THE FBU has made a decisive intervention, demanding that the trade unions build a campaign to defy the anti-strike laws being pushed through Parliament by the Tories.
Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack has said that the Trades Union Congress should lead a campaign of ‘mass non-cooperation and non-compliance’ with the Minimum Services Levels Bill.
The FBU also urges: ‘An emergency Congress of the TUC must be called to launch a campaign of defiance and civil disobedience against the bill if it becomes law.’
The FBU’s governing executive council has passed a resolution calling on the TUC to adopt the strategy, and to build a mass movement to resist the legislation.
‘National demonstrations and sustained mass mobilisations can defeat the bill,’ the union says.
The FBU recognises: ‘Non-compliance with the bill would be one of the most significant attempts by unions to defy employment law since the 1984-85 miners’ strike’, with Matt Wrack stating that the strategy of non-compliance was needed, as there was ‘no obvious route to challenge this attack through the courts’.
Wrack correctly states that: ‘The Minimum Services Levels Bill is one of the most draconian attacks on the rights of working people in decades.
‘It’s a pernicious piece of legislation that’s in keeping with authoritarian regimes around the world.’
The government is deliberately attempting to strengthen the position of employers and severely weaken the position of workers. They are doing this for one purpose – to drive down wages, to try and save British capitalism and its banks from a disaster by making the working class pay the entire bill for it.
Ministers are bulldozing this anti-worker legislation through Parliament, and riding roughshod over the democratic process by seeking to avoid scrutiny.
The FBU states: ‘The Fire Brigades Union will fiercely resist this onslaught on our democratic rights, but it’s an attack on all workers.’
It adds: ‘A mass movement of non-compliance can defeat this attack on working people by making the legislation unworkable.’
The FBU said: ‘The TUC can lead this movement of resistance, first by calling an emergency Congress, followed by a national demonstration, and a sustained campaign of non-cooperation.’
Wrack added: ‘The government is attempting to ban effective strikes, and giving employers the power to sack workers who do not comply with this legislation.
‘However, a unified strategy of mass resistance can make this law inoperable and stop it dead in its tracks,’ he maintains.
There must be full support by all trade unions to force the TUC to recall its Congress to take action against the new strike-ban laws.
The TUC will resist calling an emergency Congress but can and must be made to do so, by Unite, Unison, the GMB and the Health Service trade unions joining the campaign and insisting that an emergency Congress is called at once!
In fact, if the TUC will not call such a Congress it must be bypassed by the major trade unions calling a special TUC Congress to sack the TUC leadership and then take action to smash the anti-union laws.
However, more than a few demonstrations and some stoppages will be required to ditch these laws that will turn the trade unions into Labour Fronts.
The capitalist system is in a desperate crisis. Its banks are crashing, inflation is galloping upwards and the bosses are determined that the working class will pay for this crisis just as they did for the massive 1930s crisis of capitalism, with slump, starvation appalling conditions and then imperialist wars.
The big issue is that the working class must move forward to a general strike to bring down the UK bosses and their crisis-ridden capitalist system, and then with a workers’ government in office and in power, join hands with the workers of the world to end capitalism and establish a worldwide socialist republic.
With the workers of France and Greece in revolt this is the way forward. We must recall the TUC Congress to call a general strike to smash the Tories and bring in socialism.