The
British TUC meets in Manchester for its annual congress, 150 years after its
founding meeting in the Mechanics Institute of the same city. Much has changed
in life since 1868; but much has remained the same, with the fundamentals of
class division and capitalist exploitation.
The TUC is potentially a very
powerful force for change, but only if it had a leadership determined to
challenge the employers and governments in pursuit of the many progressive
polices agreed by its annual congress - by mobilizing the 6.3 million workers
organised in the 48 trade unions affiliated to the TUC.
Reforms and Betrayals
The trade union movement has
been instrumental in winning many vital reforms in living conditions for
millions of workers and their families: an end to systematic child labour;
improved health and safety; paid holidays; weekends off for some workers; equal
pay and minimum wage legislation, etc.
But every reform won has
required mighty struggles. Struggles against the resistance of capitalist
employers and their hired governments, but also within the unions, against
conservative right wingers and overpaid bureaucrats who've quivered and
capitulated at the thought of going into battle with the employers.
Many momentous events in
history have proved the baleful role of the right wing compromisers, and the
urgent need for fighting socialist leaderships in the unions, accountable to
the members, engaged in mobilising those same members in action for change.
The
TUC's betrayal of the 1926 General Strike; their desertion of the heroic
miners' struggle of 1984/5; their exclusion of the RMT from talks with Southern
Rail bosses last year in the midst of a ferocious RMT members' strike against
Driver Only trains; their failure to lift a finger in pursuit of "a £10
minimum wage for all workers" for the four years since it was passed -
unanimously - at the 2014 TUC congress... these are just some harsh reminders
of the need to transform the potentially mighty trade union movement into an
instrument for change, with a democratic, fighting, socialist leadership at
every level.
Great Jobs Agenda
A major theme of the 2018 TUC
congress is their 'Great Jobs Agenda'. Conference documents carry devastating
evidence of the millions suffering jobs that are anything but 'great'.
Alongside many other policy
Motions for investment in skills, sustainable 'green' manufacturing, and public
services, one from my own union - Usdaw - calls for a pioneering new policy to
replace the rampant job insecurity of zero-hours, short-hours and fixed-term
contracts.
Usdaw's Motion is based on the brand new policy I successfully moved
at the union's annual conference in April, on behalf of Glasgow no.1 branch,
calling for a ban on all zero-hours contracts, to be replaced by a legally guaranteed
minimum 16-hour contract for every worker who wants one, in tandem with an
immediate £10-an-hour minimum wage.
Poverty Pay and
Under-Employment
We're subjected to the hollow
Tory and big business boasts of record levels of employment. In reality, low
pay, insecure jobs and mass underemployment have side-lined mass unemployment as
the biggest sources of punishing poverty for millions in this rich land.
Wages have been crushed whilst
prices rocket; by 2025 the average worker will have lost out on £18,500 in real
earnings. (TUC Research).
Ten years after the financial
mayhem triggered by the bankers' greed, real wages are today worth £24-a-week
less than in 2008. All the forecasts agree wages won't be restored to 2008
levels - which weren't exactly luxury living! - until after 2025; the longest
period of wage decline since the Napoleonic Wars, 200 years ago.
The government's own DWP admit
there are 300,000 more in poverty now than a year ago - and 55% of those are in
working families.
Child Poverty Rising
The sins of the capitalist
profiteers have been visited upon the children!
Over 3.1 million kids with
working parents are below the breadline, here and now in 2018, compared with
2.1 million in the year 2000. And an astonishing two-thirds of all the children
living in poverty have one or two parents working.
Public sector cuts and
crucifixion of in-work benefits have been major causes of this catastrophe. But
underlying it all is the merciless robbery of wages by the capitalist employers
over recent decades, aided by successive Tory AND Labour governments, with
anti-union laws their weapon of choice in boosting profits at the expense of
wages and public services.
Nearly one in every eight
workers (11.9%) is in some form of insecure job: on zero-hours contracts,
agency, casual, seasonal, bogus self-employed, and pitifully short-hours
contracts. For instance, all the giant supermarkets offer a minimum weekly
contract of a mere 8 hours.
A full one million part-time
workers want a full-time job but can't get one, as employers escalate use of
micro-jobs to put workers at their beck and call, dragged in at short notice to
do extra hours to match 'business needs', then cast back onto miserably small
contract hours when the bosses want to cut their wage bill. No wonder stress is
hitting the roof in workplaces; millions have no control over their daily
working lives, and just as little control over their income.
For a 16-Hour Minimum Working
Week
That's a taste of the reasons
it's critically important the Usdaw policy Motion - for a guaranteed minimum
16-hour week for all workers who want it - is passed at TUC congress. And not
just agreed and then stashed away in a filing cabinet (or its digital equivalent!),
but made the active property of every union member in workplaces across the
country, with an action plan to fight for it immediately.
This one measure, twinned with
an immediate £10 minimum wage for all workers, rising with inflation, would begin
to transform the lives of millions - children included. Alongside demands for
investment in skills and learning (currently, scandalously, at only half the
level of the EU average!); a million 'green' jobs; vast expansion of public
sector housing and transport... such a package of radical measures, seriously
fought for by the trade union movement, could bring about genuinely 'great
jobs'.
As could a struggle for use of
digitalization and robotics to slash the working week without a penny loss of
pay - as opposed to the dystopian nightmare of new technology condemning
millions of workers to unemployment and destitution. It's a question of who
owns and controls the new technologies, as with the wider economy.
How Can We Win?
Many workers have already asked
me 'How can we get the TUC to act on good policies, like a £10 minimum wage and
guaranteed minimum 16-hour week?'
There was nothing pre-ordained
about committing the TUC to a £10 minimum wage nor Usdaw to the new policy of a
16-hour minimum working week; they had to be organised and argued for, through
union structures, from branch level upwards. That's a start.
Assuming the TUC, representing
6.3 million trade union members, adopts this policy, trade union activists and
socialists have a massive role to play in getting action to implement such
life-improving reforms.
We will need to argue for and
organise meetings of union members in branches and workplaces to discuss and
popularise the arguments for £10-an-hour and a guaranteed 16-hour week as immediate
minimum employment standards - to make union polices the property of thousands
of workers.
That's the best way to light
bonfires beneath the backsides of the TUC and national union leaderships,
demanding action and resources of them.
Leaflets and literature arguing
these policies should be demanded of the TUC and national unions, to spread the
word, involve members on the streets as well as in workplaces, through days of
campaign activities.
An aware union membership is
indispensable when union negotiators put these demands to employers - as they
should and must, if policies are to mean anything.
Strike,
if Necessary
Ultimately, unions need to
prepare their membership for the possibility of needing to use industrial
action to win such reforms.
It's to their eternal credit
that the Bakers' union (BFAWU) have already recruited, organized, balloted and
led McDonald's workers out on strike 'for £10 and a union', and are now doing
the same with Wetherspoons staff. These are also sectors rotten-ripe for the
demand for a 16-hour minimum for all workers who want it.
Other unions need to implement
TUC policies with the same determination.
Pound the Politicians
We also have other pressure
points that should be pounded with these demands by the unions, in particular
local government and the devolved Scottish government.
In the policy passed
unanimously at Usdaw conference, those points are specified, calling for
lobbying all these levels of government, demanding they introduce the £10 and
16 hour minimums for all their directly and indirectly employed staff... which
amounts to a massive 500,000 workers in Scotland!
Socialists and trade unionists
need to bombard councillors and MSPs - regardless of their party label - with
demands that in the forthcoming budget-making process for 2019/20, they set
both a £10 minimum wage and guaranteed 16-hour week into No Cuts budgets, and
then mobilize workforces and communities in struggle for the funding off
Holyrood and Westminster to implement these reforms.
Many who've joined the SNP and
Scottish Labour proclaim themselves socialists. Now is the time for them to
make demands on their own councillors and MSPs to stop implementing Tory
austerity and start standing up for the working class with concrete, radical reforms
like £10 and 16 hours minimum.
The STUC should take the bold
step of organising protest demos demanding this of MSPs and councillors.
Socialists Fight On!
The potential power of unified
trade union action has all-too-rarely been applied. The crushing poverty and
insecurity of millions of workers and their families cries out for such action.
The SSP will continue to
vigorously campaign on these policies, both within our own workplaces and
unions, on the streets and in colleges. We appeal to others to join us in that
crusade. The combined forces of the trade unions and socialist policies are a
force that could change the lives of masses of people. Join that struggle!
