Now for a red October !
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser 07-07-11
As the Independent newspaper headline expressed it, “hundreds of thousands walk out, but the real battle is yet to come”!
The 30th June 2011 will go down as an important turning point in modern working class struggle. It marked the biggest joint strike action in about 30 years. Up to 750,000 civil servants (over 30,000 of them in Scotland), teachers and lecturers staged a massive one-day strike against the government’s cuts to pensions – and the attacks to jobs, pay and services.
Colourful, boisterous, confident rallies and marches were held in numerous UK cities and towns - at lunchtimes, which allowed thousands of non-strikers from other workforces to join them and show solidarity with those who braved torrents of abuse from government figures in the run-up to J30.
Many workplaces staged the biggest picket lines they ever experienced. There was a real upbeat feel to the whole day – further boosted by the battle bus that toured picket lines issuing strikers with breakfast.
Contrary to the ConDem government’s subsequent feeble attempts to downplay its impact, this was a rock solid strike. PCS report-backs showed 84 per cent of members honoured the strike.
In England, PCS and the main teachers’ union, NUT, were joined by the ATL, traditionally a right-wing teachers’ and lecturers’ union, which had never previously had a national strike in its 127 years of existence!
Biggest ever in PCS
In Scotland, where it was only PCS, they enjoyed the biggest response from members in memory. For every one long-serving union stalwart who has stuck by the union through thick and thin, several new faces were there too, on the pickets, at the rallies, speaking out with articulate rage. Workers from across the age spectrum: plenty in their 40s and 50s, some of them former activists of 10-15 years ago who were infuriated by the amount they stand to lose on pensions and enthused back into action by the breadth of the strike; others who told us they had not really bothered with the picket lines and rallies on previous strikes; but also a tremendously encouraging contingent of young members, vibrant and vocal in their condemnation of the attacks on their pension rights – as well as their wages and job prospects.
Delegations from UNISON, FBU, UNITE, GMB, Scottish Prison Officers Association and other unions, alongside anti-cuts campaigns, disabled people’s campaigns, anti-war veterans and socialists, joined the 1,000-strong rally in Glasgow’s George Square, which was backed and addressed by the leadership of the Scottish TUC.
What next?
The question on everyone’s lips was – and is – what next, to keep up the momentum in fighting the most vicious assault on the working class since the 1930s?
To tackle this question, the first task is to grasp the full significance of what happened on 30th June.
J30 was not a strike of the entire public sector, let alone of the working class as a whole – more is the pity! But it was a mighty display of the potential power of working people to confront the government of the rich.
Whilst it was not the same as the loss of a day’s industrial production, it was an even more visible reminder of society’s reliance on these workers for daily services.
Numerous workplaces had signs up announcing they were shut – something senior management habitually try to avoid like a plague that will spread. At Faslane, such was the power of the strike by PCS that Marines from York were drafted in for the day.
Critically, despite almost universally hostile media coverage – with even the Herald’s often astute Iain MacWhirter condemning it under the headline “Public sector strike is madness” - massive public support was still displayed towards the strikers. It encouraged other people in the same boat, but in a different workplace or union. And PCS recruited around 2,000 new members, proving that decisive action builds unions.
Tory threats and lies
The Millionaires’ government initially tried to bludgeon workers into submission, to scare the living daylights out of those new to the fray, with bloodcurdling threats of even more vicious anti-union laws, attacks on union reps’ facility time to represent members - and vain attempts to enlist an army of parents to go into schools and scab on striking teachers.
Their belligerence backfired. So then they tried to bury the significance of J30 with lies about its scope and impact. They are clearly worried; why else deploy the fury of their friends in editorial offices?
Unlike Thatcher, who had a callously calculated plan to confront one set of workers at a time, Cameron’s junta has attacked all public sector workers simultaneously, on pensions. They are in danger of making pensions their poll tax, unifying and radicalising working class opposition.
Divide and rule
That explains their desperate crusade to divide and rule. They have persistently sought to whip up division between public and private sector workers - it has to be admitted with some partial success, given the lackadaisical response of the TUC in combating this, and the downright treacherous role of Labour leaders in aiding and abetting the Tories’ propaganda. Now the government wants to slice off sections of the public sector that they have infuriated by their assault, for instance with talk of local government workers’ pensions being dealt with separately.
That is where nothing is pre-determined; the outcome depends heavily on how the unions, and especially their leaderships, respond. Whether they allow the government to divide, terrify and cow workers, or unions embolden them with bigger and broader action.
Power of the working class
The TUC, and many national union leaders, have been painfully slow to build anti-cuts action.
As soon as the ConDem Cuts Coalition was foisted upon us in May 2010, the Scottish Socialist Party immediately advocated the unions, led by the STUC, should call a mass demo and rallies against the cuts. We began to campaign within unions for unified action, initially a one-day strike of all public sector workers, as they are the section most directly impacted by cuts to jobs, pay, conditions and pensions – as well as being the providers of the vital services that our entire society heavily depends upon.
This was in no way to downgrade or de-prioritise anti-cuts campaigns in local communities, amongst the sick and disabled who have been amongst the very first to be hammered by cuts, or students confronted by unprecedented cuts to courses and the threat of fees that would make education even more an enclave of the rich.
Far from it; these and other forms of campaign are critical to defending services and as an encouragement to public sector workers to stand up and fight. Furthermore, we have consistently warned against the dangers of division being sown between communities and workforces – as the millionaires’ government laugh all the way to another bankers’ bailout!
But in advocating unified strike action by workers in the front line of the Twin Tories’ war to cancel out gains made by previous generations of workers’ organisations, we are pointing to the unique potential power that the working class possesses; the ability to halt the production of services and wealth, by use of one of the few weapons in our hands – the ability to withdraw our labour.
In contrast to the calls the SSP and other union activists made for a swift programme of rallies and strike preparations a year ago, the trade unions have often been painfully slow to lumber into action.
Some people, from sheer frustration, were even tempted to write off the organised trade union movement as a force in fighting the cuts. Amongst several other features, June 30th was a devastating rebuttal of that impatient, but utterly false conclusion.
For a strike of four million
J30 could and should have been even bigger and broader in scope, but GMB and UNISON leaders duped themselves into thinking they could negotiate their way out of a crisis, and refused to ballot their members alongside PCS, NUT and ATL. The other of the ‘big 3’ unions- UNITE - has a leadership that to its credit (like PCS) is against all and every cut, and favours coordinated strike action, but in the autumn.
So now, with the full frontal assault on pensions, there is the real, live possibility of transforming a strike of 750,000 into one of four million in October – provided members hold their own union leaders to their word.
A big job is still to be done; to prevent divide-and-rule tactics, and to ensure the fighting talk of UNISON’s Dave Prentis becomes fighting action. At UNISON’s national conference, no doubt with the audience in mind, Prentis threatened “the biggest period of sustained strike action since the 1926 general strike”. Words to stir the heart of anyone fighting the cuts; but words that activists in UNISON will need to convert into deeds, given Prentis’ track record of empty rhetoric.
Words into deeds
Over the next two months, it may be necessary for specific groups of workers to take strike action where they face, for instance, compulsory redundancies, as in sections of the civil service.
But in particular a combination of the willing PCS strikers of J30 and existing union stewards and activists in UNISON, GMB and UNITE need to systematically build for strike ballots for united action.
The STUC and anti-cuts campaigns can greatly boost this process of renewing workers’ confidence by building a mass Scottish demo.
Timing is of the essence in any battle. A mass STUC demo, for instance on Saturday 1st October as Tory party conference assembles, would be the best means to maximise involvement by tens of thousands in Scotland itself, both as a battering ram against the Tory boot-boys, and to embolden the 600,000 Scottish public sector workers to vote for united strike action that month.
Further, it would help put the SNP government behind the 8-ball, by demanding they defy Westminster’s cuts, instead of repeating John Swinney’s scandalous attack on the June 30th strike, when he was a perfect echo of the Labour denunciations of the strike “whilst talks take place”.
General strikes
Some people – Dave Prentis and some ultra left groupings – play fast and loose with the term ‘general strike’. It is a deadly serious instrument of struggle, which cannot just be conjured up at will.
In turn, there is a world of difference between a one-day stoppage and an indefinite general strike, which throws up the profound issue of who is going to run essential services, ensure public safety, food supplies, etc – the question indeed of who runs the country, the old state of the capitalist class, or a new state of workers and their allies, a government genuinely of the people.
Even a one-day stoppage of four million public sector workers would be a phenomenal escalation of the resistance movement, and one the Westminster razor gang simply could not ignore.
One day general strikes have played a critical role in past movements, including defeating governments in the 1970s, 1980s and internationally.
Right now it would be foolishly premature – and futile – to call for a general strike of the entire working class, even for one day, given the preceding background of retreats and defeats, specifically given that most private sector workers do not yet feel they are part of the fight on public sector pensions.
Far more timely right now would be a mass demo that could and should include private sector workers, and a one-day stoppage of the entire, united public sector, which would in itself transform workers’ sense of power and unity, and spill over into the private sector, laying the basis for possible joint action in the near future.
Turn the tide
We have experienced an important turning of the tide on 30 June. The role of trade unionists, anti-cuts campaigners and socialists is to help sustain the momentum against a weak, vulnerable, but vicious government, with timely proposals for action that maximise mass unity in action, and hard-hitting arguments for taxing the rich and taking the wealth we create into public ownership and control, rendering all cuts redundant.