Derek Simpson makes union bashing easier

September 28, 2010

2–3 minutes

Last night’s Dispatches “What’s the Point of the Unions?” which you can watch here (skipping the irritating ads) ended up with a bit of union bashing but started off a clarion call to class struggle. Brother Crow was given several minutes of prime viewing time to put the case for militant industrial action causing Mrs Mac to remark “that’s what you expect union leaders to be like. That’s how they are in France ”. Jerry Hicks was given a free advert of a duration Mercedes would have paid a lot of money for to make the point that the salaries and perks top bureaucrats give themselves disconnects them from their member’ lives.

Derek Simpson went on to reinforce Jerry’s point very forcefully. He blustered that he didn’t decide on his own salary inheriting a pre-existing pay structure. Anyway he was getting asked to work really long hours sorting out all types of stuff. The house on which he paid a peppercorn rent was a shrewd investment by the union and on he droned. Oh, and there was absolutely nothing fishy whatsoever about some bureaucrat’s mate demanding a £24 000 “finder’s fee” for lining up a charity with the union.

It was the members’ voices which were the harshest criticism of the bureaucracy’s techniques. Two women cleaners explained how they were railroaded into signing a compensation agreement that left them several thousand pounds worse off. The local council and its union leaderships worked together to deny them money the bourgeois courts could have awarded them under equal pay legislation.

The worst case of all was a UNISON activist who was working 12-14 hour shifts to raise her family. She described how at union meetings the local leadership would take a vote to make her leave meetings at which they discussed equal pay. Her account suggests that some of the other people in the room thought that the Bulgarian Communist Party circa 1953 was the perfect way to run a workers’ organisation.

Instead of encouraging the sort of person who will have to be the backbone of union resistance to what’s just around the corner the bureaucracy has left her completely disillusioned with the whole idea of active trade unionism. That was almost certainly the point. The Channel 4 programme spotlighted the real Achilles heel of British trade unionism – its leadership’s fear of independent initiative. That will prove to be one of the biggest hurdles we face in the coming fightback.

4 responses to “Derek Simpson makes union bashing easier”

skidmarx

September 29, 2010 at 10:09 am

Watching Bob Crow interviewed on Hardtalk was quite interesting. He was happy to point out the disconnect between the Merseyside firefighters’ boss’s £200,000 per year and his attacks when his employees, but when it was pointed out that his own £140,000 a year was a lot more than most of his members, he didn’t have a coherent explanation of how that didn’t mean he had a somewhat different class position from those he represents. Other than that he was very good on class and class struggle.

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David Ellis

September 29, 2010 at 12:41 pm

There was a slot on the John Stewart show the other night whereby the union was protesting WalMart for union recognition, decent pay, fixed full time weekly hours and proper benefits. A seriously laudable effort. However, the folks doing the actual protesting were agency workers who enjoyed neither decent wages, job security, fixed-time contracts, benefits or union recognition. A very good idea to employ people that WalMart could not sack to picket on the union and employees’ behalf but surely they should have been in receipt of the very conditions that the union were supposedly demanding from WalMart?

Anyway, unions are all well and good and must be paid serious attention despite their bureaucratic excrescences in the age of imperialism and despite ludicrous incidents such as the one above. But the basis for socialism will be democratic control of industry and administration by all the workers. Control of management itself not just efforts to `regulate’ management through union pressure. In place of shareholder or government imposed managers and boards these wannabe leaderships will be required to put their proposals in the public domain and campaign to be democratically elected to their positions by the workers in any given industry, factory or office. Capitalist alienation will be replaced by democratic participation, the sharp spur of wages as reward, instead of a job well done, and of brutal discipline in place of genuine interest and inclusion will be no more.

We should be demanding, fighting for and establishing these things now. Setting up staff committees encompassing the whole workforce in a given enterprise, hospital, school, factory office to fight management by dictat and to demand the democratisation of the workplace whilst of course pointing out that these manifestations ultimately will require a workers’ state to defend them.

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skidmarx

September 29, 2010 at 4:44 pm

This is that video, which I think can be watched in the UK here for the next 5 days.

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GT

September 29, 2010 at 6:00 pm

The SP defends excess wages of Union leaders in PCS – clearly if full timers wages were reduced it would affect SP subs.

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Liam redux