- Prepare for a 24-hour general strike
- Build a new mass workers’ party
On the railways and in Royal Mail, profiteering bosses are squeezing their workers’ pay, and cutting jobs, terms and conditions.
These services, which used to be publicly owned, are now cash cows for super-rich investors – and play-things for extortionately paid CEOs looking to extract as much profit as possible for shareholders in short order. All under the watch and assistance of successive Tory and Labour governments.
In the NHS and other public services, privatising parasites are sucking the already too-low funding dry.
The government applies the same principle in the public sector as the bosses – keep wages down and force workers to work longer and harder.
But workers are striking back. Already strikes have won pay victories locally, including in outsourced and privatised bin and bus services. The porters at Barts hospital trust, members of Unite, won their campaign to be brought back in-house with a pay rise, after a strike.
Strike action works, and more and more workers are inspired to join the swelling strike wave. The enemy, the super-rich bosses and the Tory government, can be challenged further if union leaders coordinate workers taking action together on the same day. And further still by a political challenge at the ballot box.
Imagine what difference it would make to the postal workers on strike if Labour was fighting hard for Royal Mail to be renationalised, if the hated CEO Simon Thompson faced the prospect of a Labour government prepared to take Royal Mail out of the hands of the profiteers, and to give workers and communities democratic control over how it is run!
But Labour is not fighting for that, it is not fighting for public ownership of the railways, it does not promise to give public sector workers a pay rise to meet the cost of living, and it won’t commit to reversing all the anti-strike laws. We need a new mass party that does.
If even a few of the trade union leaders at the forefront of the strike wave prepared for standing workers’ candidates independently of Labour, this would have a transformative effect.
As part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, the Socialist Party is campaigning to ensure the voice of workers is heard in a future general election and in the council elections in May.
