IN YESTERDAY’s Daily Telegraph, Grant Shapps, the Secretary of State for Transport, displayed his 100% hatred of trade unions and trade unionists.
Reacting to the RMT’s rail strike actions, he vowed to wage a class war stating: ‘We must compete the job that Thatcher started and end brutal and habitual resort to strikes.’
Shapps has already raised the cap on damages for ‘unlawful’ strikes from £250,000 to £1 million, and also legislated to allow agency staff to do strikers’ jobs.
He says he now has 16 further anti-union measures that he wants to introduce. Among them he is looking to ‘banning strikes by different unions in the same workplace within a set period’, and also to ‘place an absolute limit of six pickets at any any points of critical national infrastructure irrespective of the number of unions involved and outlaw intimidatory language.’
He adds: ‘And importantly we should ensure that in critical industries like rail, unions must by law observe minimum service levels, ensuring essential services continue during industrial action.’
He concluded: ‘We must complete Thatcher’s unfinished business.’
The day before this outburst, Unite leader Sharon Graham on Tuesday 26th July hit out at Tory leadership contender Liz Truss’ leadership election manifesto.
She wrote: ‘Let’s be clear Liz Truss’s madcap proposals are an attempt to outlaw strike action and effective trade unions. This so-called manifesto is a declaration of war on the trade union movement and working people. In effect, it is a charter for massive social discontent.
‘What we have here is an ambitious politician, hawking for the votes of a tiny minority by putting the rights of all workers on the chopping block.
‘At the time of a cost of living crisis, where profiteering not wages is driving inflation, this would-be prime minister has instead chosen to return Britain’s workplaces to the 19th century. It’s Charles Dickens meets 2022.
‘Unite will not bow to threats and bullying and any attempt to make our fight for jobs, pay and conditions illegal will be met with fierce, prolonged resistance.’
Tory leadership candidate Liz Truss has said she will further attack trade union rights if she becomes Prime Minister. She will introduce minimum service levels on critical national infrastructure, introducing primary legislation in the first 30 days of government, saying:
‘Ensure strike action has significant support from union members by raising the minimum threshold for voting in favour of strike action from 40 to 50 per cent.
‘Raising the minimum notice period for strike action from two weeks to four weeks.
‘Implementing a cooling-off period so that unions can no longer strike as many times as they like in the six-month period after a ballot.
‘Putting an end to members receiving tax-free payments from trade unions on the days they are on strike.’
Responding to this, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: ‘The proposals by Liz Truss amount to the biggest attack on trade union and civil rights since labour unions were legalised in 1871.
‘Truss is proposing to make effective trade unionism illegal in Britain and to rob working people of a key democratic right.
‘If these proposals become law, there will be the biggest resistance mounted by the entire trade union movement, rivalling the general strike of 1926, the Suffragettes and Chartism.’
Sharon Graham stated ‘Unite will not bow to threats and bullying and any attempt to make our fight for jobs, pay and conditions illegal will be met with fierce, prolonged resistance.’
Mick Lynch added the resistance will be ‘rivalling the general strike of 1926, the Suffragettes and Chartism.’
However going down fighting is not the issue, the issue is winning, by meeting the modern Thatcherites head-on before they have years to prepare as Thatcher did. Lynch and Graham must demand that the TUC calls an indefinite general strike now, to bring down the Tories and bring in a Workers Government based on workers Councils of Action, that is British Soviets.
This is the only way to answer the threat to annihilate the trade unions. It is the ruling class that must be confined to the dustbin of history while the working class goes forward to build a socialist society.