IT was with much fanfare that the TUC announced on the 10th January that it would hold a national ‘protect the right to strike’ day on Wednesday 1st February.
This announcement promised that more information would be provided in the coming weeks about planned activities along with the vow by the TUC to fight the new strike curbs ‘every step of the way’.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: ‘On February the first we will hold events across the country against this spiteful new bill – which is unworkable and almost certainly illegal.’
These words were designed to convince workers that the TUC was finally taking national action.
It held out the promise of a nationwide campaign on that day to mobilise the working class and the trade unions to put an end to these laws designed by the Tories to turn workers into little more than slaves to the bosses.
Laws that the TUC itself has admitted tear up the rights of workers to strike, force workers to cross picket lines during strikes that have been democratically voted for by union members.
Laws that give bosses the power to sack on the spot any worker who refuses to obey their instruction to scab, without any rights to appeal.
Laws that make unions liable for fines of up to a million pounds if they refuse to comply with the orders handed down by the bosses and the Tory government.
Now it turns out that the words of defiance and a call to arms by the TUC are exactly just empty words to cover up the capitulation of Nowak and company to a Tory government, determined to smash independent trade unions replacing them with nothing more than Labour Fronts, whose only function is to enforce the will of the bosses on the working class.
In London, the only demonstration listed on the TUC website is organised by the National Education Union (NEU) at BBC Portland Place from 11am-1pm, called to coincide with the launch of national strike action by teachers across England and Wales.
The TUC site lists other ‘events’ scattered across the country with Cambridge being the closest one listed to London, the home of Parliament and the seat of the Tory government.
Parliament is completely off-limits as far as the TUC is concerned.
That is why this ‘day of action’ has been reduced to a day of TUC inaction with the working class left to organise regional protests and offer support to the picket lines of teachers and the 100,000 civil servants due to take national strike action on that day.
Workers do not need the TUC to tell them to support strikers fighting for decent pay increases – what they are increasingly demanding is that the trade unions end all this playing around with limited strikes, that achieve nothing in terms of pay, and instead get on with the real job of kicking this Tory government out by calling a general strike.
This massive wave of anger amongst workers and the middle classes against the Tories is precisely the reason why the TUC has refused to call any demonstration in London outside Parliament.
It rightly fears it would spark an uprising, leading to a national strike across the entire trade union movement, and that the TUC would not be able to contain it.
Instead, the TUC is attempting to disperse the militancy of workers, spread it around the country in locally organised protests, in the hope of wearing the working class down until it will accept all the Tory laws and the smashing up of independent trade unions.
It fears the revolutionary working class and will do everything possible to hold them back from the throats of the Tories.
The working class will never accept this, and the demand now must be for a national demonstration in London, and that the TUC leaders must be forced to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism or be removed and replaced with a leadership that is prepared to launch the struggle for workers power.
The the only way to defend workers and their unions is by dumping bankrupt capitalism and going forward with a socialist revolution.
