Kim Hendry, GMB activist, personal capacity
General union GMB members have been part of the strike wave, winning some huge pay victories, recognition campaigns and even in-sourcing battles. Members have taken local and national action in the NHS and local councils, sometimes alongside other unions. The developing strikes at Amazon are bringing a whole new, previously unorganised layer of workers into struggle.
General secretary Gary Smith opened the annual congress with talk about the “transformative change” his leadership is achieving, citing growing membership (he said GMB has almost 580,000 members) in response to industrial militancy.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the GMB leadership’s support for right-wing Labour. The union, which supported Owen Smith’s candidature against Jeremy Corbyn, is also the union whose delegates on the Labour NEC this year voted for Corbyn to be banned from standing as a Labour MP in the next general election.
Starmer
Starmer addressed congress and offered nothing new to GMB delegates. He repeated existing pledges about a ‘new deal for working people’, including banning zero-hour contracts, and making ‘fire and rehire’ unlawful.
While that is welcome, when asked about Labour’s promise to oversee the “biggest insourcing in a generation”. his response was that Labour would reinstate the ‘two-tier code’ scrapped by the Tory government in 2010. But the two-tier code was about maintaining some parity between public sector workers and their outsourced colleagues to protect the latter’s pay and conditions. When pressed about the promise to bring outsourced work back in-house, all he could say was: “Please keep working with Angela Rayner on that”!
Council cuts
Motion 151 demanded GMB implement existing policy, agreed in 2016, which commits it to campaigning for Labour councils to set no cuts, needs-based budgets, as part of a mass campaign with trade unions and communities to win back funding from the Tory government. The leadership made a qualification which misrepresents the situation to imply that such a demand may not be achievable, ‘taking account of changes to legislation since the 1980s that can allow central government to appoint commissioners to impose cuts without any democratic accountability’.
This was a red herring. The government cannot just send commissioners in at will. And councils can use reserves and borrowing powers to set no-cuts budgets, while building a campaign to defeat this weak, divided Tory government. The Tories could be forced to retreat – especially if Starmer was pledging that an incoming Labour government would give the funding back to councils.
Clearly, a Labour government led by Starmer has no intention of offering solutions to the poverty, inequality and public services crisis that GMB members face. That is why GMB members in the Socialist Party call for a proper debate in the union on how to win real political representation.
Another key issue for GMB is on the climate crisis and energy. The GMB leadership supports fracking, and opposes a number of other policies that are raised as ways of reaching net zero by 2050, framing the issue in terms of jobs versus climate.
Socialist just transition
In his speech, Gary Smith sent a message to Sellafield nuclear workers and the submarine site in Barrow: “Whilst other unions might wobble, your union is unwavering in its commitment to you, your communities, and the fight for jobs and a future”. The Socialist Party argues for a pro-worker, socialist ‘just transition’ to environmental sustainability, which, on the basis of taking these industries into socialist public ownership, can develop a plan which guarantees workers’ jobs, pay and pensions.
GMB members are at the sharp end of the cost-of-living and public services crises. But there’s a disconnect between the rank-and-file solidarity with workers in struggle (standing ovation after standing ovation for fellow GMB members fighting) and the lack of a national strategy which can defeat the Tory cuts. There were no motions for a coordinated approach with other unions.
And while there are militant industrial tactics in some areas, at the other end of the scale the GMB leadership arranged for Deliveroo to host an official fringe meeting on ‘distinguishing good from bad in a modern gig economy’, following up its cosy platform chat with full-time officers last year.
This is why Socialist Party members argue for the building of an organised, democratic, socialist rank-and-file broad left in the GMB to hold the leadership to account and campaign for a fighting union with a clear national strategy to take on the government – whoever is in power.
