YESTERDAY saw major unions taking national strike action across the country in one of the biggest walkouts of workers on the same day.
Three main unions were out, including the Communication Workers Union (CWU) representing postal workers with over 110,000 Royal Mail staff on strike again today and with a further strike day announced for 9 December.
Simon Thompson, the boss of Royal Mail, broke off negotiations with the CWU and delivered a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to the union to accept the complete break up of Royal Mail, thousands of redundancies and turn the CWU into a company union with few negotiating rights.
Despite this provocative declaration that Royal Mail is going to war on its workers and their union, CWU leaders last Sunday offered yet more talks with the company in a last ditch effort to avoid more strikes.
An offer that was rejected out of hand.
Joining CWU postal workers on strike yesterday was the National Education Union (NEU) with members from 77 sixth form colleges coming out over a pay demand. Since the Tories attacked college finances from 2010 the pay of NEU members has fallen in real terms by 20%.
University and College Union (UCU) lecturers were also striking on the same day, this follows a one day strike on the 24th November when 70,000 staff at 150 universities came out over pay, pensions and working conditions.
UCU members have seen their pay cut by around 25% since 2009 and the employers also want to slash their pensions by 35%.
With hundreds of thousands of nurses organising for two days of strike action before Christmas, ambulance workers and NHS cleaners voting for strike action while rail workers are preparing yet more strike days next month, the question uppermost on picket lines is why don’t the trade union leaders organise this mass strike movement into a general strike?
The working class is up for a fight but the same is not true of the trade union leadership
In fact the trade union bureaucracy and the TUC have worked might and main to avoid the question of calling a general strike.
Instead they have sought to divert the anger of workers at seeing their pay slashed and their jobs threatened by insisting that all the unions can do is to call ‘co-ordinated’ days of strikes with mass lobbies of parliament thrown in.
The outlook of the trade union leadership is that employers and the Tories can be forced back to the negotiating table where some compromise on pay can be achieved. This is a cowardly evasion of the reality of the crisis confronting workers today – a bankrupt British capitalist system that has no alternative but to dump its economic recession squarely on the backs of the working class.
Royal Mail bosses treated the CWU with contempt as they rejected any possibility of any talks that didn’t lead to the surrender of the union, and would not be deterred by any limited strike action.
Equally, the Tories have brutally told the RCN and other health unions that there is no money for any pay rise that would compensate for over a decade of wage freezes and cuts.
Exactly the same message has been spelt out to the RMT and rail unions – the Tories and the capitalist class are quite prepared to take on the unions in order to drive the working class back to the poverty conditions of the 19th century.
Indeed they have no option if capitalism is to survive catastrophic recession rapidly turning into another great depression.
The working class also has no option but to fight – the burning issue is, however, not just to fight but to win and this means organising the massive strength of the working class in an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and replacing them with a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
Those trade union leaders who are scared of calling a general strike, that poses point blank the issue of workers taking power, must be removed and a new revolutionary leadership built in the unions.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists are building the leadership required to take the working class to power – join today there is no time to lose.
• See editorial
