Meeting the Tory challenge

As the Wales TUC gathers for our annual conference this week, delegates will know that we face the greatest challenge to our movement for a generation or more.

Massive, sustained attacks on our vital public services, on our communities and on our unions from a Westminster coalition government which has no proper mandate from the British people for these attacks and certainly has no mandate at all from the people of Wales.

The scale and range of the Tory-led challenge to us is reflected in the debates we will have this week.

The threatened closure of Remploy factories, regional pay, benefit cuts, rising poverty and inequality, economic sabotage on a grand scale, austerity for us and tax cuts for the rich - the list is shameful but predictable.

This is what happens when the right has power, whether it was part of its election manifesto or not.

Welsh trade unionists will recommit ourselves this week to fighting this Con-Dem government and opposing its mean-spirited, regressive and wrong policies.

In this fight we are proudly part of the British TUC and the international labour movement.

On Wednesday, we look forward to hearing from the leaders of the British TUC, Scottish TUC and the Irish Congress and to considering how to deliver the anti-austerity campaign in all our jurisdictions.

In Wales we also have the opportunity to work in partnership with a Welsh Labour government which seeks to mitigate the impact of harsh budget cuts imposed on it from London.

We recognise our responsibility to take that opportunity with both hands in the interests of working people. The Wales TUC will not abdicate that responsibility, no matter how difficult it can be for us.

Of course it is easier to just play politics and sound leftist from the sidelines, but doing the hard graft of saving jobs and services is real workers' solidarity in action.

Wales First Minister Carwyn Jones will address conference on the very different course his government is following from that chosen by Westminster.

Since last year's referendum Wales has a full-blown government and legislature of its own rather than the halfway house of previous years.

Those powers allow Welsh ministers to retain universal benefits like free prescriptions in an NHS free from the threat of privatisation.

No "free" schools, no academies, no £9,000-a-year college fees, no binning of the education maintenance allowance.

As the local election results showed this month, there is huge support for the alternative approach being pursued in Wales.

The parties associated with austerity and cuts were given a clear message by the people of Wales: "Your policies aren't working, can't work and won't be accepted here."

And in a great victory for all anti-fascists the far-right managed a pathetic vote of less than 500 throughout the whole country, down from over 42,000 in 2007.

In Wales we do have a good story to tell. An example of the alternative in action, working in social partnership towards delivering social justice - even in the context of Westminster-imposed austerity budgets.

Working closely with us, the Welsh government has implemented programmes protecting the jobs of workers under threat of redundancy and giving real opportunities to young people who can't access employment.

It is legislating to give statutory force to the agreements we reach through our tripartite structures to prevent rogue employers undermining our partnership.

It is looking for innovative ways of making all Welsh government expenditure work for workers rather than bureaucrats and financiers.

At our last conference the First Minister promised "no knee-jerk outsourcing, no two-tier workforce and no management by diktat," offering instead a true partnership to mitigate the effects of the Tory cuts and to protect jobs and services in Wales.

He's here again to tell us how his government has lived up to those promises and I believe he will be warmly welcomed by a disciplined movement that recognises the difference between warm words and hard actions.

In the Welsh Labour government we have elected politicians we can work with for the benefit of union members and the communities of Wales.

But where elected politicians, of whatever institution or party, make attacks on workers, then Welsh unions and the Wales TUC will respond robustly.

The (now former) Labour leader of a significant local authority in Wales discovered this to his cost when he tried to manage by diktat and by threat of mass redundancies.

We look to the newly elected Labour council leaderships to follow the example of the Welsh government by working co-operatively with each other, with the wider public services and with the trade union movement.

Perhaps the uniting theme of all the debates at the Wales TUC conference this week is that the Welsh trade union movement will defend and advance social justice - by partnership where possible, by action when necessary.

As a parting thought, a motion on our agenda this week calls for a closer working relationship with the Morning Star as one of the few media outlets sympathetic to our movement.

Far be it for me to assume the outcome of our democratic debate, but perhaps now is the time for news of some of the progressive gains we are making in Wales - as well as the determined campaigns we are delivering - to be heard more widely and more regularly around Britain.

If the people's press doesn't do that, then who will?

Martin Mansfield is general secretary of Wales TUC.