What We Have Lost

We currently are experiencing a political upswing in terms of the working class’s engagement with politics. Such a period has not been seen for at least twenty five years and it is this which has provoked the panicked response from the Labour right and their masters in the ruling class. What remains stagnant though is the level of industrial struggle. Despite all the provocations or cuts to services, pay freezes and mass redundancies the public sector trade unions have largely kept themselves to purely symbolic “days of action”. There have been a few exceptions to this but there hasn’t been any kind of serious, sustained campaign in opposition to what has been a decimation of the public sector over the last six years. For all the power that was shown in 2011 culminating in the mass strike of November 30th the trade union leaders have demonstrated a consistent ability to demobilise any movement or mood that went towards sustained strike action.

Any Marxist who has made a study of the union bureaucracy will tell you that this is in their nature. The union leaders exist in a manner that is largely divorced from the class struggle, often cushioned by large salaries and secure contracts many of their members can only dream of. This makes them a perennially conservative block within any trade union subject as they are to the direct pressure of the ruling class and mixing (as many of them do) in the rarefied atmosphere of the political-media strata. Despite this relative immunity though class struggle does affect the outlook of the bureaucracy. The relatively low level of industrial struggle today is the result of the defeats, both industrial and political, that were inflicted in the mid 1980’s but the effect of these set backs has been more long lasting and more catastrophic then many of us imagined.

What happened following the defeat of the miners and the printers was a systematic dismantling of the union movements collective memory. What had been the most militant and powerful workers movement in the western world until the early 1980’s was reduced in terms of it’s power to barely a fraction of that by the mid 1990’s. This is not just a question of numbers. A reduction from 13 million to 6.5 million is going to damage a movement but it was the way these defeats were inflicted and the disastrous response to them by the union leaders that did the real damage. The defeat of the miners in a struggle that was left purposefully isolated by the other TUC leaders followed by a similarly emphatic defeat of the print unions not only demoralised the movement but saw the process of deindustrialisation accelerate across the country. With the collaboration of Blairs “new labour” the economy was moved over to a low wage, service sector based economy by the end of the 1990’s We still had a six million strong movement but it was in areas which historically speaking had not been hot beds of strike action. The last twenty years has seen more action in local government, civil service and health but these have been one or two days at most and mainly used to secure minimal concessions from the government which are then presented as “victory” by union leaders who talk left but govern right. What the Conservative-Liberal coalition faced in 2010 when it unveiled it’s cuts agenda was a union movement which had lost all of it’s traditional centres of militancy in the docks and mines. The rail unions retained their power but due to them fragmentation caused by privatisation national strikes were now rare. The huge public sector based unions not only had no real tradition of sustained, militant action but had leaders who had no idea how to carry this off and no desire to. The Conservative strategists saw this clearly and knew that if they simply refused to concede in any meaningful way then the leaders would quickly buckle. For the last quarter century the entire tactic of the union leaders has been one of “concession bargaining” i.e. accepting one bad deal in return for the employer not insisting on a slightly worse one. The Conservatives though are not a party given the negotiation, obsessed as they are with emulating their great lost leader Thatcher. They correctly guessed that the union leaders would jump on the tiniest concession and any strike would be over quickly. This desperate and wretched behaviour on the part of the leadership was to be expected what enabled them to get away with it though was the weakness of rank and file organisation within the trade unions. It must be remembered that the struggles which drove Heath from office were all powered by rank and file shop stewards who pushed the leaders into backing their actions. After the defeat of the miners and printers this tradition has been largely lost in most unions (with a few exceptions). Forty years ago the mass movements inspired and organised by the rank and file did gain some support within the union bureaucracy itself. The union leaders and full time officials are by no means monolithic in their views and under the pressure of mass struggle a section of them will move over into a more radical position. Not only have we largely lost the shop floor level tradition of militancy but the bureaucracy now has moved so far into right wing inertia and pessimism that in many unions the idea of any kind of industrial struggle at all has become utterly alien to it. Some union leaders have clearly understood that the shop stewards tradition needs to be revived the late Bob Crow and the leaders of the BFAWU are examples of such thinking. Crow did take the initiative of setting up the National Shop Stewards Network a decade ago in the hope of training a new generation of rank and file organisers. This met with the same problem as many other initiatives have faced which is that it ended up being run by the same left activist layer who run everything and it largely failed to draw in any new layers. This reflected the relatively low level of struggle and the fact that even though there are many active trade unionists the majority of them keep their activity to the workplace. Despite the main area of struggle moving to the public sector due to the cut backs and privatisations of the new labour and Conservative governments of the last decade it remains an area where the union bureaucracy is firmly in command. The public sector has very firmly entrenched employee relations procedures which are designed to defuse and de-escalate struggles, despite the employers becoming ever more provocative, so far these have held up. The public sector has become a less secure, poorly paid and stressful place to work over the last decade but it is still streets ahead of the private sector in terms of job security, down to both it’s very strong unions but also because at this moment in time the government can’t simply dismantle it’s own state apparatus and automate it (though that is an ambition they harbour). What has happened since 2010 is not an expression of rising militancy but of entrenched conservatism ruling the day in the public sector with the leaders staying firmly in charge, and the left too weak to lay out strategies of sustained industrial action in a way which can secure support from the membership.

There have been exceptions to this process, often from layers of the workforce being drawn into action for the first time. Since 2010 we’ve seen unprecedented industrial action by barristers in protest over legal aid cuts and now we have the junior doctors dispute which saw at least part of the BMA take on a role it had never played before in terms of organising programmes of industrial action far in advance of other health service unions. What is happening across all sectors of the economy is that professions previously insulated against the pressures of class struggle are now subject to it and are responding to this proletarianisation. This has seen these new layers move into action which is a welcome development. There has been a great deal of talk amidst the public sector trade unions about the need for solidarity with those new to taking action but in reality very little has been delivered. The BMA dispute has seen junior doctors address packed out trade union meetings up and down the country but they remain isolated in their struggle. Despite the militancy of their campaign the truth is that if they remain isolated they will lose. At the very minimum they will need the support of the other health unions who are currently sat on their hands and offering nothing. The problem here is that the leadership of the health unions are all phenomenally conservative and incapable of waging any kind of serious struggle. It speaks volumes that the biggest pieces of action in the NHS have come from the Junior Doctors, Midwives and radiographers. Unison and the RCN have remained inactive throughout six years of cuts and privatisations. This leads us to two uncomfortable truths about the modern trade union movement. Firstly, the anti union laws (embodied in Trade Union and Labour Relations Act of 1992 and the recent trade union act) have not just placed legal restrictions on what trade unions can do but have shaped the bureaucracy into being an enforcer of those laws. As mentioned above, the defeats of the 1980’s became so disastrous because the movement lost the knowledge of how to take effective illegal action and a generation has entered the workplace with no concept of how to carry this out. The other factor within this is that the bureaucracy as a whole is effectively working as the governments agent now. The powers of sequestration are so severe and the confidence of the leadership so low that even those who say they want militant action retreat from it when faced with the prospect of the government effectively shutting the union down. If the rank and file movement in these unions was powerful enough then they could overrule the leaders on this but we are not at the point where that is possible. Therefore the real victory of the anti union laws was to the make the union leaders into their biggest enforcers.

Secondly, it is a profound mistake to imagine that the public sector unions can take the lead on strike action that could inflict a serious defeat on the government. Historically speaking the unions who were able to defeat governments were those representing transport and energy workers. Those who have the power to stop traffic, turn the lights off or stop the food supply are those who have the real industrial power, which is why the Tories were so careful to not cause a power workers strike in the 1980’s. The rail and transport unions are still those with the most effective industrial power to this day as would the dockers. Added to this could be those workers who work in supermarkets, especially those in warehouses and delivery services. The focus of the left in the unions on building large scale public sector action as some means to jump start a wider struggle has been mistaken. The public sector lacks the economic weight to produce such a struggle and the position of many in the public service in providing essential services means any action is going to be limited. Rather than adopting a narrow focus on trying to secure large scale strike action our focus should be on attempting to build anew in the private sector. This does rule out public sector action but the focus of those of us interested in building a union movement which actually can defeat the employers and the government must be on the private sector. We on the left in the unions must focus on expanding militant trade unionism in the service sector, delivery services, transport, power and retail. There are already unions active in these areas so what’s needed is more effort in supporting them in expanding rather than endless purely defensive struggles in the public which, whilst necessary, are always going to play a secondary role to the economic power of the private sector workforce.

Recently we saw two strikes which forced concessions from “gig economy” employers in Deliveroo and Uber. Both companies rely on low wage, zero hours contract workers and immigrant labour. These workers had no official union organisation but managed to organise successful strike action anyway. This reveals another unfortunate truth about our age. These workers organise rapidly and more effectively without a trade union machine behind them because they grasped quickly that having a unified workforce prepared to walk off the job is the first and only really important factor. Also, with no bureaucracy and no leadership to act as a conservative force they were able to rapidly take action which caught the company off guard. Official union structures are hamstrung by warning periods, ACAS processes and all manner of barriers put there by the employers and enforced by the bureaucracy. The truth is that if we are to expand union organisation into the “gig” economy then we cannot rely on the old unions to do it. They are to bound up in being stabilising agents of capitalism to actually do that. They are thus only capable of waging purely defensive struggles. If trade unionism has a future it has to become a force that operates outside of the trade union laws. A new form of union organisation must have a loose structure with no assets to be seized, no general secretary to be hauled in and bribed or threatened by the government and no paid officials. Everything must be organised by either workers in their own workplaces or by those of us prepared to volunteer our time to build a new organisation. If this sounds like a revival of certain syndicalist principles it is because that it is. We need to bring into our time the operating practices of the IWW and others like them because if the last five years have taught us anything it is that the ruling class have succeeded in turning far too many of our union structures into their collaborators.