LAST week, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak along with trade union leaders from across the world attended a two-day conference organised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington.
These union bureaucrats met with senior officials from the international capitalist financial institutions to plead for them to stop pushing for deregulation, damaging austerity cuts and to support measures to ‘protect fundamental labour rights and promote decent work’.
While these trade union leaders were pleading to the world’s leading bankers for economic policies ‘that prioritise workers’ rights’ US president Donald Trump and Elon Musk were busy implementing schemes to slash hundreds of thousands of federal workers’ jobs.
The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) headed by Musk sent out emails to every federal employee on Saturday demanding that they immediately reply detailing what they had ‘got done’ last week.
Failure to reply would lead to automatic sacking.
On Monday, the official US agency that oversees federal employees said that workers could ignore Musk’s email and would not be let go for not replying.
Not to be deterred by this challenge to his assumed authority – Doge is not an official agency of the federal government – Musk immediately responded posting on X that ‘subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance,’ adding: ‘Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.’
Trump gave his approval to Musk’s threatening email saying: ‘I thought it was great. There was a lot of genius in sending it.’
Trump and Musk were busy acting to sack hundreds of thousands of workers and tearing up their employment rights while Nowak and other trade union leaders were pleading with the world’s leading capitalist financial masters to protect workers’ rights.
In the midst of this brutal onslaught on the rights of US workers, Nowak issued a statement last Wednesday that said: ‘What is unfolding in the US should be a cautionary tale for us all. This is what happens when you let the political fraudsters of the populist right in.’
The real intention of Nowak’s ‘cautionary tale’ is an attempt to shore up the Labour government by presenting Nigel Farage’s Reform Party as the greatest danger to the working class.
Nowak said that Farage was making the same ‘bogus claims about being on the side of working people’ as Trump made in his election campaign.
The clear message pumped out by Nowak to the working class in Britain was that they must stick with Starmer’s Labour government at all costs.
He ignores the fact that Labour has already torn up many of the pledges it made pre-election including pledges to keep the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and scrap the two-child benefit cap that has condemned 1.5 million children to poverty.
Last December, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a crackdown of government ‘waste’ demanding departments identify 5% ‘efficiency savings’ setting targets that would cost 10,000 civil service jobs.
In a speech at the Scottish Labour conference last week, Scotland’s Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, echoed Trump and Musk saying: ‘We will have our own Department of Government Efficiency.’
Contrary to the outlook peddled by Nowak, the drive to slash jobs and destroy workers’ rights is not confined to Trump and ‘populist’ political parties, it is being pursued vigorously by Labour in the UK.
This brutal attack is driven by the absolute requirement of the capitalist system being strangled across the world by massive national debts that the bosses and bankers are determined must be paid for by slashing workers’ jobs, wages and social benefits.
The powerful working class will never stand by while all its rights and hard-won gains are smashed to keep bankrupt capitalism from collapse.
The immediate task is to kick out trade union bureaucrats like Nowak who refuse to lead any fight against the Labour government, replacing them with a new leadership prepared to organise the strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution – there is no time to lose.
