DELEGATES to the TUC Congress unanimously passed Composite Motion 1 – the Campaign against the Minimum Service Levels (MSL) legislation – which instructs the TUC to ‘build mass opposition to the MSL laws, up to and including a strategy of non-compliance and non-cooperation to make them unworkable, including industrial action.’
This motion pledged ‘100% solidarity’ with any union attacked by laws that force workers to cross picket lines under the threat of instant dismissal, and make any union that refuses to cooperate with the legislation liable for fines to compensate the bosses for any losses they incur as a result of industrial action.
The composite makes a list of pledges on how to fight including building ‘an appropriate industrial response to defend workers’ right to strike’ along with the demand for ‘coordination of campaigns’ and legal challenges to the Tory anti-strike laws.
It further calls for a campaign to persuade employers and public bodies to refuse to implement the Minimum Service Levels law and for the TUC to organise a Special Congress ‘to explore options for non-compliance and resistance’.
The glaring omission from this motion is any instruction to force the TUC to mount a real fight to smash the Tory anti-strike laws and defend the right of workers to strike.
The crucial issue completely ducked by the motion – and avoided in the subsequent debate – is the fact that, as every worker knows, the only way to defeat the Tories is by putting pledges of coordinated action into practice by calling a general strike and bringing down this Tory government.
This issue was avoided for the reason that a general strike would set the trade unions and working class on a collision course with the Tory government and the laws of bourgeois democracy.
Speaking to the Guardian newspaper on Monday, TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak made the position of the TUC bureaucracy clear.
He pointed to the formal complaint the TUC had made to the International Labour Organisation and said: ‘We’ll explore other legal options as well. We have been very clear that the moment someone is actually sacked for exercising the right to strike, we will be looking to think about what the whole movement response looks like.’
He went on to insist: ‘What we are not doing is instructing people not to comply with the law, or instructing unions not to comply with the law. But we’ve got to look at all of our options.’
Having ruled out the only option that can defeat the Tories – to mobilise the huge strength of the working class in a general strike – all that remains for the TUC leaders is a useless appeal to the ILO and the courts to overturn the Tory law and for employers to ignore it in the hope that it proves ‘unworkable’.
Above all, Nowak and the TUC are putting their faith on a Starmer-led Labour government repealing all the Tory anti-union laws.
With Starmer openly positioning the Labour Party as the ‘saviour’ of bankrupt British capitalism, all the latest pledges faithfully trotted out by his deputy Angela Rayner to the TUC on Tuesday that Labour would repeal the latest anti-union laws ‘within a hundred days’ of taking office, are to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
This will go the way of Starmer’s previous pledges, including scrapping the Tory two child benefit scheme and nationalising public services, all dumped on the grounds that they are unaffordable for a capitalist system that can only survive by dumping the crisis on the backs of workers.
This latest pledge by Rayner is designed to try to keep the lid on the increasing demands of workers for the TUC to get off its knees and call a general strike immediately while the ruling class are still making their preparations for a class war coalition government to take on the working class.
The working class has the power to defeat this rabble of a Tory government, and the burning issue today is to force the TUC leaders to either exercise this power by calling a general strike or be removed and replaced with a new leadership prepared to lead the struggle to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
