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Global crisis and an international fightback

Alex Doherty — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:59:25 +0000

THE global economic crisis threatens to hit poor people hardest amid the challenge to defend millions of jobs. But next Tuesday (October 7) campaigners will launch a fightback with the biggest gathering of international development and labour-related organisations in Britain.

War on Want will play a leading part in this TUC event at Congress House in London which marks the World Day for Decent Work, co-ordinated by the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation.

Almost a decade ago, the International Labour Organisation developed the concept of decent work. It defined the concept as “productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. Decent work involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income; provides security in the workplace and social protection for workers and their families; offers better prospects for personal development and encourages social integration; gives people the freedom to express their concerns, to organise and participate in decisions that affects their lives; and guarantees equal opportunities and equal treatment for all.”

Yet besides the grim statistic that almost 200 million people remain unemployed around the globe, far greater numbers are underemployed or not paid for their work.

In addition, half of the world’s workforce earns less than two dollars a day; more than 12 million women and men work in slavery; 200 million children aged under 15 work, rather than go to school; more than two million people die from work-related accidents and diseases every year.

Moreover, people in developed and developing countries work harder for less money. Companies use the threat of outsourcing to drive down wages and hard-won freedoms, such as the right to collective bargaining and to strike. And trade unionists who fight these trends are dismissed, threatened, jailed and even killed.

The Congress House event will feature more than 50 workshops, films, exhibitions and stalls from unions and development charities, as well as fair and ethical trade groups and academic institutions.

War on Want will lead a session on how free trade rules have destroyed millions of jobs through cheap imports and the new threat to livelihoods posed by the “Global Europe” policy of European Union trade commissioner Peter Mandelson. This will take place from 11.15 am-12.30pm, with speakers including War on Want trade campaigns officer Dave Tucker and Wendy Willems, the charity’s international programmes research officer.

As developing countries resist wealthy nations’ pressure in the World Trade Organisation, the EU aims to bully them one by one into accepting terms that will increase poverty.

Another disturbing trend concerns the growing numbers of people – overwhelmingly women – forced to make their living in the so-called informal economy, without social protection or rights and in precarious jobs.

Zambia, once among the richest African countries, slumped in the 1970s when copper prices collapsed. In return for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the government slashed health and education spending, privatised industries and opened the economy to foreign business.

Now seven in 10 Zambians face life on less than $1 a day, with many struggling to survive through small-scale trading in street markets.

Global Europe defines the EU’s interests in terms of an aggressive market access agenda on behalf of European business. This identifies three key areas in which the EU will press to secure new market access opportunities for its corporations in external markets by renewing commitment to reducing tariffs in developing countries and opposing or preventing other so-called barriers to trade; removing controls which impede access for European business to developing countries’ natural resources, especially in energy; enforcing intellectual property rights, liberalising services and opening public procurement markets to transport, construction and utilities companies.

The Global Europe strategy also seeks to favour corporate interests by lowering social and environmental protection to match US deregulation.

The ILO’s reference to a “fair income” in its decent work definition contrasts with the poverty pay for up to 90-hour weeks toiled by millions of garment workers making clothes for British retailers. In Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, China and Sri Lanka, employees in sweatshops earn far less than needed to meet bills for food, housing and healthcare.

In June, new research launched by War on Want and the campaign group Labour Behind the Label showed Indian workers making Tesco clothes toiling long hours for as little as 16p an hour – only half a living wage. In January this year, War on Want revealed new evidence from the Garment and Textile Workers’ Union in India that employees producing clothes for Matalan and H&M earned only £38 a month, well under a living wage. And a month later the charity found workers in Kenya and Colombia facing poor wages, health problems and job insecurity, supplying flowers as Valentine’s Day gifts in British supermarkets.

In another workshop organised by War on Want, from 1.30-2.45pm, the speakers will include Simon McRae, its senior campaigns officer, who will describe the charity’s support for garment workers battling for a living wage.

The world financial crisis has sparked widespread debate about its effect on the plight of millions of poor people. The TUC event offers a timely opportunity for activists to join forces in the battle to save jobs and step the campaign to ensure that all employment meets the criteria to justify the term decent work.

Paul Collins is media officer at War on Want

Death of the industrials

Alex Doherty — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:00:12 +0000

They were the terrors of Fleet Street – irreverent, anarchic, hard drinking, hard living and often cynical. Tony Blair hated them and invariably referred to them in a sneering tone in his uneasy speeches at the Trade Union Congress. Government ministers – Labour as much as Conservative – as well as employers often trembled in their presence. Even trade union leaders felt they had to treat them with a wary suspicion.

And yet they were hard-working, up at all hours, hanging around in pubs and on doorsteps as they plied their trade. They were often sexist and some were homophobic. They were not fond of abroad, either. They hunted in packs and they gave no quarter. But they also maintained a strong esprit de corps as they saw themselves as a special band of brothers.

Now they have almost all disappeared from the scene. Next week will witness their last hurrah with the final end of their traditional farewell Congress speech that first began in 1924. Memories are fast fading of their deeds and misdeeds. They have gone the way of factories and mines, car plants and steel works – into the industrial museum of British social history. These are the industrial/labour correspondents. Until recently, they constituted a group – albeit a shrinking one. Now the survivors make up little more than an informal network. Their rapid demise, which began in the late 1980s, has been an unlamented event for the smooth people of the “new” Labour project whose own demise is rapidly approaching

Thirty years ago, industrial reporting attracted some of the best and brightest in national journalism. Their reports from the frontline of Britain’s labour wars invariably made the front page. Some could even influence the Financial Times share index by what they wrote. They were the troublemakers, not spoon-fed by manipulative spin-doctors. Their sources were everywhere and not confined to the exclusivity of the Palace of Westminster or Whitehall department briefings. “We don’t like you lot because we cannot control you as we can the parliamentary lobby”, arch-spinner Peter Mandelson once told me.

Of course, the industrials were never perfect – far from it. The group was often divided viciously by the politics of the Cold War, which added spice to the fierce competition. Many passed through or remained in the orbit of the Communist Party – in spirit, if not in membership.

The party’s effective industrial base gained them access to a diffuse range of personal contacts inside many unions. Others avoided the CP’s embrace and ploughed a different furrow. But it was hard not to have some kind of commitment to the labour movement. Too many became much too close to particular trade union leaders. Most identified with the unions in an uncritical and narrow way. It made them less aware of new trends in the labour market and a changing world of work They were often too much a hallelujah chorus and not enough a fifth column within organised labour’s ranks.

But they inhabited a wonderfully unpredictable and fascinating world with its daily routine of press briefings, seminars, lunches, dinners and long sessions in the pub. Mapping an industrial correspondent’s life could take you from central London to a picket line of unofficial strikers at the Longbridge car plant in Birmingham, talking to miners in pit villages, reporting from once important union conferences in seedy seaside resorts.

Not all industrial correspondents came from the working class or provincial backgrounds. Many were middle class with guilty consciences about class. Some even went to Eton or other such schools and even Oxbridge, although they tended to keep such secrets hidden.

A number rose to eminence in national journalism: John Cole, Peter Jenkins, Paul Routledge, John Lloyd, John Elliott and Donald McIntyre. Others became eminent doyens in the group: Geoffrey Goodman, Eric Wigham, Sir Trevor Evans, Hugh Chevins and Margaret Stewart. Many others passed through the group’s ranks that in its heyday grew to more than 70.

Not all they wrote deserves to be buried with them. Much was of long-forgotten strikes and endless wage negotiations and doomed incomes policies. Such work soon ended as fish-and-chip wrappings. But some articles gave an accurate, authentic picture and analysis of what was going on and why in a predominantly manual workers’ world that somehow mattered.

What happened? In part, the industrials were the victims of social change. The new workplaces of computers, hot-desking, de-skilling and information technology, open-plan offices and 24-hour news replaced the old. They were also casualties of the demise of the labour movement.

But there were other profound reasons for their decline and fall. The revolution in Fleet Street’s technology with the utter defeat of the once mighty print unions was a devastating blow. Previously, newspaper proprietors and their hapless managers were at the mercy of the small elite of printers with their power to stop the presses in the fight for differentials and perks. Some Fleet Street bosses paid out wages to fictitious workers such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to keep production rolling. Others provided print leaders with grace and favour flats and even allowed them to run recruitment agencies for Fleet Street jobs. After Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless escape to Wapping in 1986, the print unions lost their grip on the means of production. Most importantly, employers no longer feared them. For much of the time the industrials had been – whether they liked it or not – pillion riders with the printers who had kept a close eye on what they reported. Now news desks no longer needed to worry about lost production. Their industrials could be culled.

But the waning of industrial reporting in its widest sense should concern anyone who wants to know what is happening in this country’s workplaces today. Often forgotten now are the important sources contained in the long gone nationalised industries – especially in coal, steel, the railways and even the public utilities. The best industrials needed to know a good deal about those commanding heights of the political economy. Then there were the employer organisations – particularly the CBI and the Engineering Employers’ Federation. Journalists also needed to know the twists and turns of government economic policy. They were always far more than the convenors of the trade union interest. I recall following the complexities of manpower policy and labour markets, health and safety and training, productivity and diversity. A good industrial was absorbed in a range of widely different worlds of work at home and abroad. Their desk was piled high with government reports, academic monographs, trade union and employer press releases and a large number of books about labour economics, history, politics and international (and especially European) social affairs.

The centrality of work grew more obvious at the very time when reporting the subject began to fade away. The young and ambitious were now to find fame in financial reporting or on rugged lands in the Middle East. Or they sought careers in television with its obsession with triviality and personality glitz. There was a dumbing-down of reporting in general. For industrials, it spelt the end. However, the world of work has not gone away. Now it is covered in advert-related supplements, niche journalism, soft features and uncritical puff stories about no-nonsense entrepreneurs obsessed with the share price, their share options, downsizing and corporate restructuring.

One result of this is the almost complete absence of reporting about work in the mainstream media. In the United States, there are only about three full-time industrials in newspapers remaining in the entire country. The picture is little better here. But Britain is heading into a deep recession. Millions face unemployment. Power and influence has gone to the few and not the many. After 11 years of this Labour Government, we now live in a society and economy closer to neo-liberal America than the European social market.

Occasionally, a report on workplace inequalities and class divisions exposes the world that still exists: of poverty pay for women and the young, exploited immigrant workers, old male manual workers with no hope. What we need desperately is the emergence of a new kind of labour journalism that will address all of these outrages. There seems little chance of this. The combative years of the industrials are not going to return. But at least we can call for an irreverent, uncompromising, toughly realistic coverage of the world of neo-liberal capitalism we now live in.

Robert Taylor was labour editor of The Observer from 1976-1988 and employment editor of the Financial Times from 1994-2001

Young people harassed by Labour yobs!

Ellie Keen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:37:43 +0000

For the second year in a row child poverty has risen. Children in poverty increased by 100,000 in 2006-7 on top of the 200,000 rise in 2005-6 (before housing costs). And that was at the height of the economic boom – the coming recession will make it worse still.

Figures for child poverty after housing costs are even worse, with 3.9 million living in relative poverty instead of the target of less than 3.3 million (relative being 60% of average earnings).

Thirty per cent of children – yes, that’s nearly one in three – live in poverty in the UK (all statistics from government website) and the figure is rising despite New Labour’s tax and credit reforms. Labour’s promise in 1997 of halving child poverty may be missed by one million.

But the government’s failings are even worse. Last month, the Children’s Commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland released a damning report to the United Nations that highlighted how legal and political attacks on young people’s rights and living conditions have intensified over the past few years.

The report highlights a “very punitive approach to misbehaviour” in the UK and that the UK has a low age of criminal responsibility (10 years compared with an EU average of 14), locking up many more children and young people than most European countries. In addition, the report exposes how severe child poverty makes the UK stand out from much of Europe, with bad health, poor education, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy.

There is a clear racial dimension to child poverty. The commissioners’ report condemns the treatment of young asylum seekers who are “consistently treated differently” and experience “serious breaches of their rights”, while a recent House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee report found that rates of poverty were twice as high among children in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the UK.

Labour’s approach to youth since 1997 has been underpinned with Tory rhetoric such as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, but in reality has focused on the former and not the latter. Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) have been used mainly on young people, criminalising youth for activities that under criminal law would not be offences. There’s no ‘innocent until proven guilty’ when it comes to Asbos: no trial, no jury, no case for the defence. But it’s a criminal offence to breach an Asbo – with penalties including heavy fines, and even imprisonment. The latest Home Office statistics (from 2006) show that 61 per cent of all Asbos on young people were breached. As part of the same package of legislation, dispersal orders have allowed police to ban gatherings of young people in certain places, which threaten groups of more than three young people with criminalisation.

Alarmingly, new technology has also started being used to target young people indiscriminately. The “mosquito” device projects a loud high pitched noise that can only be heard by young people in order to disperse them from an area.

Workers Power spoke to a young woman in Huddersfield who described its effect. “There is one outside Kingsgate shopping centre which is on constantly. It doesn’t hurt but it’s distressing, it’s really unpleasant and just makes you want to run away.”

In a further attack, the Labour government has cut funding for youth centres, with many having closed or been threatened with closure, and has built on many of the remaining inadequate urban green spaces in the UK. Schools have sold off playing fields to developers. The result has been that young people in Britain have far fewer places to meet and socialise –important because young people often feel the need to escape the restrictive environment of home and family.

With widespread poverty, victimisation by local government and the police, racism and a deteriorating standard of life, young people in Britain have never been more alienated from society.

Despite the government’s age discrimination laws, the minimum wage for young workers is officially lower than for over 21s. Lower pay in most workplaces and rising costs of living are forcing those who would choose to leave home to stay in unhappy family situations. School life is becoming increasingly difficult for younger teenagers who have had to put up with a huge burden of homework and examinations.

Little wonder then that the report by the Children’s Commissioners point to the fact that young people in Britain drink more alcohol and smoke more cannabis than in the rest of Europe. The report also shows that the mental health of children has deteriorated over the past 30 years, with one in 10 children between the ages of five and 16 suffering a clinically recognised mental disorder.

Young people are easy scapegoats for the cowardly Labour government. Its attacks on wages, education, social and health care are causing many social problems, and are increasing levels of poverty and crime. The media whips up panic about “chavs” and “hoodies” – this is another example of how young people are victimised for social problems caused by poverty and alienation.

But young people have shown that they can be the most energetic when it comes to fighting back. Young people led the way in organising demonstrations and walkouts against the Iraq war in 2003, and came to take a leading role in anti-capitalist struggles across Europe in early 2000-02. Today, young people have the potential to fight back against the poverty caused by the Labour Party today, and against racists like the BNP who are trying to take advantage of disillusionment to divide us against ourselves.

The trade union movement should break its silence on the issue of young people, and condemn the Labour governments attacks on youth. They should rally the support of young people for workers’ struggles against low pay, privatisation and cutbacks. They should launch a huge recruitment drive to organise young workers, fight for equalisation for the minimum wage and an end to low pay.

Young people also need their own political voice: a revolutionary working class youth movement, run by young people, for young people, which can organise in the schools, colleges and workplaces to resist the government’s attacks on the youth and link resistance to the worldwide struggle against capitalism.

Why do the unions keep handing over their money?

JamieSW — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:03:27 +0000

What did it do for Gordon Brown’s ego, to spend a morning with Barack Obama? There’s his guest attracting cheering crowds of tens of thousands in every city, while Gordon must consider it a good day if he completes a speech without making a puddle.

Instead of Obama, Brown’s people should get him to meet people less popular to make him feel better, so his schedule goes: “7.45am – Discussion on EU expansion with Radovan Karadzic; 8.30am – Breakfast meeting on trade regulations with bloke who pretended to disappear in a canoe.”

Maybe it was this thinking that meant he had a weekend conference with the trade unions. They suggested that Brown should promise to amend one or two of the laws that Blair boasted were “the most restrictive union laws in Europe”, but instead they were told they’d get nothing at all, so the unions said that was all right and they’d carry on providing 90 per cent of Labour’s funding. And the whole point of unions is to be smart at bargaining. They must come away from markets, bragging: “We got a brilliant deal on that rug. We paid double the asking price and the man at the stall gets to keep the rug. And he let us off half the price of delivery.”

How does the Government sell this to the unions? Do they say: “We simply can’t go on ignoring you at the old rates. Across the world the cost of ignoring is soaring to record prices and we’ve all seen the reports from South America and India, where some people haven’t been ignored for over a month. So if we are to fulfil our historic role of telling you to piss off you will have to increase your contributions”.

Presumably the great trade union speeches of the future will go: “Brothers and sisters, I can promise you your union is working night and day in an effort to be utterly humiliated and ignored. Just this morning I personally spent two hours ringing a British Telecom call centre, and listened to 11 tracks of Celine Dion and a whole movement of Vivaldi, without once getting through.”

Not just on the laws, but on the growing inequality, the war, the 42 days detention, pensions and everything, this Government has not just ignored the unions but taken delight in doing so because they think it proves they’re not Old Labour. And it’s the unions’ own fault for refusing to modernise. Instead of giving the Labour Party millions and expecting protection for their members they should hand over 50 grand and demand a peerage. Because you can’t keep living in the past.

The Government may argue they can’t appear to agree to the demands of a narrow layer such as the unions. But luckily they do find a way of agreeing to the demands of the much wider group of managing directors of supermarkets, arms companies and newspapers.

For example, Terry Leahy, chairman of Tesco, was invited on to a panel making laws about town planning, and Digby Jones, former head of the CBI, was given a post in the Government. Because company directing is the trade that most needs protecting in uncertain times.

Whole communities of managing directors meet up every evening in gentlemen’s clubs and fret: “If this board of executives was ever shut down, it wouldn’t just be the major shareholders who’d be finished, it would be the whole darn executive community. This area relies on managing directing, there are families I know that have never known anything else going back nine generations. Accepting bonuses is in their blood, it’s the only life they know.”

Obviously the Government couldn’t go on listening to the demands of self-interested cliques such as firefighters and nurses, and instead they’ve taken the trouble to go on holiday with people like Rupert Murdoch, who must tremble with emotion and stutter: “At last I feel someone’s taking notice of little me.”

Yet somehow, no matter how much the unions are battered about by Labour, they keep handing over their money. But the areas where unions have defied the trend and grown has been where they’re seen to be defending the workforce in the traditional fashion. The teachers’ unions recruited members following the recent strike, the journalists’ union has had some success, and the railworkers’ union has doubled its membership in London, as a result of throughly “old-fashioned” methods, including having a union leader, Bob Crow, who’s so traditional he often gets his words magnificently tangled.

During a dispute about tea-breaks he appeared on London regional news to say: “It has got to the point where some of my members are no longer allowed out for a urination.” That’s a proper union leader.

Miliband strikes

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:15:03 +0000

What a day for the androids! Miliband half comes out as a leadership challenger, then backs down under pressure from Downing Street, but then it is noticed that he wouldn’t explicitly rule out a leadership challenge. On the basis of this hopeless placard, Labour’s demoralised members have nothing – neither policies nor charisma nor added common sense – to hope for in a Miliband leadership. As a pronunciamento from a plotting putschist it lacks everything, including novelty. “Labour needs to change and change now” is how The Guardian summarises Miliband’s intervention. In fact, the argument is that Labour must not change under any circumstances, but must defend everything it has done, and insist that the only flaw is that it didn’t do it faster and better. Even the language must remain the same, the better to reinforce a stifling orthodoxy – “the many, not the few”, “change” this, “radical” that, “modernisation” the other… Whoever wrote this drivel for Miliband has the mind of a small child, and he better give it back.

It was mentioned in the papers the other day that if the swing at Glasgow East were repeated in Labour’s remaining heartlands (how hollow that term is beginning to seem), there would only be a dozen Labour MPs left after the next general election. The Tories have a clear plurality in every sector of the electorate, whether you stratify them by gender, region, age, or ‘social class’ (see poll [pdf]). From leading by 10% this time last year, Labour is now behind 19% (poll [pdf]). Recent polling evidence [pdf] suggests that the government’s core policies of pay restraint in the public sector and tax breaks for corporations and the rich are deeply unpopular. Unsurprisingly, a party that assures us there is no such thing as class and then goes on to take the side of the ruling class in every key policy area or battle is making itself look a bit ridiculous and contemptible. Because of the government’s commitment to privatization (what Miliband somnolently calls ‘NHS reform’), New Labour is now even less trusted on the NHS than the Tories. That is a colossal reversal, and it shows that while people did support massive public investment, you can’t disaggregate that investment from what is done with it. If you plough billions into colossally wasteful PFI projects, which everyone knows are wasteful and reduce the quality of care provided, you don’t get brownie points. If you ram through a raft of market-driven measures and internal competition, which is the reverse of what Labour promised to do, you don’t improve people’s experience of the health service. Naturally, people are turning against the governing party on what was once its biggest strength. I don’t think I need to keep underlining the point: New Labour is in meltdown on all fronts, and the cause of it is policy. The Miliband clarion call for ‘change’ actually maintains that all will be well if you only explain to the voters that New Labour was right all along, and that everything is going fabulously well.

This is not just a foolish political logic, but part of a dangerous epoch we are in. When people are suffering, stressed, in pain, they will look for solutions, not soothing bromides. And if real solutions aren’t in evidence, the pseudo-solutions of the far right may gain a bigger foothold. Look at what’s happened just today: British Gas put up prices by 35%. What can Gordon Brown say about this? He wouldn’t dream of nationalising the energy giants. He is unlikely to even consider a tax on energy profits and a mandatory cut in fuel bills. He surely isn’t going to ask us to ‘stop wasting energy’, is he? So, the recession is going to kick in, alongside soaring food and energy prices, and the government can only insist on belt-tightening from its constituents and obedience from its supporters. The trade unions got precious little for their supposedly militant demands in Warwick Two, and there is a reason for this: because they fundamentally accept the system that is crashing and burning, they have to accept that it needs to be rescued with wage restraint and public sector spending curbs. And they are subject to intense pressure to reinforce the government’s line on ‘belt-tightening’ with their membership. Only a powerful, countervailing pressure from the rank and file could possibly stiffen their spines. Without working class militancy of the kind we have seen in Germany and, recently, Poland, we are going to see the politics of despair and reaction thrive.

As for Miliband, one last question: where did this idea that he is some kind of a rising star come from? I gather that the papers like him, but who else does? Is he even remotely electable? Transplanted into one of the safest Labour seats in the country, where his predecessor had a 56.8% majority (Miliband has helped chisel that down to 40.8%, and probably much lower still come 2010), has he ever really been tested? Both Blair and Brown had years of political streetfighting in them before they got to power, but Miliband has always been essentially a Blairite mini-me for as long as he has been in politics. The man is a suit-stuffer, probably set to go down as the Portillo of the 2010 election. So, again, enlighten me: who said he was a star?

What does David Davis stand for? (Part 2)

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:52:56 +0000

This is the second of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part one can be viewed here.

In concluding his speech on the campaign to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme, the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney, explains:

“We knew that confrontation would be inevitable and when at last the government announced on the 5th April 1989 that they were going to repeal the dock labour scheme we knew we had won a famous victory. What we then had to do was put our plan of action into operation. We set out to achieve reform as fast as possible using a £35,000 redundancy payment provided by the government in its repeal bill, to break the strike and to shed labour. Under UK labour law you can actually dismiss workers lawfully providing you are not selective. If all workers are on strike you can say ‘either you come back to work or you are sacked.’ We were accused of ‘gangster tactics.’ Nevertheless, that was the threat and it certainly had a major effect on breaking the strike, because of the potential loss to the dockers of their £35,000 sterling redundancy payment.”

He then cites the accomplishments made after just one year:

“We had 9,221 dockers on April 5th 1989. In October 1990, there are less than 4,000 dockers left and many ports where there are no ex registered dockers at all. The restructuring of the labour force has been complete.”

He boasted that “We” had removed “all national agreements…all port agreements…all industry Conciliation and Arbitration procedures…developed entirely new work patterns, totally flexible shift patterns” and “introduced part time working/contracting out.”

“But,” he concludes, “I think the greatest of our achievements (and this is an achievement for the company as a whole) is that we destroyed for the foreseeable future the power of trade unions to hold the country to ransom by calling a national dock strike, which is so wrong for any democratically elected government. I think these achievements are worth learning from.”

There is not a word uttered by Finney from which Davis could legitimately attempt to distance himself. Whether he was one of the three MPs cited by Finney or not, he acted as “an influential voice in parliament” and as a member of the “influential political body,” the Centre for Policy Studies, to help wage the propaganda war against the dockers preceding the abolition of the National Docks Labour Scheme.

How David Davis wanted to criminalise strikes

David Davis next ventured into print for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in November 1989, with a pamphlet that went even further than his plans for the docks. Advocating a major assault on the democratic rights of working people, his objective was nothing less than to outlaw strikes altogether in vast areas of the British economy.

The CPS pamphlet, “The Power of the Pendulum” is subtitled, “Reducing strikes by ‘final offer’ arbitration.” In it, Davis writes of the “rumblings” that the government might face from a series of strikes in a “summer of discontent,” which were “symptoms of a dangerous factor in industrial relations—the great difficulty of reforming the state sector unions.”

By “reform,” Davis means preventing strikes. He complains that while strike activity was at its lowest level for 50 years in the private sector, public sector strikes had not declined to the same degree.

The need for “reform” was not mediated by privatisation, he argued, because the recently privatised companies still often enjoyed a large or monopolist position.

Between them, the “combined state sector and recently privatised monopolies…can effectively bring the country to a halt. They can impose vast losses on other people and other businesses. They employ six or seven million people, about a quarter of all employees; and for all these reasons their continued productivity is a proper cause of government concern.”

Davis’s solution is to make strikes illegal throughout this entire sector, while bringing in a system of compulsory arbitration. He favours what is termed “pendulum” arbitration. As opposed to conventional arbitration, where the arbiter decides on pay and conditions based on a consideration of the positions of management and unions—and usually decides a settlement somewhere in the middle ground, Davis wanted a decision backing either one or the other position. If they faced the “pendulum” swinging against them, he believed this would force the unions to make more “moderate” demands.

Davis makes clear that his call to illegalise strikes goes much further than legislation to prohibit strikes in what are usually described as essential services—a demand that has often been raised by the political right.

He writes, “It has been suggested, both in Parliament and outside, that essential services are the proper area for restriction of the strike weapon…. This paper addresses the issue from a slightly different angle, that of monopoly industries.”

Listing the scope of his proposal, he continues, “Water, obviously, qualifies as an essential service which is in effect a monopoly. So does the National Health Service. But what of gas, electricity, telephones and the postal service?... [T]his paper’s policy proposals are aimed at all monopoly suppliers, not just state sector or ‘essential services.’ ”

Davis rejects the right to strike

Civil liberties are often represented as individual rights that are inalienable to the citizen. But for working people, faced with the power of major corporations and the state, the preservation of individual democratic and civil liberties has always been bound up with the right to organise collectively in furtherance of common social and political interests.

The right to a decent standard of living meant challenging the tyranny of the owners of capital. It meant the right to organise in trade unions, to collectively bargain and to withdraw labour, if necessary through strike action. This in turn meant preventing not only the individual worker being victimised, but also the collective union body from being subject to attack by the employers or the state.

On the political front, the struggle for the right to vote led inexorably to the struggle to break the monopoly of the parties of big business. This meant, of necessity, to establish and fund a party that would represent working people.

This is the only way that civil liberties can be properly understood. But as far as Davis is concerned, these collective rights do not properly exist and can be done away with.

Davis always writes of the “right to strike” in quotation marks, arguing that “British law does not explicitly recognise a ‘right to strike.’ ”

Instead, he acknowledges only a “combination of immunities in civil and criminal law” that “render strikes a viable tactic for trade unions and workers under certain conditions” [emphasis added].

After briefly describing how in 1906 trade unions secured freedom from liability for losses occurred during strikes, he states that because of the damage they can inflict in monopolistic sectors this freedom from prosecution for liability should no longer hold.

He believes this should be the case not only regarding official strike action, but also when the union does not actively prevent unofficial wildcat action by effectively policing its members. Any no-strike legislation, he insists, “must be able to deal with this sort of difficulty: able to deter guerrilla action which is apparently (and often only apparently) leaderless…. We should recognise that a trade union is its membership. Therefore if it has the majority of the membership of the bargaining unit involved, and that bargaining unit takes disruptive action, then in the absence of effective action to put the matter right the union is guilty of a breach.”

He concludes, “Any union that breaks this constraint should face sequestration of its assets.”

To make the legislation even more far-reaching, he proposes that prosecutions “should recognise who is the real victim of such action; and allow customers of the service or industry to initiate the action for sequestration of assets.”

Thus, Davis wanted a situation in which any Tory party activist could initiate legal proceedings against a union taking strike action, paralysing or even bankrupting them.

David Davis—then and now

Davis and his defenders might argue that he no longer calls for these measures and, like the rest of the Tory Party, has suffered an acute attack of niceness. In reality, he does not make these issues his central concern because—as he argues in his only other CPS pamphlet, “Modern Conservatism,” written in 2005—the Tories have successfully dealt with “overweening union power.”

That is why he continues to hail Margaret Thatcher for having secured “our freedom from the threat of the Soviet Union” and “from socialism at home.”

Even in 1989, he was able to cite as examples that should be emulated the “single-union ‘no strike’ agreements,” and the industrial relations pursued by Japanese companies investing in Britain—which were signed with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbers Union and Amalgamated Engineering Union, now part of Unite. He then noted that “more surprisingly, the GMB, TGWU and ISTC are also signatories to no-strike pendulum arbitration deals.”

Since 1989, the phenomenon of no-strike deals has proved to be only one manifestation of the transformation of the trade unions into an adjunct of corporate management. The imposition of no-strike legislation was not necessary, because trade unions hardly ever called a strike, ingratiating themselves with the employers during year after year of record low levels of industrial action.

Nevertheless, should the trade union bureaucracy prove unable to prevent an eruption of militant activity as a result of today’s worsening recession, Davis and the Tories, together with Labour, would not hesitate to impose the harshest sanctions they deem necessary. Even more likely, they will demand measures targeting anyone who leads an unofficial action outside the control of the trade unions.

It is not David Davis who has moved to the left, but the Labour “left” and erstwhile liberal milieu that have moved inexorably to the right. They have not met Davis on the political middle ground, or recruited him to the cause of civil liberties. Rather, they have ceded any claim to defend the basic democratic rights and essential social interests of the working class to the Tory party’s big business agenda. In the process, they have abandoned even the pretence of an independent political existence or purpose.

What does David Davis MP really stand for? (Part 1)

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:59:44 +0000

This is the first of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part two will be published tomorrow.

Veteran Labour “left” Tony Benn, Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and a plethora of liberal journalists from the Guardian and the Independent all hailed David Davis for leading a campaign in defence of civil liberties after his resignation triggered a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

The Socialist Equality Party stood Chris Talbot against this attempt to corral hostility to the Labour government behind Davis, advocating an independent socialist perspective to defend democratic rights. On the day of the vote, we explained, “The end product of allowing Davis to be identified as the leader of a supposedly non-partisan movement in defence of civil liberties is to maintain the exclusion of the working class from political life. At the very point where the necessity of breaking with Labour is becoming clear to millions of people, and when the most thoughtful layers are looking for a political alternative, workers are urged to either remain loyal to Labour despite everything or to back the Tories.”

Just what it means to lend credence to Davis’s pretensions to be a civil libertarian, and what the working class can expect from any government of which he is a part, is illustrated by his own writings.

Davis is hardly prolific when it comes to setting pen to paper. However, in the late 1980s, he did publish two pamphlets for the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) that refute any and all claims he and his newfound allies might now make for him to be a guardian of democratic rights. They make clear that as far as working people were concerned, Davis’s aim was to deprive them of any possibility of mounting an independent defence of jobs, wages and conditions.

In the name of “allowing management to manage,” he sought to both utilise and extend the draconian anti-union laws enacted by his party leader and political idol Margaret Thatcher in order to outlaw strikes and bust any unions that defied the Tories’ sweeping privatisation programme and the “rationalisation” of industry and public services, at the expense of thousands of jobs.

As someone representing a constituency adjoining the seaport of Hull, Davis centred his attention initially on plans to deregulate Britain’s docks.

In 1988, the then MP for Boothferry, largely merged into Haltemprice and Howden in 1996, published a pamphlet for the CPS, entitled, “Clear the Decks: Abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) was first introduced by the Labour government in 1947, in response to the rank-and-file wildcat dock strike of 1945. The strike was opposed by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and the government used troops to keep the ports open. It ended after six weeks when the striking dockers accepted an assurance from the TGWU leaders that they would negotiate a “Dockers’ Charter” with the government.

The NDLS promised an end to casual labour by giving dockers the legal right to minimum work, holidays, sick pay and pensions. It was administered by a National Dock Labour Board, made up of equal representation from unions and management, and also gave the unions a veto over dismissals and control over recruitment.

Registered dockers who were laid off by any of the 150 firms bound by the scheme had to be taken on by another firm or be paid compensation. By the time of Davis’s pamphlet, employers at the 60 British ports were all covered by the scheme.

Davis wanted an end to this situation. Above all, he sought the destruction of dual union-management control, the guaranteed employment rights for Registered Dock Workers (RDW) and other protections. He denounced these measures as “restrictive practices.”

The preamble in his pamphlet declared, “This paper demonstrates how unjust and ludicrous existing legislation is. If Britain is to seize fully the economic opportunities which will be offered by the Single European Act after 1992, the Dock Labour Scheme must be abolished. Legislation must be brought forward to end the Scheme; and steps be taken by the Government to secure the profitable expansion of Britain’s ports industry in order to meet the demands of a single European Market with 320 million consumers.”

Davis complains that a docker fired by an employer could not then be prevented from working elsewhere in the industry without the agreement of the Local Board. He cites as an extreme case one worker who was convicted of “smuggling” but continued to work on the docks. He lists various “abuses” such as “bobbing or welting”—setting too high a figure for workers needed for a particular job so some “bob-off” home—and “Ghosting”—enforcing a non-registered dockworker carrying out work on the docks to be monitored by an RDW.

All of this is used to portray the registered dockers as a group of corrupt time-wasters, who should be dealt with for the benefit of everyone else. What he actually wanted was to impose massive job cuts and greater levels of exploitation and thereby secure bigger profits for his corporate friends.

Strike-breaking and union-busting

One passage is revealing in that it explains how Davis saw the attack on the dockers as a continuation of the destruction of Britain’s mining industry, after the defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. He states, “Another difficulty which arises from the Scheme is that the port employers can be powerless to prevent political strikes.”

He gives as his example a July 9 strike in 1984 at Immingham that escalated to a national strike, when the British Steel Corporation used non-registered dockers to unload iron ore. “In light of the miners strike,” he writes, “it was important for British Steel that the work should continue.”

The national strike was to continue until July 21. Davis was incensed, as this was a rare example of an industrial action breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of Tory anti-union laws prohibiting so-called secondary action: “This example shows how the TGWU is able to manipulate the Scheme for its own political purposes, in this case giving support to the miners.”

Apart from this incident, the TGWU, like the rest of Britain’s unions, never did challenge the anti-union laws and bring out their members in solidarity with the striking miners—who were isolated and defeated. In contrast, Davis was prepared to do whatever was necessary to defeat both the miners and the dockers, using the legal powers of sequestration against the TGWU to possibly bankrupt and break the union that earlier had been employed against the National Union of Mineworkers.

Davis anticipated that the TGWU would call a strike should the government determine to abolish the NDLS. He stressed that the combined effect of the anti-union laws and the propaganda campaign he played a part in would isolate the dockers, noting that if a strike were to involve non-scheme ports then it would be illegal:

“If the TGWU is to have immunity from civil actions for damages resulting from a dock strike, it would have to be recognised by the law as a ‘trade dispute’...if the eventual decision went against the TGWU it would risk a large fine and the possible sequestration of all its assets if it persisted with a strike.”

He continues,

“The legislation, however, on trade unions and industrial disputes brought in by this Government, has laid down that a sympathy strike, by definition, cannot be ‘in contemplation, or furtherance of a trade dispute.’ Therefore if the non-Scheme workers were called out on strike in sympathy with the Scheme port RDWs, the employers in the non-Scheme ports would be able to obtain injunctions against the trade unions involved and damages for any losses incurred.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme was finally abolished in 1989, the year after the publication of Davis’s pamphlet.

A revealing speech

The dockers came out on strike in July of that year, but this was defeated without the need to implement Davis’s full agenda.

However, a speech delivered in Australia in 1990 by the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney OBE, vividly describes the nature of the campaign waged against the dockers in which Davis played such a prominent role.

Finney describes how the port employers prepared for the abolishing of the Scheme:

“When the confrontation came, a number of important factors made a difference to the outcome…

“We held two major conferences before we were sure the government was actually ready and these conferences were to try to persuade employers to plan in advance how they would go about setting new working patterns, how they would set about breaking down the demarcation lines, how they would go about setting new pay agreements, new manning levels, etc. Fundamentally and long before the government repealed the scheme, we took the decision that the employers were going to abandon all national and port pay bargaining.

“The campaign was conducted through parliament by using every possible parliamentary device. Early day motions, adjournment debates, etc. We had three MPs who really acted as our voice in Parliament. They did all the hard work, they talked to the other MPs, they introduced briefing materials into the House of Commons, and we made sure that they were always well supplied with appropriate material.

“We talked to influential political bodies (like your own) such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the No 10 Policy Unit, the Aims of Industry. We made sure that those people who really had influence in government were fully committed and would themselves talk to a wide range of people. It was too serious an issue to just leave to transport or employment ministers. We knew that it would be a Cabinet decision; we knew we had to get people like the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary on our side. So we used every political body which had influence. We also used the press and media. We constantly searched out and supplied the media with anti-docker stories, headlines such as ‘welcome return even if the man’s a thief’ or ‘ghosts who keep vanishing’; ‘twenty things you never knew about fiddling dockers,’ ‘they can’t be fired.’ These headlines were all designed to make it easier for the dockers to be isolated. By the time government acted every national newspaper at one time or another had published an editorial calling for the government to end the dock labour scheme.

“We had a Times columnist write headlines like ‘dock ages on the docks,’ ‘queer seaside customs,’ ‘legalised extortion racket,’ ‘time to end it,’ ‘block those dock rip offs.’ We also encouraged radio and television to do documentary programmes on the docks scandal.

“We commissioned economic studies. One particularly important economic study (and perhaps it is worth thinking of using in the Australian scenario) was to try and prove that by getting rid of the dock labour scheme, you actually create many more jobs than you lose. Getting rid of the restrictions on the waterfront meant a whole new world in ‘investment opportunity.’ We sought two benefits from this approach. One, to make it much more difficult for the Labour Party and for the unions to argue against repeal, and secondly to make sure we could drive a wedge home to isolate dockers and describe them as a selfish, small group of workers who were actually stopping people from gaining jobs in unemployment black spots which frequently were in under-developed city dock areas which had been derelict for many years.”

To be continued

Union Militancy and New Labour

JamieSW — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:28:27 +0000

This week’s big two-day public sector strikes (detailed coverage with pics and on-scene reports here) is to be followed up by further local actions by PCS workers. There are picket lines by the Coastguard and Home Office employees across the country today. A nationwide three-day strike is now planned for Autumn. Passport workers in Northern Ireland have just voted for strike action as well. Employers are predictably talking down the success of the strike, saying only 100,000 turned out, but they protest too much. As Socialist Worker points out, the BBC regional correspondent reported 70,000 on strike in Yorkshire and Humberside alone.

Much as one may wish that strike actions were not so brief and the period between them so long, there is evidently something bigger percolating away here. The rate at which public sector workers are opting to fight the government is not just a manifestation of reviving industrial militancy in the most unionised sectors of the economy. It is poison for the government’s electoral chances, who are now positioning themselves as the class enemy of some of their key constituents. Yet New Labour is so wedded to this policy that it is trying to defend a heartland Glasgow seat with a mountainous but threatened majority with a candidate who will not say a single word of criticism about the policy, preferring to rely on contrived prolier-than-thou credentials. Clearly, the SNP would have to fight a serious battle to take the seat, but the difficulty for New Labour is that its voters won’t turn out to match their standing in the polls. The union leadership is evidently still hoping to force a change of policy with this rank-and-file pressure as an added bargaining lever. They know the governing party is short of cash and will be tapping them for it, just as surely as they know they will provide it unless the members force a decisive break with Labour. Despite the calamitous state of would-be alternatives for the time being, the scale of the government’s attack on workers is likely to intensify moves in that direction. Absent a viable national alternative, funding may well tend to be distributed in a more fragmented fashion with some even going to the Liberals (yech, can you imagine?).

The opposition, despite its venomous hostility to trade unions, is keeping relatively quiet about this. In fact, it is bigging itself up as the party of the poor. Not only that, but when David Cameron made his lousy statement about absentee black fathers, he got the backing of a selection of ‘community leaders’ (how I hate that phrase and everything it implies), who said that the Tories were more progressive on social investment than Labour. This probably doesn’t forebode an upsurge of working class conservatism as in 1979. After all, the Tories are concealing their agenda, not aggressively propounding it as the way forward. But with every passing day and every new action by the government, which has never seen a bungled attempt at right-wing ‘populism’ that it didn’t like, it becomes more and more obvious that Labour voters are going to stay at home in droves, repelled by the government and unafraid of the Tories. New Labour is about to discover the true meaning of the phrase ‘things can only get better’.

The crisis fuels discontent

JamieSW — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:12:53 +0000

Where did it all go wrong for Gordon Brown? Was it his failure to call a general election last October? Was it the attempt to impose a pay freeze? Was it the vote in parliament to extend detention without trial to 42 days? Just one year into Brown’s premiership a recent Gallup poll showed Labour’s popularity at its lowest ebb of support since Gallup first asked people to declare their voting intention in 1943. The government is in a crisis that appears out of control and the central issue that is derailing Brown is the economic crisis.

This crisis is not confined to the boardrooms of big companies and the financial markets. This is a crisis that affects every single household in Britain. Rocketing price increases have become the topic of conversation on every bus, in every workplace and college. When basic foods go up by 12 or 14 percent everyone but the very rich feels it. One Daily Mirror front page stated: “Cost of living up 11.6 percent… Mirror index shock increase: food up 15 percent; transport up 16 percent; utilities up 13 percent.”

The housing market, which once fuelled the boom, is now helping to precipitate the crisis. Repossessions have doubled in the last year, house prices are falling but at the same time people’s mortgage payments are actually rising as fixed payment deals expire and interest rates rise. The Guardian financial pages reported that there has been a 60 percent fall in people buying new build houses in the last year.

Rising fuel, food and transport prices are causing misery for millions. But how has the government got into this mess? Only a few years ago Brown was boasting that his economic policies had got rid of the boom and slump cycle.

This is not an economic crisis confined to Britain: it is a world economic crisis creating instability across the globe. Capitalist crisis links the teaching assistant in Bradford who can’t pay her gas bill with the woman who joins food riots in Senegal. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation states that the world’s poorest countries could see their annual food import basket cost four times as much as it did in 2000. According to the World Bank, food riots have already hit more than 30 countries in the past year.

There have been major strikes and protests across the world, including South Korea, Egypt, Spain and France. Last year right wing ideologue Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election. He was being hailed as the new Margaret Thatcher, but one year later his plans to break the French unions and privatise industries lie in tatters as strikes and protests have shaken his government. The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland is further evidence of increasing resistance to the political establishment and its neoliberal priorities.

This crisis and the resistance to it are not only creating a crisis of political legitimacy for mainstream parties but also creating the conditions in which many people begin to question the very nature of capitalism.

It is important to understand that Britain is not immune to this process. The struggle may not be as bitter and deep as some countries, but nonetheless it is growing and creating massive problems for the government. Many media pundits are already warning of a “summer of discontent”. The detonator for this panic was the victory of tanker drivers employed indirectly by Shell. This small group of workers organised a militant strike that forced the bosses to concede a 14 percent pay rise over two years. The strike showed the willingness of private sector workers both to join the pay revolt and to give solidarity, even if it meant breaking the law.

This victory is also being used as a benchmark for other workers. In fact, the Financial Times expressed the growing concern of bosses that so many inflation busting deals are part of two and three year deals linked to the Retail Price Index, which a year or two ago employers clearly believed was a safe bet to stay low. But it reported that four out of five deals over 4 percent were not linked to the RPI and so have been won by unions. “Mr Darling and John Hutton, the business secretary, argued last week that the Shell settlement was a one-off. But other recent deals include Drax Power, which in April agreed a 7 percent pay rise for 600 workers [plus a £1,500 lump sum], forming the second year of a two year deal. Babcock Engineering recently agreed a 7.6 per cent increase with 500 workers. Barclays has implemented a 5 per cent pay increase for 55,000 workers at the bank, as the first leg of a three year RPI-linked deal”.

This wage fight is continuing to escalate. As Socialist Review went to press half a million local government workers in Unison voted to strike over their pay. The action planned for July has the potential to intensify the wage fight, and unlike previous strikes this involves a Labour affiliated union. This will take place alongside action by other unions.

The PCS civil service workers’ union passed a motion that is likely to lead to a national ballot over pay and other issues in September. The NUT teachers’ union conference backed a ballot for further strikes as a follow up to the stunningly successful multi-union strikes on 24 April, which drew new layers of militant workers into the movement.

Pay cuts

The CWU postal conference supported a strike ballot over pensions, mail centre closures and defence of the post office network – and the leadership responded positively to calls for a mass demonstration at the Labour Party conference.

The fury over pay cuts – and the fact that those cuts are driven centrally by Gordon Brown – combines with a wider disillusion with Labour to produce an unprecedented questioning of the unions’ links with the party. At almost every conference the issue of whether (or at least to what extent) to continue supporting Labour was raised openly.

The firefighters’ FBU union broke from Labour in 2004 after the government had behaved so aggressively against the union during its national strike. At last year’s conference some delegates called for renewed affiliation to Labour. This time there were only a handful of votes against the decision to remain separate from the party.

The GMB union voted overwhelmingly to remove funding from up to 35 Labour MPs who had not measured up to a union assessment of their “value for money”. GMB leader Paul Kenny dryly remarked, “We’ve examined the records of MPs both at local level and national level and many are doing a fantastic job, but there are a number who seem at times to be embarrassed by their relationship with the union. We don’t want to embarrass them by giving them union money.”

Kenny also told the conference, “We are going to consider our affiliation levels to ensure they represent the realistic level of support within the union for the party.”

At the CWU, motions to disaffiliate from Labour or to democratise the political fund were defeated heavily. But this was largely because the leadership had supported an emergency motion which said that unless the government had sharply changed its policies towards privatisation and the running of Royal Mail by March 2009 “then the CWU membership will be balloted on whether they believe the union should fund the Labour Party at the next general election”.

Speaker after speaker (including several Labour members) spoke to underline that this was the party’s “last chance”. Setting this deadline defeated those who wanted an immediate change in the relationship with Labour. But it is now a ticking time bomb that could explode and cause serious damage to the party.

Even at Unison, where the leadership worked hard to prevent a discussion about Labour, the issue was forced on to the agenda. Towards the end of the conference the delegates have a chance to vote for motions they think should be shunted up the order paper. This year every region of the union decided that the priority was a motion on having a review of the union’s political fund and support for Labour. In the event it was defeated, but only very narrowly.

Earlier, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis had to declare that the pay deal in the NHS (which the union leadership had pushed) would have to be renegotiated if inflation continues to rise. He warned Brown, “It’s time for the government to raise our people up, or our people will bring Gordon down.”

The background to the conferences is a collapse in support for Labour among its core supporters and a widening sense of opposition to the system – challenging neoliberalism is now common currency among trade unionists. For example, the NUT and UCU conferences both agreed to campaign against military recruitment in schools and colleges, and the question of how best to build opposition to the fascist BNP was discussed at every conference.

The bitterness about Labour was underlined by an opinion poll commissioned by Unison just before its conference which showed Labour’s traditional supporters deserting the party in their droves. Almost half of those who have regularly voted Labour at past elections now say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were in 2005. In addition, 51 percent of the general public say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were at the last general election compared to 4 percent who say they are more likely.

Who could have believed that the man who replaced Tony Blair would have managed to drive Labour support down so far and so quickly, by his handling of the economic crisis? Bank of England governor Mervyn King made it clear that things are only going to get worse when he said, “Rising fuel, gas, electricity and food prices mean that average real take-home pay will stagnate this year. It will not be an easy time, and I know that some families will find it particularly difficult.” A new study by accountants Grant Thornton reported that official figures show that income inequality under Labour so far is already higher on average than it was under Thatcher.

One thing is certain. As with any economic crisis in history the government and bosses want workers to pay the price. This has sometimes been successful in the past. Attacks on conditions and financial hardship in times of crisis can have the effect of subduing class struggle. But such attacks can also lead to people questioning the system and fighting back. Such periods of instability polarise society, as we are seeing now. But polarisation does not necessarily mean that people move to the left. The election results for the BNP and the rise in anti-immigration sentiments are proof of this, and a warning. Polarisation is exactly what the word means – a move away from the centre of politics.

The government is on the rocks. Millions of workers want to see a serious battle to defend living standards, to take action for affordable housing, to halt the spread of privatisation and to defend secure jobs. What socialists do and how they react to events will make a difference. The left has already played a major role in shaping the pay revolt as it has developed. The anger felt by ordinary members in unions like the PCS, NUT and UCU found expression in the lead given from the unions’ leading bodies.

This in turn has increased the pressure on Labour affiliated unions like Unison to move. The left has won an argument over the idea of joint action and turned it into a reality. Socialists have to continue to place themselves at the centre of the moves for action and unity across the unions. That means pushing for joint action where we can and supporting initiatives like Public Services Not Private Profit, Organising for Fighting Unions and the National Shop Stewards Network that attempt to build unity between trade unionists nationally and in the localities.

The left also needs to be able to raise a political as well as an industrial response to the crisis. We need to popularise a set of demands that activists from different political backgrounds, or none, can rally round. And we have to continue to raise the urgent need for political alternatives to New Labour, no matter how difficult they are to construct. This year’s union conferences with the increasing attacks by New Labour make this project more important than ever.

UNISON passes boycott resolution

JamieSW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:13:46 +0000

UNISON – 2008 National Delegate Conference – Composite : AgendaID D – Palestine:

Conference welcomes the fact that UNISON has adopted comprehensive policy on Palestine at successive national delegate conferences in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Conference notes that 2007 marked the fortieth anniversary of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the “Nakba” which led to nearly 900,000 Palestinians refugees fleeing their homes. Many of them and their descendants still live in refugee camps and all are unable to return to their homes.

Conference condemns the current siege of Gaza which threatens a humanitarian catastrophe through the denial of food, water, power and medical supplies by the Israeli government in breach of international law which outlaws collective punishment of a civilian population

However, Conference is aware that there is a still a low-level of awareness about the fate of the Palestinian people amongst trade union members and the wider public. Conference is also aware that this is among factors that allow both the British government and the European Union to pursue a foreign policy that whilst formally supporting the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state effectively tolerates the continuing Israeli occupation.

Conference notes that the Trades Union Congress in 2006 adopted a clear position in support of self-determination for the Palestinian people. Conference recognises the importance of the work in the trade unions to win support for the Palestinian people, to campaign for recognition of their rights and to bring pressure to bear on the British Government to end its complicity in denying the rights of the Palestinian people.

Conference notes that 18 national trade unions affiliate to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) representing over 80% of the organised trade union movement and recognises the potential that this represents for building a mass campaign of solidarity.

Conference recognises the importance of developing the work in the trade union movement at national, regional and local level and encourages all members and branches to affiliate to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and to seek to take initiatives that will strengthen this work in 2008.

Conference welcomes the work carried out by PSC’s Trade Union Advisory Committee and in particular the production of the Education Pack, which can be a valuable resource for work in regions and branches, Trades Union Council and with PSC.

Conference welcomes the organisation of the PSC led Trade Union Delegation of representatives of PCS, UNISON, UCU, UNITE (TGWU section) and TSSA, which visited the West Bank in January 2008. Branches and regions are encouraged to make the maximum use of this opportunity to organise meetings with delegates reporting back.

Conference supports the calling of a trade union conference in the coming year and urges the National Executive Council to work closely with PSC on this initiative and give it maximum publicity and support.

Conference therefore instructs the National Executive Council to:

1) continue to promote awareness about Palestine amongst UNISON’s members, branches and regions by:

a) acting in solidarity with the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions, including;
b) projects to support the Palestinian trade union movement in the Occupied Territories;
c) working with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other organisations and encourage regions and branches to affiliate to PSC and invite speakers to address branches;
d) examining the investments of their members’ pension funds with a view to calling for disinvestment from companies such as Caterpillar, involved in the occupation;
e) using UNISON publications and other campaign materials
f) Act on some of the recommendations from the PSC trade union delegation to Palestine such as:
i) actions focused on the occupation;
ii) organising fact-finding solidarity delegations to the occupied Palestinian Territories;
iii) conveying solidarity messages to those inside Israel organising against the occupation, the Wall, the
checkpoints and the blockade.

2) work with the TUC and its affiliated trade unions to effectively implement the 2006 Congress resolution, especially through the TUC/Foreign Office and the TUC/Department for International Development forums;

3) raise the issue of Palestine with UNISON’s sister unions abroad and especially the global and European trade union federations to which UNISON is affiliated;

4) work with anti-occupation forces in Israel, such as Gush Shalom and Machson Watch;

5) make links with and give support to PGFTU endorsed worker’s advice centres across the region;

6) continue to work with both PGFTU and the Israeli Histradut to promote civil society dialogue and the peace process;

7) campaign to bring about a concrete change in the policies of the British government and the European Union. A first goal should be:

a) an end to the arms trade between Israel and Britain and EU Member States leading to a mandatory United Nations Arms Embargo;
b) suspension of the European Union/Israel Association Agreement until Israel is in full compliance of its human rights clauses;
c) a ban on imports of all goods, and especially agricultural produce, from the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories;
d) recognition of the outcome of the last elections to the Palestinian Authority which were certified as free and fair by international observers;

8) Ensure that the union divests itself of any holdings in companies responsible for maintaining the illegal Wall condemned by the International Court of Justice.

New Labour plc?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:47:28 +0000

Recently support for New Labour registered at 23% nationally, the lowest since opinion polling began back in 1938. The party has lost 53% of its membership between 1997 and 2006 and will undoubtedly have lost considerably more since. It is struggling to pay off loans which with interest amounts to an estimate of between £24 to 28 million. Annual running costs amount to £25 million and private donors are understandably refusing to step up to the plate. And why would they? It’s not as if New Labour will do something for them that the Tories won’t.

As for the unions, calls to hold a vote on whether to disaffiliate are becoming more frequent. The GMB have threatened to withdraw funding from 30 Labour MP’s. Stephen Ladyman, vice-chairman of the party described the move as “tokenistic and hard-left”. That the kind of response is not likely to help mend bridges. Meanwhile senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks. Almost unbelievably the New Labour response is to consider changing its status to a company – so that it would limited liability! Which is apt as they are set on privatising everything else.

The party has four weeks to find £7.45m to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors recruited by Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s former chief fundraiser, or become insolvent. A further £6.2m will have to be repaid by Christmas – making £13.65m in all. The sum amounts to two-thirds of the party’s annual income from donations.

The figures are a conservative estimate as they do not include interest that will also have to be paid. A Labour source said that although the total debt was listed as £17.8m on the Electoral Commission website, the true level, with interest, was nearer to £24m.

The possibility that party officials and members of its national executive committee could become liable is being taken seriously by union leaders, and has been underlined by the decision of equity fund chairman David Pitt-Watson not to accept the post as Labour’s general secretary.

Though he was Brown’s candidate for the post, he declined the offer after receiving independent legal advice that he would be personally liable for repaying the loans and could be bankrupted if Labour’s finances collapsed.

The advice from City solicitors Slaughter and May said unequivocally that leading party officials and members of the NEC would be ” jointly and severally” responsible for the party’s debt.

The reason is that the Labour party constitution is framed like a local club or society, and has no provisionfor limiting the liability of its officials or managers.

A Labour source said: “The party’s constitution is like a five-a-side football club, or the local cricket club. The big difference is that the most club officials and managers could expect to have to fork out is an unpaid bill for hiring the pitch. In Labour’s case, it’s tens of millions of pounds.”

The advice was the sole reason why Pitt-Watson, a committed Labour supporter and former Westminster City councillor, turned down the job this month.

But the reverberations inside the party have been enormous. Earlier this month the GMB union’s executive decided to indemnify its two members on the NEC – Debbie Coulter, the union’s deputy general secretary and a former Labour party conference chairwoman, and Mary Turner, GMB’s president – to protect their homes and savings. A GMB spokesman told the Guardian: “They told the executive they would not continue to sit on the NEC unless they were indemnified. It’s too much a risk for them.”

As leader of the party and a member of the NEC, Brown is also potentially vulnerable. Other prominent members of the committee are Harriet Harman, the deputy leader; her husband, Jack Dromey, the party treasurer; Pat McFadden, minister of state at the department for business; Angela Eagle, exchequer secretary at the Treasury; Dawn Primarolo, public health minister; and former ministers Keith Vaz and Janet Anderson.

Anderson said last night: “I am very concerned and we should look into the situation immediately. If this is the case, I can’t see how anyone, unless they are very wealthy or are indemnified, like in the case of the GMB, can serve on the NEC. I can’t see who would want to be general secretary following this advice.”

The party’s financial plight can be shown by the current negotiations taking place with banks and donors.

The Co-operative bank, whose £2.61m loan is due to be repaid on June 30, has told the party it wants its money back, even though it is getting 7% interest. The bank has asked the unions to offer loans to Labour so the party can pay its debt, but some are refusing to do this. Paul Kenny, the GMB’s general secretary, has told the Co-operative bank it will refuse to help unless the bank withdraws its de-recognition of the union, which represents staff at Co-operative Funeral Services.

Three other loans are due to be repaid on June 30 and July 1. They are a £1.54m loan from Unity Trust bank, also at 7%; a £1m loan at 6.75% from Nigel Morris, founder of the Capital One financial group, and £2.3m from Sir David Garrard, a property developer. He had already extended the loan by 15 months from April 2007.

Labour is hoping that the donors can be persuaded to extend the loan period. Sir Richard Caring, owner of the Ivy and Caprice restaurants, has agreed an indefinite extension of his £2m loan, due to be repaid last March. He has agreed to give 180 days notice if he wants it repaid.
The party’s financial crisis could be compounded this autumn. Three of the biggest unions, Unison, the Communications Workers Union and the GMB have tabled motions at their annual conferences this month calling for members to disaffiliate from Labour. If this goes ahead, Labour would lose £4m of its £19m a year in donations.

The Labour party is said to be investigating whether it can change its status to a limited liability company to protect its officials and NEC members – but such a move could be open to legal challenge until it clears its debts.

Hands off our oil

Ellie Keen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:12:27 +0000

Unions lead fight against Western oil theft

Five years into the war and occupation of Iraq, and following five missed deadlines, the proposed Iraqi Oil Law remains off the statute books, despite the best efforts of those whom it would benefit. The law would allow foreign oil companies to control the extraction, production and depletion of Iraq’s oil reserves for a generation. Furthermore, it would allow sectarian élites, who already enjoy both military and political power, to sign their own contracts with oil companies, thus reinforcing their long-term economic control.

Dick Cheney, General Petraeus, Condoleeza Rice and the former supreme commander of US forces in the Middle East, Admiral Fallon, have all visited Baghdad in person to push for ratification of the law – yet their diplomatic efforts, flanked by over 150,000 US troops, have failed. Iraqi civil society and embattled parliamentarians are winning.

Inside Iraq, unions, still illegal and subject to Ba’athist anti-union legislation, are leading the fight against this resource theft. The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU) is on the frontline. The 26,000-member independent federation is active in 11 state oil and gas companies throughout the country and is the only union to have forced Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to the negotiating table. The IFOU has held numerous protests, conferences and seminars about the Oil Law, popularizing the term ‘Production Sharing Agreements’ – the contractual agreement which has become a by-word for ‘oil theft’. Later drafts of the Oil Law had to drop the term due to ‘media and popular fuss’, according to the Ministry of Oil.

When Iraqi Pipeline Union workers took strike action last summer, Oil Minister Hussein Al Shahristani called the action ‘economic sabotage’ and arrest warrants were issued against the IFOU’s leadership. Iraqi troops occupied the oil fields as US helicopter gunships circled overhead. Despite death threats from both sectarian militias and Government allies, the union remains steadfast in the face of mounting repression. And they are not alone. Power, port, agriculture and steel sector unions have organized a co-ordinating committee in Basra, Iraq’s oil capital, to campaign for union rights and against public sector privatization. The Federation of Workers’ Councils and the General Federation of Iraqi Workers are both involved in the committee and in similar initiatives around the country. Likewise, representatives from all unions are involved in the Iraq Freedom Congress’s ‘Anti Oil Law Front’. Based mainly in Baghdad and connected to the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, it has held conferences and demonstrations in the capital against oil privatization.

Last year over 100 technocrats, including senior former Oil Ministry and Iraqi National Oil Company directors and lawyers, signed a statement urging the Iraqi Government not to support a law which allows for long-term contracts to be signed while the country is still occupied.

So far the law remains unpassable. Yet Oil Minister Shahristani is inviting oil companies to sign under existing Ba’athist legislation and to treat the Oil Law as passed, despite there being no democratic mandate for it or the economic occupation it represents.

The issue of resource sovereignty is uniting Iraqis. A powerful alliance of grassroots civil society organizations and technocrats has been created and it is intent on keeping Iraq’s oil in the hands of the people.

For further information see
www.basraoilunion.org
www.handsoffiraqioil.org

A Failing Relationship

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:01:50 +0000

IF Justice Secretary Jack Straw really thinks that, as a part of doing a chummy little deal with the other parliamentary parties over funding rules, he can haul every penny of trade union cash given to the Labour Party straight into its central funds, to be dispensed as party HQ sees fit, then he has got another think coming.

One can only wonder what view of the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade unions Mr Straw holds.

While Labour loyalists are struggling to hold the Labour-union link together, pleading that things will get better in the face of serial betrayals by new Labour that have left an enormous majority of the trade union membership in this country disillusioned and bitter, Mr Straw seems only to see an endless source of funding that new Labour’s upper echelons can commandeer. Well, it simply isn’t so.

The days of blanket support for Labour are long gone and trade unionists are becoming ever more distrustful of the party’s leadership, and with good cause.

The recruitment of CBI bigwigs into the government, the dismal treachery of the non-delivery of most of the elements of the Warwick agreement, the abolition of the 10p basic tax rate for the low-paid, the lack of movement on pensions justice and, most visibly of all, the government’s grovelling self-abasement to big business and its refusal to do anything about bringing the City fat-cat profiteers into line have all but destroyed the credibility of Labour in the eyes of most trade unionists.

Union after union has severed ties with the party and many more are now demanding the more discriminating use of their funds.

Support is being increasingly directed only at constituencies and members of Parliament who have earned the trust and the respect of the unions and that trend will inevitably continue and intensify.

And it is in this atmosphere that Mr Straw thinks that he can manipulate away even more of the unions’ input into policy.

Labour Party conference has already been effectively neutralised and this dirty little deal could, if Mr Straw got away with it, almost entirely sever the trade union link with Labour, while keeping the money conduit open and running – in one direction only, of course.

There is, it is said, no such thing as a free lunch and that holds as true for the Labour-union link as for anything else.

Mr Straw and his Downing Street master need to remember that the unions do not support Labour and keep it financially afloat merely because of Mr Brown’s nice smile or because the MPs are such jolly good chaps.

They support it when it serves, as it was formed to do, working-class interests. And when it opposes them, as it is increasingly doing, that support will be more and more difficult to win.

It is almost unbelievable that, as John McDonnell MP points out: “When the Labour Party is at its lowest ebb in the polls for years and we are facing local elections in a fortnight, the Labour leadership is picking a fight with its most loyal supporters.”

Take note, Mr Straw. New Labour and its luminaries have abused the trade union movement for long enough. It is time to mend your ways, not to try and wriggle out of your commitments. If new Labour thinks that it can stand alone without the unions, it will fail and no amount of subterfuge will keep this failing marriage from the divorce courts.

Basra Siege Endangers Trade Unionists

Ellie Keen — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:55:25 +0000

Statement from Naftana

Basra Assault Confirms Presence of British forces a Threat to Political and Trade Union Rights in Iraq

In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called ‘Security Plan’ started midnight 24 March with intense shelling and fire from all kind of weapons.

The attacking forces now besieging Basra stretched all the way to the city from Dhi Qar province. Two armoured divisions are deployed, in addition to thousands of policemen, backed by US and British planning and air cover. They have cut off electricity supplies, food and water on the city of 1.5 million people. Hundreds have been killed or injured in a savage, premeditated and unprovoked attack, now spreading to much of Iraq as the people protest and show solidarity with Basra’s beleaguered people.

They describe the attack as far worse than the invasion of 2003 and begun in the same barbaric manner that the criminal Saddam employed against Basra to crush the March 1991 people’s uprising. They remind us that the present puppet Iraqi government sentenced Saddam’s Defence Minister to death few months ago for similar crimes of waging war on civilians. The assault is backed by the US and British occupation forces, particularly in providing air cover. US planes are also bombarding areas in the Basra, several southern cities and Baghdad, where tens of thousands marched yesterday denouncing the “puppet regime”. It is now, along with many other cities, under a strict curfew enforced by regime and occupation forces.

Trade union leaders have asked us to inform the public in Britain that the government’s attack on Basra serves the occupation. The city is “steadfast” and the onslaught will end in “utter failure.” The city streets were free of the occupying forces before the assault and the regime’s attacks will make it even more dependent on the occupation forces, they stressed.

Naftana, the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions in the struggle for democratic trade unionism in Iraq, condemns British collusion in the preparation of the assault on Basra city and British participation in air strikes.

Naftana urges all to join in calling for an immediate withdrawal of British forces from Iraq, ending the US-led occupation, and the payment of reparations to Iraq.

In the absence of adequate media coverage of the nature and context of this savage onslaught, Naftana wants to set the record straight on UK involvement.

In December 2007, the Basra Development Commission (BDC) was formally announced after discussions between Gordon Browne and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. (1) Browne appointed a British businessman, Michael Wareing, Chief Executive of KPMG International as “Commissioner”, apparently heading the BDC. (2) Wareing visited Basra in February and made outrageous comments, confirming his real interests to be those of predatory business rather than the security, development and well-being of Basra and its people.

Wareing told The Observer: “If you look at many other economies in the world, particularly the oil-rich economies, many of these places are quite challenging countries in which to do business. … Frankly, if you can successfully operate in the Niger Delta, that is a very different benchmark from imagining that Basra needs to be like London or Paris.” (3)

Wareing’s appointment was welcomed by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a major advocate of the 2003 invasion and of privatisation. On March 13 the British Defence Minister Des Browne met with Salih in Basra Airport. Browne promised to show new action on ‘security’ in Basra province and to bring Umm Qasr port up to ‘the highest international standards’. (4) What this meant was made clear by Salih who threatened the Governor, people of Basra and port workers’ union of Umm Qasr saying ‘there must be a very strong military presence in Basra to eradicate these militias’. (5)

What Salih, himself a former militia leader, was concerned about were organised port workers who had earlier confronted the American SSA Marine corporation in Umm Qasr and the Danish Maersk corporation in Khor az-Zubair in the two years after these companies were imposed by the occupying forces in 2003. (6) The new plans involve privatisation measures opposed by the port workers, who are supported by other trade unions and port management. It is likely that the planned corporate takeover of the port is required in order to facilitate the activities of international oil companies.

Nevertheless, the scale of what was afoot was not apparent, but the link between military action and breaking trade unionism was. On March 17-18 the US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in Baghdad meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who presently heads the attack on Basra city. (7) Top of the agenda was the oil law (8) and how to insure its passage. The oil law means that international oil majors will control Iraqi oil for many decades.

Various reports reveal that the present carnage was coordinated and agreed with British and American leaders. Naftana believes they commanded it. Why? The tide of national public opinion has turned against long-term troop deployment in both the UK and the USA. If the war was fought for oil and total domination of Iraq, then those most closely associated to those interests must speed up their plans. The present onslaught aims to break popular resistance, especially from the Sadrist movement, to the passage of the oil law and to the occupation itself. Beyond that, with local elections looming next autumn, it aims to destroy morally and physically the popular base which would otherwise be set to drive, first from local power, and subsequently from national power, the US/UK allies, Nouri al-Maliki (al-Dawa party), his main allies in the Supreme Islamic Council, led by Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and the Kurdish leaders, Talbani and Barzani.

Naftana calls on all who support democratic trade unionism to stand by the people of Iraq, with the port workers of Umm Qasr and the oil workers of Southern Iraq, with workers in Baghdad and many other cities who are in danger of physical elimination.

For further information on Naftana and IFOU:
Sabah Jawad – 07985 336886 sabah.jawad@googlemail.com
Kamil Mahdi – k.a.mahdi@exeter.ac.uk
Sami Ramadani – 07863 138748 sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk

Notes

Naftana (‘Our Oil’ in Arabic) is an independent UK-based committee supporting democratic trade unionism in Iraq. It works in solidarity with the IFOU. It strives to publicise the union’s struggle for Iraqi social and economic rights and its stand against the privatisation of Iraqi oil demanded by the occupying powers. For more information see the IFOU’s website http://www.basraoilunion.org

(1) www.basraoilunion.org
(2) http://www.eeegr.com/events/info.php?refnum=562&startnum=A0
(3) http://www.kpmg.com/Press/KPMGLeaderappointed.htm
(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/24/iraq.oil
(5) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7294144.stm
(6) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/world/middleeast/13basra.html?_r=1&scp…
(7) Since 2003 the first shortened its name to SSA Marine. See on UmmQasr:http://www.allbusiness.com/transportation/marine-transportation-ferries/5665051-1.html and http://www.publici.net/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=56and on Khor az-Zubair http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13196 and http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12490
(8) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120593326652748375.htmlhttp://www.breitb…