to spring into action. We would be waiting for some considerable time. We agreed to get as many union bodies as possible to call a demonstration against privatisation for May Day 2002, and make as large a labour movement contingent as possible in any May Day mobilisations.

A major plank of the fight against privatisation has to be for repeal of the anti-union laws and legislation for comprehensive positive rights: privatisation leads directly to job losses and attacks on pay and conditions, yet, absurdly, trade unionists cannot legally take action that is explicitly against privatisation. While that has to be part of United Fightback?s agenda, it clearly does not in any way negate the role of the United Campaign to Repeal the Anti-Trade Union Laws. We were pleased to have John Hendy QC of the United Campaign speaking on Saturday and I am sure such cooperation will continue.

Clearly the agenda of Unions Fightback is de facto leftwing, but it is not meant as a sort of cross-union broad left. It is more a proto-rank and file movement, a movement for a rank and file movement, if you like. The revolutionary left - this is my view, not UF policy - should seek to organise not just ?the socialists? in the unions, but all those who want the unions to fight. We should make the running on the issues that affect members, and the non-members we want to recruit, every day in their working lives.

The clearest recent indication of the potential power of this strategy is the election of Mark Serwotka in the PCS. Mark stood on a platform that made it clear that he wanted to lead a fight on the key issues facing PCS members - pay and privatisation. Obviously he should and did say he is a socialist, but if Mark had stood on a platform consisting simply of ?tapping into the disillusion with Blair? and appealing to PCS members to go to Genoa because the revolution is nigh, it is extremely unlikely that he would have won.

The unions are littered with people calling themselves socialist who have highly suspect records industrially: we can make socialism mean something to workers, and make more socialists, by leading the struggle in the here and now. Clearly, the Socialist Alliance, for example, should hold events aimed at trade unionists and take our fight into the unions. But that should not mean transposing the SA into the unions and building lash-ups of the left groups and a few individuals, such as Unison United Left is turning out to be. Clearly the left should unite in the unions - and it is better to have UUL than the previous situation - but that still leaves the rather important question of what we do once we have united.

The dividing line in the unions should not be whether you are a supporter of the Socialist Alliance, Labour or even a non-voter, or even if are you against the war, or for or against a federal republic. The dividing line should be: are you up for a fight with the employer and the state? Do you want the unions to fight? The dividing line is class struggle. Organising on that basis, the left can not only break out of the ghetto where we find ourselves in the unions, but make a real impact in the class struggle itself.