Editorial of the Socialist issue 1224
The strike wave goes on! The action that has developed over the last year or so is proving stubbornly resilient. The May Day weekend, including International Workers’ Memorial Day on 28 April, is always an important one for the workers’ movement. But it is apt that this year, over four days, over half a million workers will take strike action. This includes national action by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), National Education Union (NEU) and civil servants’ union PCS, along with a whole number of localised disputes. In Northern Ireland, teachers and civil servants strike on 26 April.
It might have seemed to some on occasion over the last couple of months that action was beginning to peter out. But time and time again, workers have won re-ballots to refresh their strike mandates and voted to reject totally inadequate pay offers. Perhaps the most incredible example of this was the reject vote by nursing members of the RCN, overturning their union leadership’s recommendation to accept.
In each of the unions striking now, there needs to be a serious plan for escalating strike action to win. That must be coordinated wherever possible – nurses and junior doctors; unions in schools, and so on. Support staff in the NEU are demanding to be balloted again urgently, having only just narrowly missed the Tory turnout threshold.
There appears to be a trend of a number of union leaderships looking to resolve their disputes but on detrimental terms. Even in these disputes, members’ action has forced concessions out of the employers, including Sunak’s Tory government that was adamant in the autumn that it wouldn’t even talk to unions about pay. It has been forced to the negotiating table by determined strikes.
But the cost-of-living squeeze is relentless, forcing workers to maintain their action. Some union leaders have settled their disputes, by recommending pay deals of 5% for this year, on the basis that ‘inflation will be falling’. They will be nervously looking at the monthly inflation figures, which are refusing to substantially decrease.
Against expectations, March’s figure barely budged, with the Tories’ preferred lower CPI rate still in double-figures at 10.1%. The more realistic RPI rate is at 13.5%. But even this is likely to be an underestimate of the real burden of spiralling price rises facing workers and their families, with food inflation over 19%. But workers don’t need to wait for statistics, they are seeing every week how little their shopping budget buys. There is more and more of the month left at the end of the money.
Postal workers in the Communication Workers Union (CWU) will be consulted on the proposed deal negotiated by the union’s leadership with Royal Mail senior management. While a year of determined action by posties has forced back Royal Mail on a number of issues, Socialist Party members will be campaigning for a reject vote. This is because it fails to answer a whole series of workers’ demands, including only offering a 10% pay rise over three years while over 400 union reps and members remain sacked, suspended or disciplined (read more here).
Workers in local government are the next to vote on pay, with Unison, the biggest union in the sector, moving to a strike ballot. PCS, RCN and NEU are all re-balloting to maintain their ability to strike. This legal requirement, along with the undemocratic 50% voting thresholds in strike ballots, is due to the Tory Trade Union Act, a raft of anti-union laws brought in by Cameron in 2016 on top of those of Thatcher and Major from the 1980s and 90s. Now Sunak is pushing ahead with his Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, which would try to force unions to organise scabbing to undermine their own strikes! It would target whole sectors of workers, including those most prominent in the strike wave. Those under attack would include rail and bus workers, nurses and teachers, along with school support staff and firefighters.
In several strikes there is already pressure applied – in the NHS and schools particularly – to provide ‘safe’ staffing levels or support students. But who decides? Socialist Party members argue that those issues should be discussed and decided by the strikers in their union groups – not by the bosses or the Tories.
But this isn’t an offensive by a strong and confident Tory government – it can be defeated. The RCN is opposing the legal challenge to their strike by the Tories and NHS employers. This would be one of the first examples of such defiance, albeit in the courts. Such is the pressure of members on the union’s leaders, that the RCN has moved from the union that health workers joined to avoid going on strike to one that escalates action and resists court injunctions. No wonder the strikes in health and education are so persistent when newly qualified teachers and nurses are estimated to owe £50,000 and £35,000 in student debt. Placards on the BMA junior doctors’ strike rallies complain of being weighed down with such debts of £70,000.
The strike wave so far has given just a glimpse of the potential power of the workers’ movement, compared to what would be on show if it was mobilised together in a fight against the cost-of-living crisis and Tory anti-union laws, which could pass onto the statute books as early as the summer.
The unions must meet urgently to prepare for mass co-ordinated action up to and including on the scale of a 24-hour general strike, on an even greater scale than that of 1 February, 15 March Budget Day, and the May Day weekend strikes. The TUC should organise a national demonstration to launch such a campaign.
The annual conference of the National Shop Stewards Network, on 24 June in London, will be a vital forum for union reps, members and activists to come together, to share their strike experiences and hammer out a fighting strategy for the union movement. The national elections currently taking place in a number of unions, such as NEU, PCS, Unison and Unite are also of huge importance in the fight to build militant leaderships in the unions.
Tory crises
The resignation of Dominic Raab from the Cabinet is yet another in a long line of Tory crises, with Rishi Sunak himself set to be investigated by parliament’s standards watchdog for alleged undeclared family business interests. Raab had to walk because it could have led to a series of resignations in the Tory party and senior civil service. But it will itself further polarise the Conservatives.
These Tory divisions are caused by the dire position facing British capitalism. It is still most likely that workers will vote for Starmer’s New Labour to get the Tories out of office. But this wouldn’t be with any enthusiasm for his pro-business agenda. The nurses on strike this weekend now know that their allies won’t include Sir Keir or his shadow health minster Wes Streeting, who refused to give support when questioned on TV.
A Starmer government will dutifully carry out the diktats of big business, as shown by the Labour leadership’s refusal to respond to Royal Mail management hinting at plunging the company into insolvency, threating the jobs, pay and pensions of postal workers – by pledging for an incoming Labour government to immediately carry out Labour Party conference policy to renationalise Royal Mail.
The unions must draw the conclusions now from Starmer’s opposition to their strikes and the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, and now Diane Abbott. It points to the need for workers to have their own party, backed by the trade unions, fighting for their members and policies. A workers’ list in the general election, preferably headed by Corbyn, would be an essential step in this direction, and a vital asset for the workers’ movement now in the battle to get rid of the Tories and beyond the general election.
