Saturday’s gathering of Socialist Resistance trade union activists (“fraction” in the jargon) was probably the only group of people in Britain which avoided all mention of Jade Goody over the weekend. That alone made it worth going to. Here are some points from the discussion. We have decided to produce a book by early spring exploring all this is in a lot more detail.
The accompanying photo shows the attempted media stunt at the start of the Keep Our NHS Public conference yesterday in London. SR editor John Lister plays a minor role in this outfit and I remonstrated with him on the ecological effects of releasing all those balloons into the atmosphere. He was able to reassure me that they are not made of rubber but from the biodegradable intestines of humanely killed baby seals. What a relief. Otherwise the damage to our new ecosocialist credentials could have been severe.
The one fact that dominates politics in Britain is the historically low levels of industrial action by the working class. In the current issue of International Socialism Martin Smith writes “in 2004 there were 905,000 strike days in the UK, twice the number in 2003 (499,000).41 The 2004 total is higher than the average number of strike days in the 1990s (660,000), but considerably lower than the average for both the 1980s (7.2 million) and the 1970s (12.9 million).” Even during World War Two when both Labour and the Communist Party were working flat out to prevent strikes levels were higher than this.
The working class is suffering from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win. We identified a number of reasons for this. The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory blitzkrieg of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. This encourages an ethos of social partnership with the employers. The third is the effect of the anti-union laws. These have encouraged a terrible sense of passivity. Speaking at the Organising For Fighting Unions conference John Hendy made the point that these can only be defeated inside parliament. The odd thing is that only two speakers in the whole day chose to challenge this. Well done Ted Knight and Rod Finlayson. If the challenge were going to come from inside parliament you might have expected it ten years into a Labour government. A point of view based on persuading New Labour to change track is flawed.
The main beneficiaries of the anti-union laws are the union bureaucrats whose first reflex is to use them to prevent the development of solidarity action and to intimidate militant workers. Judging from the discussion Amicus officials are the worst offenders. They have also created what seems to be the second most undemocratic structure in the British labour movement. There have been one or two moments when it looked like action by a group of workers in a strategic sector of the economy could break them. That is why the defeat of the Gate Gourmet workers was more than just a sectoral setback. A group of workers took spontaneous sympathetic industrial action and the bureaucracy scabbed. Any other group of militant workers tempted to try something similar will have this hanging over them for years and no union official will ever let them forget it. I did a bucket collection with SR comrade Julia and a couple of her friends for the Gate Gourmet strike at the Brick Lane Mela (festival) that year. The thing that struck me in that torrent of well meaning liberal humanity was how few of them were willing to make a donation. The cops were very supportive but principled Communists that we are we refused to take their blood money. Honest! For more on this see the article
http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentGateGourmetStrikeIllegal.html
The working class in Britain is now quite polarised between a majority that is in stable, pensionable, relatively well-off employment and those who enjoy none of these benefits. There is also a big difference in union organisation. Martin Smith writes, “Union density in the public sector is 59 percent and only 19 percent in the private. The difference in density is explained by the fact that there are more people working in the private sector (i.e. around three quarters of all workers). Union density in sections of manufacturing remains very high.” We can add to this that many of the people on the worst terms and conditions are migrant workers. A paradox is that even though most of these migrant workers are not unionised they are often more radical than British workers who are unionised. Maybe because of this the big British unions are not trying to organise them but devote more time to poaching members of other unions on the basis of cheaper insurance or credit cards. However without trying to organise these workers and employees in the new expanding sectors the unions are on a path of inexorable decline.
Liam redux 
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