British perspectives 2022 (continued)
The capitalist class is right to fear a rising tide of working-class struggle. As the Financial Times worried in another editorial (5.1.22), “After 40 years in which capital has had the whip hand over labour is workers’ power on the rise?” They conclude that in Britain, the US and other countries, “Whether or not the balance of power between capital and labour has changed for good, the pandemic has been instructive for both sides… And a new generation of workers, from shelf stackers to delivery drivers, have learned just how essential they are.”
One of the most important features of the current situation is increasing industrial militancy. The government’s Office for National Statistics has stopped producing strike statistics over the last two years – blaming the pandemic! Given the low number of generalised national strikes at this stage the figures would probably not show a dramatic increase from their pre-pandemic levels. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear that there has been an increase in the number of local strikes and, even more importantly, in the number of all-out strikes and the number of victories. Three factors driving this are the increased class consciousness and confidence created by the pandemic among some sections of the working class, the desperate need to fightback in the face of the cost of living squeeze and, in some sectors, the labour shortages that exist. It is not a coincidence that some of the most successful strikes have been of groups of workers who drive large vehicles! Those strikes are also helping to give confidence to fight to other groups of workers, however. None of the factors driving these strikes is going to end in the short term, and the first two will only intensify.
While the third, labour shortages, may ease in some areas as Covid travel restrictions are lifted, and the Johnson government is forced by the bosses’ pressure to allow more work permits in some sectors, they will not be easily or quickly overcome. It is clear that an important factor in them is a layer of older workers – like the lorry drivers – who are no longer prepared to risk their lives and their health working in terrible conditions for bad pay. This includes a layer of foreign workers who returned home at the start of the pandemic and do not feel inclined to come back. It has been combined with a complete failure to invest in training young workers in vital skills for the functioning of the economy. This highlights the importance of our continuing to promote the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. While mass youth unemployment has not, at this stage, developed in the way that seemed possible at the start of the pandemic, millions of young people still face underemployment and low-paid, insecure work. Some are now beginning to see that only collective struggle can change this.
All of these factors mean that we are entering a period which will see important strikes. The £25 million in pay increases won by Unite members in Sharon Graham’s first hundred days as general secretary is an indication of the potential that exists. Of course, this rising tide of anger is developing against the background of the previous period of defeat and retreat. The workers’ movement went into the pandemic in a state of disarray. In the wake of the betrayal of the 2011 public sector pensions struggle, many of even the left trade union leaders had no confidence that struggle was possible. This was reflected in their pitiful failure to fight against the Tories’ latest repressive anti-union laws. Especially given the low ebb of trade union struggle, the election of Corbyn as Labour leader seemed to offer a way forward. His final defeat within the framework of the Labour Party, coinciding with the start of the pandemic, fuelled the completely mistaken initial response to Covid from the big majority of national trade union leaders, who came behind the government in a show of ‘national unity’.
That phase has now passed, with growing pressure from below for union leaders to fight. This was reflected in the election of Sharon Graham, plus – for the first time ever – of a left majority on the national executive of Unison. However, at the same time the level of activists in the trade union movement is still low by historical standards. A report by the ‘Time for Real Change’ grouping on the Unison NEC, for example, estimated that there are currently only around 12,000 Unison members active in its structures. The picture is undoubtedly similar in many other trade unions. Our specific weight in the trade unions is therefore greater, relatively, than it was in the 1980s. The work we have done in fighting to build and develop our trade union caucuses during the pandemic is of enormous importance, and – if we continue with it – will pay dividends in the next period. Fighting to develop broad left organisations, often from scratch, along with building our own caucuses, will enable us to play a role in transforming the potential new trade union activists who are currently angry and want to take action, into consistent fighters to transform their unions into fighting, democratic organisations.
One element in those battles that is posed in the near future is the campaign to go beyond local and sectional strikes, and to fight for national and coordinated action. This is clearly required, for example, to fight for decent pay rises in the public sector. The UCU’s strike action in universities at the end of 2021 was an indication of the possibilities for public sector action, as were the results of the various indicative ballots that have taken place against the current real-terms pay cuts. In the NHS 77% in Unison voted for ‘sustained industrial action’, and in the RCN, which historically has opposed strikes, the vote for ‘action short of a strike’ was over 90% and up to 56% for strike action. However, in the NHS the leaders of both unions have used the excuse of the anti-trade union laws to avoid going for strike ballots.
Unison local government, where the left is in the leadership, has balloted, but not reached the turnout threshold for a legal strike, created by undemocratic Tory laws. In the next period the question will be urgently posed of how to prevent the Tories’ vicious anti-trade union laws blocking effective action. One option is to disaggregate ballots, as UCU has done, in order to maximise the chances that some sections of workers can take action, although this is a tactic, not applicable in all situations. Where appropriate, if it is done as part of a fighting strategy, with the aim of lifting the confidence of other groups of workers to fight, it can play a positive role in preparing for more generalised action, just as one public sector trade union taking effective action would inspire workers in other sectors. This, of course, is the basis on which coordinated action will be built, rather than moving at the pace of the most conservative. However, there is no balloting tactic that can magic away the obstacle of the anti-trade union laws. As the recent experience of Royal Mail workers in 2020 showed (where they got a huge 97% yes vote on a 75% turnout), the capitalist courts can be used to try and block action even if every legal hoop is jumped through. Defying them cannot be done lightly, without weighing up the relative balance of forces and possible consequences, but it will be necessary and is the means by which the anti-trade union laws will be defeated at a certain stage.
As far as public sector pay is concerned, the pressure will be far greater on the trade union leaders to fight on the 2022 pay claims than was the case in 2021. The banked-up anger over the pay restraint of recent years will explode in the face of the cost-of-living hikes now taking place. Even regarding the 2021 pay claim, local explosions are possible, even without a lead from the top, particularly in the NHS where pay could combine with the enormous stress health workers are under.
Nor is public sector pay the only field in which national action is posed. Taking on the transport unions, particularly the RMT, is central to the Tories’ Great British Rail initiative. These are the biggest changes since the Tories initiated privatisation of British Rail in 1994, and are a confession of the bankruptcy of the profit-driven rail system. Nonetheless, they are not a move to renationalise, but rather to leave the private Train Operating Companies in place, guaranteeing their income regardless of ticket sales, and therefore freeing them up to try and take on and defeat the rail unions, and in particular the most militant of them, the RMT. Rail workers are facing attacks on their terms, conditions and pensions. A similar battle is beginning on London Underground.
Social struggles
Not only workers’ strike action, but also new and resurging social struggles will erupt in the next period, potentially including a new phase of the Black Lives Matter movement, struggles against sexism, police repression, mass protests for action against climate change, or others. Social movements on economic issues are also brewing – including against the rising tide of evictions and among students on the issue of free education. In some local areas, including Waltham Forest, we have been able to play an important role in the campaign against evictions.
The fact that the National Union of Students, after a decade of virtual inactivity, was forced to call a national day of protest for free education, including a national demonstration in London, shows how deeply students’ outlooks have been altered by the pandemic. Prior to Labour calling for free education under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, this demand had seemed unrealistic to the majority of several generations of students. Once Corbyn called for it, students overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Labour’s manifesto in the 2017 and 2019 elections. Then, during the pandemic, students have experienced paying £9,000 a year for a largely online education. Some have also taken part in the biggest student rent strikes since the 1970s, successfully winning back at least some of the rent they’d been forced to pay for accommodation they weren’t even living in for most of the year. Starmer, who as Director of Public Prosecutions was responsible for jailing student protesters in 2010, has been studiously silent on tuition fees ever since winning the Labour leadership – while his mentor, Tony Blair (originally responsible for introducing fees in 1997) is asserting it is essential to drop Corbyn’s free education pledge. No longer able to look to Labour to deliver free education, students are starting to look to their own strength. The potential exists for the biggest student movement since the 2010 mass demonstration that occupied Tory Party HQ after the Tory-Lib Dem coalition increased tuition fees threefold.
