THE Tories wasted no time in placing their anti-strike laws before parliament yesterday in their determination to break the trade unions and inflict the cost of the capitalist crisis squarely onto the backs of workers.
With the working class throughout the country rising up in mass strike action to demand pay increases, the Tory Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill is designed to undermine effective strike action by enforcing a minimum service level to be provided in public services.
The NHS, education, fire and rescue, and border security are all covered by this bill which gives employers the right to issue a ‘work notice’ instructing workers to cross picket lines and attend work.
Any worker named in this notice will lose all legal rights of protection from immediate dismissal, while any union that fails to comply with management instructions to enforce strike-breaking will be subject to massive fines.
This bill gives the green light to sack workers who have legally voted to strike and fine trade unions millions of pounds for not enforcing management strike-breaking demands.
In response to this war to make striking illegal, all the TUC can do is appeal to MPs ‘of all parties’ to reject this ‘latest attack on the right to strike’.
In fact, the main argument put forward by the TUC for MPs to vote against it is that, if passed, it ‘would make it harder for disputes to be resolved’.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak, while denouncing it as ‘undemocratic’, insisted that the main objection is that ‘this bill will prolong disputes and poison industrial relations’.
What world are these TUC leaders living in when they think that the Tory bill is just a cynical ploy that will fail because it has to go through the House of Lords and then spend months being fought over in the law courts and that it can only ‘poison’ industrial relations?
The reality is that the Tories are not making cynical political choices but are being driven by a capitalist system that is diving into recession and being overwhelmed by inflation – inflation that the bankers are demanding be dealt with by super-austerity cuts to services and wages.
Any forlorn hope that the Tories are prepared to make concessions over pay to nurses, ambulance or any public service worker, was shattered after trade union leaders emerged from cosy talks with Tory ministers on Monday with absolutely nothing, only to be confronted the next day with a bill that offers only fines to cripple them and the sack for their members.
If this bill does not produce the desired effect of breaking strikes then the Tories are prepared to go even further and ban workers from joining unions.
On Sunday, the Observer newspaper revealed that Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak had seriously contemplated banning Border Force staff, members of the PCS union, from trade union membership.
As the PCS pointed out, although only Border Force staff were threatened with being banned from joining a union this would quickly be extended across all public services.
This plan was put on the back burner by Sunak as the Tories wait to see if the latest anti-strike measures are sufficient to bring the trade unions to heel, and give them the ammunition to impose wage cuts on workers.
While Nowak was appealing to MPs, Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), said the bill was a ‘shameful attack’ on democratic rights and called for a ‘mass movement of resistance’ against it.
Wrack said: ‘This represents one of the most shameful attacks on the democratic rights and liberties of working people in decades. This is an attack on all workers – including key workers who kept our public services going during the pandemic.’
He added: ‘It’s an attack on Britain’s Covid heroes and on all workers. We need a mass movement of resistance to this authoritarian attack.’
The burning issue today is to put these words into practice by forcing the TUC to call a mass indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build a planned socialist economy.
This is the only way forward.
