10.09.2008
SP sides with Barber
TUC rejects strikes against anti-union laws
This year’s Trades Union Congress saw most left union leaders shy away from confronting the right in two key votes calling for generalised strike action.
As usual, pretty useless platitudes abounded among the motions on offer in Brighton. However, a successful composite on public-sector pay included the call from the Public and Commercial Services Union for the public-sector unions to coordinate their industrial action against the government-imposed pay limit. It also called for the TUC to organise a national demonstration and days of action in support of the pay campaign.
The Prison Officers Association put in an amendment to the composite which proposed to add the single word “strike” in the middle of the phrase, “days of action”. In other words, there would be TUC-organised strikes going beyond the public sector. Incredibly, on a show of hands, the composite appeared to have passed after Unite, the biggest union with almost two million votes, had spoken in favour of the POA amendment, which meant it should easily succeed.
However, on the call for a card vote, there followed the strange case of the lost voting card. Unite mysteriously abstained, and the amendment was defeated by 2.9 million votes to 1.4 million. Derek Simpson later revealed that the Unite delegation had been unable to find its voting card at the crucial moment. Careless!
Later the same day the POA moved a sharp and critical motion against the anti-union laws. It wanted “a series of one-day general strikes until such time as the government removes the restrictive anti-trade union legislation from statute” - and once again it demanded that the TUC organise them.
The motion clearly never stood a chance following the earlier debacle involving ‘Butterfingers’ Simpson. After stating the obvious, to the effect that the unions “have had no success to date in persuading the government to amend legislation to return the fundamental rights of all workers”, it went on: “In fact, government has taken even more draconian legislative action to stifle trade unions.”
This was, as expected, far too much for TUC leaders to stomach. But what was astonishing was that it was also too much for all the left-led unions apart from the POA itself and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). Not only the PCS, but the Fire Brigades Union and Communication Workers Union (and, of course, Unite) voted against.
Trusty speaker after speaker trooped to the rostrum to dash any hopes for a real, effective protest. Former Socialist Alliance activists Christine Blower (National Union of Teachers acting general secretary) and Matt Wrack (FBU general secretary), backed up TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, who warned that union members would not support a general strike, which in any case would be illegal.
Bob Crow of the RMT pointed out in response that the union movement was “founded on illegality”. Besides, Barber had just praised South African dockers for illegally refusing to work on a ship taking weapons to Zimbabwe, said comrade Crow. Apart from the POA’s Brian Caton, he was a lone voice. Caton did not pull his punches: “This Labour government has lied and lied and lied again to us... this organisation should ... organise us and make sure that the government actually listens.”
Comrade Caton was well aware of what was on the minds of his fellow union bureaucrats - the spectre of a Tory government. He said: “If we’re weak when they arrive, you will all end up like the POA is today: stripped of your rights.” Far from wanting to tone down action that will inevitably be portrayed as anti-Labour, he urged: “Let’s hurt them, because that’s the only way we will truly get what we deserve in the public sector.”
Billy Hayes of the CWU resorted to paraphrasing Lenin. Didn’t the POA realise that we “have to be a step ahead of the working class, but only one step”? He called for the motion to be remitted.
What of the Socialist Party-led PCS? SP member John McInally “regretfully” opposed the motion - although not before, according to The Socialist, he had “lambasted the TUC leadership in a powerful speech for doing nothing on the anti-union laws” (September 10). He echoed Barber’s sentiments that a strike against the industrial relations legislation “would be very difficult to deliver at this stage”. It was all “a question of tactics”, said comrade McInally - a sentiment approvingly repeated by Bill Mullins in The Socialist.
While for comrade Mullins the debate “showed the difference between those who are sincere in attempting to bring about the end of the anti-union laws” (like comrades Hayes and McInally, clearly) and “the cynicism of the TUC right wing”, for many others, I suspect, the distinction is hardly obvious.
Of course, when it comes down to it, there are objections that can be legitimately raised about the call for a series of one-day strikes, as posed by the POA. The government would not, as comrade Caton imagines, simply cave in when faced with two or three mass stayaways, even if they were supported by a few million workers. However, as an initial mobilising protest, such a display of militancy would represent a huge step forward.
Could it be delivered? Well, if even left-led unions like the PCS are not prepared to try to win their members to back it, then clearly it would not happen. But the SP’s excuse that generalised strike action would have to be organised over a more “concrete” issue than the anti-union laws does not really hold water. After all, it also rejected any attempt to mobilise members of the union it led in defence of pension rights and, as a result, a two-tier system was imposed on the PCS, as on all the other public-sector unions. Are pensions not “concrete” enough?
For us, workers in the POA are correct in looking politically at the difficulties thrown in their way by the Labour government. Almost exactly a year ago, a one-day strike was massively supported by POA members (the union claimed that 90% of its 35,000 members came out), despite the fact that they were breaking anti-trade union laws in the process. In the year since the union’s bout of lawbreaking militancy (undertaken by those entrusted by the state with keeping lawbreakers incarcerated!), the POA has gained members as a result of its stance.
As we noted in this paper, “Although the Brown government obtained a court injunction against the POA, no-one obeyed it” (Weekly Worker September 6 2007). That showed a distinctly combative and courageous spirit that should imbue the whole of the trade union movement, were its leaders of left and right serious about leading real resistance to the continuing attack on trade union rights. The POA leaders appear to have progressed from the lesson learnt then and were trying to press home to the TUC the need to generalise their experience. Back in September 2007, government ministers were very aware that the POA was not seeking to spark a general revolt on public sector pay. Obviously the reverse is now true.
However, while the POA motion should have been welcomed, albeit critically, it does raise serious questions on the kind of fightback that would be necessary to defeat government attacks on the unions. For us the party question is crucial. The working class needs an alternative to the Labour Party. Not a Labour Party mark two or a halfway house, but a mass Communist Party. Without a mass Communist Party we can achieve nothing serious, let alone inspire workers to take over the running of society.
