IN advance of the national ‘protect the right to strike’ day of demonstrations on Wednesday 1st February the TUC has published a statement headed ‘Fighting the anti-strike laws’.
This statement calls the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill a ‘draconian piece of legislation’ that the TUC believes to be ‘undemocratic’ in forcing workers to cross picket lines and also ‘counter-productive’ as it could lead to more strikes.
The statement concludes: ‘The Bill will do nothing to help those workers, or to resolve current industrial disputes’ – as if the latest Tory legal onslaught on the trade unions and working class had anything to do with helping workers or resolving strikes.
This bill is the culmination of decades of Tory anti-union laws aimed at legislating against strike action by forcing workers to submit to having their wages cut and their conditions destroyed, and make the working class pay for the recessionary crisis swamping British capitalism.
The TUC leaders are completely oblivious of the reality of the crisis that is driving the Tories into an all-out war to crush the unions and push the working class back into the poverty conditions of the 19th century – the era of workhouses, and poor laws when workers either worked for poverty-level wages or died of starvation in the gutter, and when there were no rights to join trade unions, no unemployment benefits and certainly no free health service.
All these rights had to be fought for by workers, and today they can only be defended in a class struggle.
TUC leaders are clearly pinning their hopes on persuading the Tories to back down through mass protests coupled with appeals to be reasonable and settle the mass strikes by making concessions over pay.
There will be no concessions over workers’ pay or conditions by the Tory government.
Trade unions – like the nurses’ RCN, train workers’ RMT and Aslef, and the CWU postal workers’ union along with the Unite union – have taken the struggle for pay increases to protect their members from inflation and all the wage freezes of the past to the limit.
Despite calling unprecedented national strikes at every turn these unions have faced an outright refusal from the Tories and the bosses to negotiate any settlement.
On Sunday, the general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, lashed out at the Tories’ refusal to negotiate, saying: ‘Genuinely, I believe they are looking that this is the moment they can privatise the NHS.’
CWU general secretary Dave Ward accused Royal Mail bosses of ‘waging war’ on postal workers by refusing to negotiate on pay and conditions while they embark on ‘nothing more than an asset-stripping agenda’.
Under the cover of ‘modernisation’ and ‘reform’ the employers are preparing to turn postal workers into self-employed delivery staff with no rights and no union.
In the NHS, the Tories are preparing to manipulate the collapse of hospitals so as to open up the entire health service to the privateers through imposing poverty level wages on health workers.
On the railways the story is the same, with the Tories banning any meaningful talks on pay and conditions with the unions, and RMT leader Mick Lynch insisting Tories want to turn rail workers into a ‘gig-economy’ and all they want ‘is to bash the unions’.
These trade union leaders have taken the struggle of their members to the limit in order to achieve acceptable settlements, but the Tories are now prepared to fight it out to the finish in order to smash all the gains of the past.
The TUC must not be allowed to dump the struggle against the Tories and their union busting laws through a campaign restricted to protests and legal challenges.
The class war declared by this weak Tory government will be won by organising the massive strength of the working class in a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
February 1st must be turned from a protest into action to force the TUC leaders to either call a general strike or be replaced with a leadership that is prepared to take the struggle to its completion, that is the victory of the British socialist revolution.
There is no other way forward!!!
