J30: one day strikes are not enough
Posted on Thursday 30 June, 2011
Filed Under Industrial relations
I DON’T know what the late Ralph Miliband read to his offspring by way of bedtime stories. But if Ed’s reluctance to back today’s public sector stoppage is anything to go by, Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘The Mass Strike’ did not feature strongly in his upbringing.
For my generation of the far left, which came to political awareness against a backdrop of the Winter of Discontent and the miners’ strike, this slim pamphlet from 1906 formed some sort of blueprint for what we were trying to achieve.
I’m not exactly sure what difference my presence as a skinny Trot student made on picket lines from Warrington to Wapping, but it was a point of honour to be there.
Real class conflict took place at the point of production, and was largely a male manual worker thing. White collar stoppages were all very well, albeit largely in an ancillary capacity.
The theory was, to use a period catchphrase, that ‘workers learn through struggle’. In other words, the very act of participation in industrial action was seen as in and of itself emancipatory and radicalising.
Backward ideas such as racism, sexism and – worst of all! – support for the Labour Party would evaporate as the proletariat inevitably gravitated towards [insert name of sect here].
This was all a long time ago, of course. Despite the comparisons to the past routinely on offer from some quarters, there is an enormous difference between the potential economic impact of an all-out indefinite strike by, say, steelworkers and a 24-hour walkout by, say, school teachers.
It’s just that in deindustrialised Britain, the former doesn’t happen anymore. And as the experience of recent decades underlines, prolonged series of one-day strikes sooner or later peter out, as members become demoralised at the loss of pay for no obvious gain.
Whatever the Daily Telegraph purports to think, such gestures are manifestly not designed to extract concessions by militancy or ‘bullying’. Their purpose is rather to strengthen the weak hand of union officials at the negotiating table, even as they accept terms that invariably concede almost everything the employers want.
The perspective really is as restricted as that, and once the bluster is stripped away, both sides are well aware this is the case.
In other words, Dave Prentis’s overblown insistence that he is about to take the labour movement through a more successful rerun of 1984-85 under his wise guidance is a mark of either incredible conceit or an astonishing degree of detachment from reality.
None of this means that ‘there is no point in striking’, or that socialist trade unionists should confine their politics to tabling all or nothing ultimatums. But in plain English, either they succeed in using J30 as a springboard towards a strategy that has some chance of success, or the fight is going down to certain defeat.
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26 Responses to “J30: one day strikes are not enough”
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fuck. you are more fucking miserable than i am.
and i have a hand missing
J30
had an Apple and Mango one of those the other day
What a wonderful pamphlet that is.
One day strikes can shift the balance. But perhaps you’re right to echo Tony Cliff:
The union bureaucracy is both reformist and cowardly. Hence its ridiculously impotent and wretched position. It dreams of reforms but fears to settle accounts in real earnest with the state (which not only refuses to grant reforms but even withdraws those already granted); it also fears the rank-and-file struggle which alone can deliver reforms.
Surely you could be skinny again?
Well Teachers going out on Strike can mean that parents have no one to look after thier kids. So Teachers play 2 roles – educator and nanny. The teachers go out on strike and who looks after the kids? Steel workers striking may just mean that a cruise misslile or 2 is not built that week. Who knows?
The right wing have gone nuts over these strikes as they go nuts over every strike. God knows how they would react to a prolonged strike. Kelvin Mackenzie (sorry if you are eating) typifies the attitude, he is like Brennan on speed, spewing out untruths as if they are divine proclamations, calculated to appeal to what he thinks are the idiot masses. (and the masses seem to lap it up so maybe he isn’t wrong about everything).
This tactic of playing one set of workers against another has gone on for centuries. Mackenzie attempted to get the support of private sector workers for his brand of free market neo liberalism by telling them how dreadful the private sector was in relation to the public sector. Talk about irony or a paradox or Orwellian! In Marx’s day the mine owners in England said to English workers, yes you are poor but look at the Belgians! Then Marx pointed out that the Belian miners rioted and were shot for doing so!
How the right wing can again and again get away with this is truely depressing. How they have drawn a straight line between bankers and speculators playing fast and loose with the economy to an attack on public sector workers and Unions is a trick worthy of David Blaine.
Wake up folks, the world is not made of cheese!
What do you suggest as an alternative tactic/strategy?
A teachers strike has a potentially vast impact as it means that for every kid under the age of 16 a parent has to potentially take a day off work.
One such day is indeed no big deal – but make a strike last weeks and months and every employer in the country will be complaining at the huge disruption caused to their workforce.
Plus time it right and you throw out the entire exam and university admissions systems as well.
And if the teachers unions are capable of elementary solidarity there is bugger all the government can do to break a strike – however much the Tory scum media rant there is simply not an industrial reserve army of scab teachers who can be drafted in.
So this one is potentially winnable if only the unions have the will to fight (and staging a one day strike at the fag end of the school year after all the exams are done doesn’t fill one with confidence).
Now an all-out strike starting at the new school year would be hugely more effective – even if they draft in a parents army of scabs to turn classrooms into creches no effective teaching could be done in them (and what about background checks – can any paedo just volunteer?).
In fact possibly the teachers are the only unionised work force left with real power to radically disrupt the whole nation – if only they realised that.
Solidarity is virtually non existant. Prolonged strikes will only alienate ”Hard working families” further. I work in the private sector and I’m sick of the ” We have to suffer so why shouldn’t they? ” attitude to the public sector. These morons ( and there’s plenty of them ) can’t see that we’re all under threat. I can only see further pain and the majority will lie down and take it.
Having marched through yet another 1 day strike today I have vast experience David on knowing how innefective they can be in themselves. Though this time it’s supremely ironic that this one again means one days less service into the very pension I am fighting for.
I can be as cynical, frustrated and angrier than the rest. So many scabs I work with, pretending there is a neutral and hiding in the corner, tell me they are confused and not political. Fecking hell, which part of being screwed do they not understand? Which one exactly of their steps across a picket line is not political?
I think you have it David in your reference to Kelvin ‘pond life’ McKenzie. All the lumpen British Public are drip fed is the likes of his right wing lies. Day and night, 24/7, year after year. The majority see, hear and know nothing else. Most being too bloody exhausted now from ill paid battery hen slavery, to look for any alternative. God knows it is nigh on impossible to find it in a media which is 99% owned by the bastards doing this to us.
Yes ever since last May I have dreamed of my union calling an indefinate strike. The reasons to justify are countless. But as we cannot even yet get even the union members to be bothered to turn out to vote in a ballot for day, let alone vote for it, it would be bloody suicidal.
Of course it’s desperate and screamingly frustrating. But for an academic socialist David you can be so defeatist. Working people over the past few hundred years have been in much darker corners than this. Much, much darker. Yet still there comes the time when they have surmounted the incredible odds. Maybe it’s why we call it ‘struggle’.
Next step? A 24/7 indefinate mass picket outside chief scab Milliband’s residence. It’s high bloody time we dealt with the collaborators in the so called Labour Movement who after all made this all out assault on working people possible.
I understand he has surgery booked soon to help his bloody awful nasel twang……just a thought?
Martin – Next step? A 24/7 indefinate mass picket outside chief scab Milliband’s residence. It’s high bloody time we dealt with the collaborators in the so called Labour Movement who after all made this all out assault on working people possible.
Martin it makes me again think about something that Bob Crow mentioned. It could be that civil disobedience is well worth looking at. I’m guessing that when Gandhi started he didn’t have the support of the majority in India, so being in a minority doesn’t stop you using this tactic.
I’d agree with the list of reasons why the yesterday’s strike has underlying weaknesses. You could also mention that many workers in the public sector, from Job Centres to local government, are no longer covered by pension schemes.
The only way to make an impact in modern terms, a ‘mass strike’, is a ‘mass movement’ of protest. Something on the lines of the French actions last year, which if they didn’t achieve their full aims certainly will make any government think twice about anything more in the UK direction.
But then we certainly do have a lot of the ‘misery loves company’ attitude of those doing badly outside on things like pensions towards the Public sector.
“You could also mention that many workers in the public sector, from Job Centres to local government, are no longer covered by pension schemes.”
Many? Is this voluntary? I am not aware of employees being excluded.
I suspect he means agency workers.
Ye I thought that but agency workers have been first in line with cuts. Many local authorities have introduced what are called cross cutting savings and one big area is Agency. So they have been first out of the door.
The agency workers that remain tend to be cover for building cleaning, Refuse collection, Grounds maint etc – those areas where you need agency to cover for sickness etc.
@Mr Jelly/olly
“and I have a hand missing”
No sex life then ?
GW
au countrairree
it is V doing the busines. Try sitting on your left hand and make it numb then give it a good few thrusts. well werTH it all
I see Dominque Strauss=Kahn has been realeased on bail and the papers are talking about the case against him collapsing due to his accuser being a money-launderer with questionable political connections. Lots of lovely conspiracy theories about who was behind it!!! Haven’t laughed so much since OBL got a visit from the Navy Seals.
No I don’t mean only agency workers – Councils like Suffolk County Council employ people as causuals themselves (for example the library I’m writing this in), and people on short-term contracts who don’t get pensions.
Actually on DSK it’s pretty clear that the woman was trying to take advantage of her position – very clear. But equally clear that sexual relations took place.
As Tendance Coatesy, for all your up-to-date French news, reports.
I’m not sure “as the experience of recent decades underlines, prolonged series of one-day strikes sooner or later peter out, as members become demoralised at the loss of pay for no obvious gain.” is strictly true – having been through a few pay rounds made up like that myself as union rep, B.sec or latterly just plain member , they often win a small movement – a percentage point (a half a percentage point , even), some weighting to the lower paid etc. And a short-ish series of one day strikes usually leads to more members. But if you want a bigger answer, you need to pose a bigger question. Also worth saying that there are a few bridges between the “bureacratic mass strikes” (the 1-dayers) and something more powerful. Joint, or synchronised action obviously has a remarkably different feel – as we have just seen. Even a set of spaced out 3-day strikes has a different effect.
Relieved and gratified to report that many I work with, those of us who had the sense to strike yesterday, were holding their head just a mite higher at work this morning.
Never underestimate David the burning psychological need for such action. Any action. Even for now if it’s 1 day. It’s a one day release from the chronic, grinding and oppressive workplace cultures we now find ourselves. Anyone with any knowledge of the inside of the public sector right now will know that the Mgmt culture and speak is truly Orwellian. The single biggest cause of absence and sickness, no surprise, is chronic stress and depression. Even workers undergoing Chemo have had employer warnings for absence. Consistent with forcing the sick and unemployed into wage slavery and telling them ‘Work is Good for You’. Any work that is.
I could write a book on it. Reduced to isolated sheep as we are, expected to build our own ‘private’ slaughter houses, finding that there are other sheep wanting to bleat even louder than you restores some bloody sanity.
Even if we lose and are sold out on the pensions fight, yesterday’s ‘one day’ was a bloody much needed mental health boost for many I work with.
As it is I am daring to glow in the more than expected public support yesterday. Just allow me to fantasise the Con Dem (Labour) bastards have really shot themselves in both feet on this one. Coming as it does days after they were forced into the smoke and mirrors defence of NHS privatisation. Which many in the BMA and elsewhere have seen for what it is and are still fighting.
Maybe just a few more eyes were opened and heads knocked together yesterday. Certainly if you heard Francis Maude struggling with pension figures on the ‘Today’ programme yesterday, they could have been just days away from admitting this is just about creating Britain PLC and privatising everything in site. Then I read Osbourne returned from Wimbledon to give sessions on how to better the ‘lies’.
Billy Bragg spat it on target yesteday. It’s about making public sector workers affordable fodder for the fucking bankers and corporate gangsters who created this misery. Having reduced their own workers conditions and pension’s to nigh on wage slavery.
Civil Disobediance Les. Yes. Maybe Bob Crows point is if such action takes the tired British public’s eyes off Kelvin McKenzie and Cheryl Crow’s latest bleedin hair do, we win every time.
We can only win minds and hearts if people are given a chance to hear us. UK Uncut is a bloody good start
Bulgey eyed little scab
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHSxcoNR3Jw
Great Link. If New Labour were supposed to be ‘alternative comedy’, all of us stopped bloody laughing a very long time ago.
The Labour Party now has as much credibility to working people as Hitler would have had as a Rabbi.
You don’t think your economic analysis is wrong to start with?
Read the right wing press and they are not talking about wages,salaries and pensions :they are talking about house prices.
The old militant left was completely blind-sided by the rise post-1970 of “ownership society” (see Wikipedia) politics or asset owning democracy by which the right-wing ,knowing they could n’t really provide jobs or distribute purchasing-power through the wage system, cranked up their popular homeownership number.Big advantages: they did n’t have to use their own money but could rely on the national credit going into housing first; people with big mortgages don’t strike: providing millions of people with jobs is too much like hard work.
During the early days of Homeownerism ,as this form of politics is sometimes called (we live in a One-Party Homeownerist State) ,lefties of the Carry on Picketing type ,completely ignored huge Property bubbles (the biggest spike in house prices was early 70′s )and went round losing friends and alienating people by declaring that the Provisional IRA was a a socialist organisation and that immigration was never,ever a problem.(Anybody with doubts about either was Not A Proper Socialist.)
The point is that Labour politics was heavily influenced early on by Henry George ,who wanted to eliminate land owners of all types as a class,but his idea of keeping land and property prices
down by a tax, while wages and commercial profits rise all around, is now completely lost on lefties who ,with a few honourable exceptions ,are only too willing to take the capitalists’ bribe of continually rising house/land prices (beats working!) ,ignoring the bleedin’obvious that you can’t have continually rising house prices without global property bubbles and busts. You can’t logically have rising house prices and rising wages and deferred wages(pensions) either.
Erm. Confused rant? Well it bloody confuses me I am pleased to say. Who the hell is Henry George? Whoever he was I can glean enough to know his nightmares must have been bloody limited to the snake eating it’s tail, with no more analysis beyond that.
Some of the ‘picketing lefties’ of us left still prefer another political philosopher. The one who spent a life graphically illustrating that in a market free for all, ‘Property is theft’. In this system my labour is their theft. Get it? He and we do have better dreams and hopes for the future than whoever Henry Geoorge was. Cannot be arsed to google him.
Not sure where you were in the 80′s but every ‘leftie’ I knew was screaming from the roof tops against the privatisation of housing, and the rest.
We could have written (and did) todays headlines on chronic homelessness and squalid ‘Landlord’ exploitation. You and I the famous taxpayer picks up the tab for the thieving land lords.
Not exactly a sensible way to live together is it?
Surprising someone who has such a high regard for such a comparatively minor figure as “Property is Theft” Proudhon has never heard of Henry George and altogether typical of the self-satisfied “Those were the days” 80′s lefty that he can’t be bothered to look him up.The Georgist explanation for the recession as emanating from the property market is more logical than anything coming from the Marxist left with the notable exception of Jerry Jones in the Morning Star who incorporates Georgism into his analysis.
Don’t worry: keep smoking the stuff and listening to authentic rock and roll (played by Englishmen from the Home Counties).
Maybe I have had enough of ‘Ism’s'? Some of us do not need them, or dope, or rock and roll, to click what is happening.
I did not need them in the 80′s. The ‘picketing left’ have been proved tragically right on every single count. I certainly do not need them now. But thanks.