15th March Birth of Our Power?
When the Radio 4 News at 7pm on 15th March could report first on Hunt’s Spring Statement, and then secondly note that it had almost been overshadowed by strikes on the day, its clear something significant is moving, at least potentially.
The strikes involved a range of unions- Prospect and the PCS in Government employers across the UK, NEU teachers in England, ASLEF and RMT, London Underground, BMA Junior Doctors in England, UCU University workers across the UK.
There was an impressive central London march and rally. I attended one called by the Wales TUC in central Cardiff (during my lunch break as I’m a trade union activist in the private sector). At the Cardiff rally there were of course veterans of many previous fights but there were also numbers of younger trade unionists. Indeed such was the scale of the action that many on strike would have been doing so for the first time.
The strikes had the focus of pay, jobs and conditions and the statistics tell the story. TUC research officer Alex Collinson tweeted that if wages had gone up at the same rate as before 2008 they’d be £233 a week higher.
Yet these were mostly one day or limited duration strikes part of a pattern of a significant rise in action since last summer. It’s the biggest strike wave at least for 10 years and perhaps rather longer. Yet there remain issues about how far victory can be achieved by our side. Here the trade union leaders are important.
In the strikes and victories of the 1970s a body of theory was generated, for example by James Hinton and Richard Hyman, about the nature and role of the trade union bureaucracy. That work I suspect is very largely unknown to activists in the current day.
Certainly union leaders have an interest in successful strikes. They attract more members and income and build the union’s strength- important matters. The interest in widening and generalising action at the political level is at best uneven though. Are we talking to the Tories or trying to get the Tories out? It’s not an issue confined to the UK. Similar questions arise in France with action on pensions.
Work in progress…
Leave a Reply