YESTERDAY, Tory leader David Cameron hosted a breakfast meeting with the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, as part of his campaign to persuade the heads of the EU to allow Britain to re-negotiate the terms of membership.
In advance of this meeting, the general secretary of the TUC, Francis O’Grady, flew out to Brussels to meet with Schulz, in the words of the TUC, to ‘raise concerns about the prospect of an EU stripped of workers’ rights’.
At her meeting, O’Grady complained to Schulz that the Tory government was demanding all employment rights are ‘repatriated’, for a complete moratorium on new or better rights for workers in the EU and the right of British capitalism to create a two-tier workforce by slashing in-work benefits for migrant workers.
According to O’Grady: ‘We reject the false choice between leaving the EU or staying in an EU stripped of protections for workers, consumers and the environment. EU law is in many cases the last frontier for British workers – take that away and they will be left with no protections. I’m asking the President of the European Parliament to stand up to David Cameron, for British workers and for workers everywhere in Europe.’
In one statement, O’Grady has expressed the complete craven capitulation of the trade union bureaucracy before the Tory government. For O’Grady and the rest of the TUC leaders, the only defence open to the poor British working class is not its powerful trade union movement – built in violent and often illegal struggles with the bosses and governments – but by begging the bureaucrats of the EU to tell the nasty Cameron to be nicer to workers and respect their rights.
She is asking Euro MPs to ‘stand up to Cameron’ because the TUC leaders are too scared to stand up to him themselves. In the face of proposed legislation that will strip trade unions and workers of their legal right to strike to defend their jobs, wages and conditions, O’Grady is reduced to impotently begging for help.
Help from the very EU that is engaged in a vicious war to carry out a regime change against the anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece and force through cuts on the Greek workers and pensioners that will drive them into the gutter. For five years, the EU, the ECB and IMF have systematically done their best to smash up every right that Greek workers have.
The previous right-wing coalition government of Greece (which included the ‘socialist’ PASOK party) brought in emergency laws of ‘civilian conscription’ under which strikers were threatened with jail unless they returned to work – laws instituted at the instruction of the troika. This threat didn’t stop Greek workers from fighting. It was the government that had to back down.
The same is true in Britain. Time and again the working class has shown that it is more than prepared to take strike action and confront the government regardless of the repressive anti-union laws. Time and again the trade union leaders have stepped in to stop strikes regardless of overwhelming votes in favour.
It is the trade union leaders who are terrified of breaking the class laws of capitalism and are reduced to impotently begging for ‘protection’ from the representatives of European capitalism. The working class has no need for such protection; it is a powerful, undefeated class more than capable of dealing with a weak, divided Tory government that can only survive through the support of the reformists in the Labour Party and TUC leadership.
The time has come to remove these leaders who refuse to fight and replace them with a new leadership within the trade unions that will mobilise the full strength of the working class in a general strike to kick out this Tory government and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
This means the building of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP and Young Socialists as a matter of great urgency and we call upon every worker and young person to join us in this fight.
