LESS than a week before the start of the TUC’s annual conference, the Tory government has unveiled a whole raft of new proposals to criminalise strikers and pickets with the ultimate intention of making every strike illegal and every worker actively supporting a strike liable to be dragged in front of the courts to face the justice of the employers.
Under these proposals, every worker attending a picket line would be forced to indentify themselves to the police, wear an armband and carry a letter of authorisation issued by the union involved. Under previous Tory proposals on picketing, only a designated union ‘supervisor’ was required to identify themselves in this way by handing over their name, address and contact details to the police, now any worker attending a picket will be legally made to do so.
Given the proven collaboration between the police and the blacklisting agencies that make a living out of gathering information on workers to pass on to employers this move will make it open season for the employers and the capitalist state to identify and persecute workers taking industrial action.
These new proposals come on top of all the other attacks announced in July, under which ‘illegal’ picketing would become a criminal instead of civil offence, legalise the use of agency scabs to break strikes and replace striking workers permanently while at the same time introducing thresholds of at least 40% of those asked to vote supporting the strike before a strike could be legally called.
In a joint statement yesterday, three leading human rights groups (Liberty, Amnesty International and the British Institute of Human Rights) said that the proposed bill ‘would hamper people’s basic rights to protest and shift even more power from the employee to the employer’.
That is a massive understatement – the Tory anti-union legislation will not just hamper the basic right to protest, it will make it virtually illegal to protest or strike and by extension make independent trade unions illegal as well.
The only unions the Tories are prepared to tolerate are corporatist unions whose only function is to ensure that their members obey the ‘rule of law’ and submit peacefully to every demand of the employers. The response of the TUC to this latest attack is perfectly in line with their entire record of subservience.
TUC leader, Francis O’Grady, welcomed the statement by the three rights organisations before going on to plead with the Tories to stop being nasty to the unions and instead allow the unions to collaborate with them in saving bankrupt British capitalism. She said: ‘Ministers need to take a step back, recognise that they were wrong, and drop these proposals’, going on to add: ‘Ministers should be working with the unions to deliver a fairer Britain.’
In other words, the TUC is offering to collaborate with the Tories in imposing all the savage austerity cuts demanded to pay off the £1.4 trillion debt run up in bailing the banks out, if only they will allow the trade union bureaucracy to carry out the job without recourse to repressive laws.
Laws which the trade union leaders rightly fear will be met with enormous hostility and resistance from a powerful working class that will not sit back and see its rights and lives smashed up by a weak Tory government.
All this pleading, however, will not change the minds of the Tories, they are being driven by an economic crisis which dictates that to survive capitalism must make the working class pay through austerity.
This cannot be achieved without smashing independent trade unions. The only possible answer to this war against the unions is to mobilise the full strength of the working class in a political general strike to bring down this Tory government and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
At the TUC conference on Sunday there must be a mass turn-out for the Young Socialists lobby to demand that these leaders either call a general strike or be kicked out and replaced by a leadership that will fight.
