THE wave of ‘wildcat strikes’ that are taking place in power stations and oil terminals throughout the UK have the full support of the News Line.
The strike wave is against employers using EU law to award contracts to foreign companies to bring in non-union contract cheap labour, instead of employing UK-based workers, on union rates.
The only thing that is wrong with these strikes is that they are unofficial. Such actions against the employing class’s victimisation of UK workers, because of their trade union affiliations, should obviously be official strike actions.
The fact that such union-busting operations are legal under EU law only emphasises the fact that the EU is a bankers’ and big businessmen’s club, for cutting the jobs and wages of the working class throughout the EU.
One of the ways of seeking to do this is to set worker against worker. Not just in the UK, but throughout the member states of the EU, workers are fighting against EU legislation that legalises bosses bringing in contract labourers, specifically to lower wages and undermine trade unions.
The eruption of these ‘wildcat’ actions is in fact a condemnation of the union leaders who are too busy agreeing job cuts and wage cuts with the big employers and governments to fight for the interests of their members.
The wildcat actions are eruptions of angry workers.
These kinds of actions are not just taking place in Britain. They are also taking place in Greece and France and in other EU states. They are not expressions of ‘racism’ but of a deep desire to defend jobs, wages and basic rights.
Some suggest that what is emerging is an ‘age of discontent’. This is to underestimate the situation. What the world crisis of capitalism is producing, in a contradictory way, is world revolution.
The fact of the matter is that jobs, wages and basic rights are under attack in every capitalist country, and the response to it by the working class is in essence revolutionary, despite the appearance of some nationalist forms, such as the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’.
In fact, this battle cry originated inside the Labour government and has been propagated by some trade union leaders.
Its original proponent is Gordon Brown. In the days of his deepest unpopularity, when he was likened to Mr Bean, he decided that it would be a very clever thing to court favour by borrowing some of the clothing of the BNP.
It is of course only a step from this slogan to ‘Britain for the British’ and deporting immigrants, but this did not worry Gordon.
However, the movement of the working class is not heading in this direction, despite the slogans of Brown and others.
It is heading in the direction of a showdown with the Brown government, and with capitalism, that will take the form of a general strike in which all of the working class of the UK, whatever their national origins, will play their part.
Such a general strike will pose the working class with taking power and resolving its problems through replacing bankrupt capitalism with a workers’ government and a planned socialist economy, based on satisfying people’s needs.
Workers must build up their wildcat actions against the wage-cutting contractors and the EU that legalises wage-cutting.
They must demand that their trade unions make their actions official and that the TUC calls a general strike to smash up this European Union conspiracy against the working class of the UK and Europe.
This emerging struggle is part of the world movement of the working class against bourgeois plans that it should sacrifice all of its gains to rescue the bankrupt bankers and bosses.
Central to the struggle of the working class is internationalism as opposed to nationalism.
It was Marx who declared: ‘Workers of the world unite. They have a world to win and nothing to lose but their chains.’
This is the way forward.