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These strikes could be a paradigm shift

Despite the obstacles put in place by Thatcher and Blair’s anti-union measures, industrial action is growing and public support remains high. February 1 is our chance to bring about a leap in class consciousness, argues NICK WRIGHT

THE current strike wave has caught the government on the hop. It thought public opinion would turn against strikers and it hoped the ballot thresholds might not be reached. It was wrong, has been wrong-footed and is being forced to make some concessions — at least in the form of talks.

There are elements of panic both in ministerial circles and among Tory backbenchers who fear for their seats in the next election. The government’s bid to force workers in key sectors of the economy and public services to provide a “minimum service level” on strike days is a transparent bid to blunt the growing wave of trade union militancy — and it failed, as the massive National Education Union ballot demonstrates.

The government’s new laws are most likely to be found in breach of its obligations to international treaties and flaunt the minimum standards set by the UN’s International Labour Organisation.

Union action appears to be strengthening public opinion in support of strikers. An average of two to one the public supports specific actions by teachers, railway workers and civil servants.

Support for nurses, ambulance staff firefighters and teachers ranges from half to two-thirds of the public.

Despite a co-ordinated media campaign against rail workers, over 40 per cent back the RMT strike. Bus workers and teachers get even better support, while even three in 10 back driving examiners.

Every picket line attracts substantial crowds, not of the legally sanctioned half a dozen official pickets, but crowds of supporters from other trade unions and the public.

Neither the government, the police nor any employer thinks it politically expedient to limit pickets. The February 1 day of action is a timely and necessary escalation of solidarity actions, and with the NEU now on strike, offers the possibility of even bigger mass demonstrations.

The TUC, predictably enough, has suggested that the government’s proposed laws be fought in parliament and the courts.

Good luck with the first. We have a parliamentary opposition with little willingness to fight the government to a standstill on this or any other issue. This is not simply a question of parliamentary numbers, but of Westminster Labour’s prevailing class-collaborationist ideology.

This found a perfect expression in Keir Starmer’s echo last weekend of Wes Streeting’s open commitment to a “modernisation” of the NHS that would further subordinate it to private capital.

Westminster Labour is now generations into its abandonment of any attempt to restore pre-Thatcher trade union rights. The explanation for Starmer’s uncharacteristically forthright pledge to repeal the latest new Tory anti-union laws is most likely an expedient bid to keep union leaders onside.

There is a conspicuous Labour silence on the Thatcherite anti-worker laws still on the books. No-one thinks that a “progressive” pledge from Starmer is likely to be implemented.

Indeed, the Tories are already rehearsing their attack lines for the next election which include a reminder of the Jeremy Corbyn-inspired policy pledges Starmer had to make in order to get elected as Labour leader.

The Tories and their compliant media run a twin-track strategy targeting Starmer, the man, as demonstrably mendacious. They try to terrify Home Counties property owners with the prospect of a socialist government red in tooth and claw, while at the same time showing Starmer as a liar. That the second cannot be reconciled to the first presents no professional problems to media moguls who are no less mendacious than their target.

For the Tories — in purely PR terms — it should be a win-win situation, but such is their desperately low standing in the polls that, even with these golden attack lines, they still fear electoral defeat.

The explanation for the government’s steadfast resistance to conceding on the pay front, lies firstly, in its sense that the whole history of austerity (code-named “fiscal responsibility”) upon which its credibility as a party of government depends, will fall apart if it retreats.

The fact that Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself parrot the same phrases — and with no less conviction — offers little prospect of a parliamentary challenge to the Westminster consensus on economic policy.

The second factor lies in the sense that this present situation — in addition to its specific features as a cost-of-living crisis — can take on the character of a systemic challenge.

Big employers could, of course, meet the pay expectations of the working class and big sections of the middle strata without fundamentally challenging the system of private ownership which underpins their dictatorship of capital.

After all, Rishi Sunak found the millions necessary to stabilise society during Covid while military expenditure has no limits when confronted by a threat regarded in ruling class circles as inimical to their interests. The super-profits garnered over recent decades while, and because, wages languished, can be drawn on to meet the costs of averting systemic challenge.

Our ruling class will concede almost anything to retain power.

Of course, threatening trade union leaders with the sequestration of their unions’ funds raises the stakes and is designed to frighten them into unnecessary compromise.

However, one distinctive feature of the current strike wave is the great skill with which trade union leaders at all levels have been able to challenge the media’s attempts to construct a narrative in which the unions are seen to be outside the mainstream.

A feature of this is the unprecedented feminisation of union leadership which reflects the reality that many of the workers making up the massive ballot majorities are women.

We have seen a masterly (sic) subversion of the media’s prerogatives in determining the framework in which industrial action is seen.

This is excellent in itself and a key indicator of the change in public mood. However, a strategy which rests on public opinion alone or on the expectation that this will decisively influence the outturn on its own is mistaken.

On the contrary, experience demonstrates that the judicial apparatus of the bosses state is most responsive to industrial action and mass resistance when linked to a challenge in the workplace or on the streets.

Two examples; the poll tax was not defeated in Parliament, or the courts, but on the streets, in direct conflict with the police and in every housing estate and working-class community: up and down the country people simply refused to pay the poll tax.

The second example, and one which is particularly pertinent to present circumstances, is the 1970s unofficial industrial action which sprang the dockers from Pentonville jail.

The majesty of the law collapsed when print workers, dockers, building workers, market workers, public transport workers and local government staff walked off the job and surrounded the prison.

The Official Solicitor, a hitherto obscure judicial figure, soon arrived bearing a piece of paper upon which the state’s surrender was written and which immediately freed the militant dockers’ leaders.

This retreat by the state reflected a temporary shift in the balance of power, but inevitably was followed by a systematic assault on workplace organisation, shop steward power and union rights.

                        * * * *

Tony Blair’s 1997 election manifesto said that “the key elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will stay — on ballots, picketing and industrial action.”

This left the main features of Thatcher’s anti-union legal framework inviolate, but a sweetener was added: “People should be free to join or not to join a union. Where they do decide to join and where a majority of the relevant workforce vote in a ballot for the union to represent them, the union should be recognised.”

A year later, Labour’s Fairness at Work scheme appeared and specified that unions had to win 40 per cent of the entire labour force rather than simply those voting.

Today the Tories want this ramped up to 50 per cent, but the aim and effect of New Labour’s approach was to dampen trade union action, tie up unions in expensive and complex balloting arrangements and render spontaneous and immediate local action and solidarity actions illegal.

The consequent demobilisation and damage done to the culture of workplace militancy is one factor in allowing the long reduction in wage levels.

Today, the pressure cooker effect produced by the mounting crisis in the British — and global — economy means that these limits imposed on working-class action have been breached by a series of stunning strike votes accompanied by a distinctive sharpening of class consciousness.

This is already producing a transition from a trade union movement bound into the consensual rituals of institutionalised class compromise into something altogether more combative.

February 1 can be a step forward in shaping a trade union consciousness to a more generalised class consciousness that can become the foundation of a clearer and more widespread understanding that the battle for wages is a permanent feature of capitalist society.

In these times the yet-unrealised aims of the working class for a society in which the workers, by hand or brain, secure “the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service” reappears as a collective aim.

European Parliament and ITUC sleaze update: Panzeri talks

Belgian politician Marc Tarabella is one of two MEPs who looks likely to have his legal immunity lifted amid allegations that EU politicians accepted money from Qatar and Morocco.

And an Italian tribunal has ruled that the daughter of former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri can be extradited to Belgium for charges in the alleged Qatar corruption investigation rocking the EU and the international trade union movement. Panzeri himself has struck a plea deal with the Belgian prosecutor to exchange information about bribes he made in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Luca Visentini, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, has claimed that he received a cash donation of “less than €50,000” from the NGO Fight Impunity, founded by Panzeri. This, he said, was mostly spent on his general secretary election campaign.

It is hard to see what he spent the money on. His opponent Kemal Ozkan scratched together a mere 18 nominations from mostly tiny Global South unions with only South Africa’s Cosatu and the French CGT as heavyweights among his supporters. Establishment shoo-in Visisentini had 134 nominations.

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