ON Sunday at the TUC Congress delegates voted unanimously to defend the right to strike, with GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny declaring: ‘If the Conservatives come to power they want to shackle the trade unions.
‘They want to sweep away the rights of public sector and private sector workers.’
Addressing the demand for 50% turn-outs to make strike ballots legal, Kenny pointed out that Justice Secretary Grayling was ‘elected by less than a third of the vote’.
He then publicly opposed calling a general strike.
He said: ‘This is not about a general strike. It’s far more real than that. When our members vote to come out on strike it will hit them.’
On the eve of the Congress TUC leader Frances O’Grady said of the government’s anti trade union plans: ‘The Conservative Party is not just proposing a few more bureaucratic obstacles that will make life a bit more difficult for trade unions.
‘Taken together they would effectively ban strikes by the back door.
‘And on top of that they would open up elected union leaders to increased surveillance by the state. They are not just an attack on fundamental liberties. They will act to lower living standards for the majority of the working people, whether or not they are union members.’
Despite the desperately serious situation that she outlined she agrees with the GMB’s Kenny that a general strike is ‘not real’.
This is why she has presided over the farce at the TUC Congresses where a motion to discuss the practicalities of a general strike is carried as an annual event, without any intention of calling it.
The TUC leaders are and have been presiding over a farce and are attempting to make a fool out of the working class.
While they are prepared to support a number of one day actions to protest at wage cutting and millions of trade unionist being plunged into poverty they are not prepared to mobilise the trade unions to hit the Tories with the only trade union action that they really fear, the indefinite general strike.
They are acting like the labour lieutenants of capitalism, holding the working class back while the ruling class sharpens its knife!
Who is then to save the working class from the offensive of the ruling class to smash their unions and living standards, that is being driven forward by the world crisis of capitalism.
These ‘unreal’ trade unions leaders are asking the working class to look to the Labour Party, to the feeble Fabian Miliband and even to a Labour-Liberal coalition to save them.
This is after all of the enormous betrayals of the 1997 to 2010 Labour governments, that openly served the rich and powerful and waged three major imperialist wars to suit the bosses and the bankers.
Any new Labour government will do exactly what the bosses want as the capitalist crisis deepens.
It is the understatement of the century that the working class must not tolerate having at its head this completely unreal TUC misleadership, at a time when real leaders are needed – who are not too frightened to call an indefinite general strike.
The trade unions must have at its head a revolutionary leadership prepared to mobilise the whole of the working class to bring down the bosses and the capitalist system.
The current leadership of the TUC must be sacked and a new leadership put in place that will call an indefinite general strike that will bring down the Tory-led coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.
The force that will lead this struggle are the youth who hate capitalism and the way that it is treating them and the mass of the working class and the middle class.
The Young Socialists, who marched to the TUC to demand a general strike, won massive support from trade union members but were rebuffed by the TUC leadership. They will now proceed to build a mass youth movement of hundreds of thousands of youth who will provide the revolutionary leadership to take the working class to power.
