Editorial of the Socialist issue 1303
Despite making it through to the end of 2024 without facing widespread strike action, the year ends with several strikes in both public and private sectors, including a national strike in sixth form colleges, and the Labour government is on a collision course with the working class.
In preparation for the 2025-26 pay round, the government is signalling its readiness to go to war with public sector workers over pay – albeit one in which they hope trade union leaders will argue for surrender. The Departments for Health and Education, as well as the Cabinet Office, have all suggested that 2.8% pay increases are on their way to health workers, teachers and civil servants next year.
Government departments have been told that they have to fund pay rises for 2025-26, and future pay rises, out of departmental budgets. This is a first taste of what Labour’s austerity agenda, laid out in the October Budget – by and large accepted by the union leaders – will mean for the pockets of millions of workers and trade union members in the next period, unless seriously fought against.
Linked to this, a spokesperson for Keir Starmer had the cheek to say that “for pay awards to go beyond inflation they will have to be met by productivity improvements.” Tell that to the health workers, teachers and other public sector workers who have for years already been going above and beyond their contracted hours, including during the Covid emergency, while pay has failed to keep up with the cost of living!
In a written statement to the School Teachers’ Review Body on pay, the Department for Education wrote about “the challenging financial backdrop the government is facing.”
But what really is the financial backdrop to the government’s decision? While Starmer’s spokesperson continued to slavishly harp on about the need for “tough decisions” to address the “black hole” in public finances inherited from the Tories, it’s projected that the top FTSE 100 companies are set to pay out £84 billion to their shareholders in 2025.
A fraction of that wealth, if under the democratic control and management of the working-class majority, would be more than enough to deliver the pay rises workers in the public sector and beyond desperately need.
So the only truthful excuse the Labour government has for not giving workers in Britain the pay rises we desperately need is that it is acting to defend the interests of crisis-ridden capitalism. Despite straining to keep a lid on the situation – with the pay awards coughed up over the summer to avoid, in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s own words, “the cost of further industrial action” – Labour cannot and will not indefinitely avoid the constraints afforded to them by the capitalist system which they fight to defend.
What now?
As the strike wave under the Tories showed however, these attempts to make us pay for the crisis of capitalism can be smashed, but only by working-class struggle.
And the Labour government is well aware of the potential the organised working class has in its hands to halt their policies of pay restraint and austerity. At his speech to the Trades Union Congress in September, Starmer made several references to ‘partnership’ between the employers, his government and the unions.
This idea of ‘social partnership’ between the unions and employers isn’t new. It’s an attempt to tie the unions into a ‘consensus’ approach with the bosses and government, to get all sides ‘working together’ and round the table, in the absence of any struggle for what workers need. Anticipating the big potential class battles set to erupt on his watch, Starmer is fighting to enlist the trade union leaders to help him subdue the fighting capacity of a potentially powerful, independent trade union movement.
This has been the approach taken by Welsh Labour with social partnership. It has been an attempt to sign up unions to Labour-imposed austerity, rather than challenging the cuts from Tories and now Starmer’s Labour from Westminster.
Any such barriers to action must be opposed – although no agreement can outright prevent action if workers want to fight. Despite the best efforts of the Welsh Labour government and the trade union leaders to justify and engender passivity amongst trade union members, the ‘social partnership’ wasn’t enough to prevent the upswell of the strike wave in Wales in 2022 and 2023.
That isn’t to say that socialists should be opposed to having the structures and means to collectively bargain with the employers. But workers, and the bosses and government, have diametrically opposing interests. That’s why we also fight to defend the ability of trade unions to struggle independently, rather than effectively giving the employers, who are responsible for carrying through attacks to wages and conditions, a voice in the affairs of the trade union movement.
Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), has said that the 2.8% offer “won’t do”, and that “NEU members fought to win the pay increases of 2023 and 2024. We are putting the government on notice.”
Daniel Kebede is correct to point out that it was determined struggle by teachers and other workers which won those pay rises, not a ‘partnership’ approach. That’s why Socialist Party members in the NEU, including those on the National Executive Committee, and across the whole trade union movement will be fighting against any attempts to go into ‘partnership’ with the bosses and the government, and defend the right of unions to act independently of the employers and the government – as well as for an independent political strategy in the new era of Labour austerity.
