“Things have changed in the last few months. There's a real feeling of change that's great to see, and so many young people getting involved, adding their energy.”
Those were the words of a train driver to me on the most recent TransPennine Express picket line.
The scale of the strike wave keeps expanding. Of course, there are ebbs and flows in individual disputes, but the general direction is towards increased armies of the working class entering the fray; rising up off their knees in rebellion at being robbed of their wages, their livelihoods, quite often their jobs and rights at work, as well as of the services they provide to the public.
A Million Strikers
About a million trade unionists across the UK are now either already engaged in strike action or have live union ballots to do so.
Rail workers have been forced to declare escalated strikes after brutal rejection of their appeals for reasonable offers during negotiations. They may have suspended previous strikes in good faith, after promises of ‘intensive negotiations’, but the railway bosses have spat in their faces, under instructions from a Tory government hell-bent on making workers pay the price of a crisis we did not create.
Over 115,000 Royal Mail workers are stepping up their strikes amidst escalated attacks not just on their wages but with the threat of 25,000 job losses. Gangster capitalists who seized control of the 500-year-old public service seem hell-bent on transforming it into yet another gig economy cash machine for the profiteers, slaughtering conditions of work, making posties deliver later at night, putting in longer days in the dead of winter than during summer months, and replacing existing unionised staff with casualised, lower-paid replacements.
Scottish teachers, members of the EIS, have launched the biggest strikes in their history - and indeed the first in nearly 40 years - with vibrant, colourful mass pickets and massive rallies. They are overwhelmingly young and majority female workers, fresh in the battle and determined to win their demand that the Scottish government ‘Pay Attent10n'!
Universities across Britain are witnessing mass pickets both of academic and professional services staff as they take the most widespread action ever on pay - which has been slashed by 25% since 2009 – cuts to their pensions of at least 35%, and rampant casualisation and job insecurity. An incredible 68% of research academics are on fixed-term contracts and 41% of teaching academics are on hourly paid contracts. Perhaps what best sums it up is that on average, university staff work more than two unpaid days a week. That's the equivalent of working 20 weeks of the year totally unpaid!
Civil service workers - who for many years held the line against government attacks, frequently standing on the field of battle on their own - are about to stage a wave of strikes in the biggest collective action in the history of the PCS union.
Mood of Radical Change
Perhaps most incredible of all is the declaration of pre-Christmas strike dates by the Royal College of Nursing; an organisation which historically sheltered people who were opposed to the whole notion of taking strike action and had a no-strike policy throughout the 106-year history of the RCN.
Such is the fury of NHS staff at being underpaid, cruelly overstretched and understaffed, suffering burnout particularly after the horrendous experiences of the Coronavirus, that nurses and other health workers are prepared to withdraw their labour. Strikes not just in defence of their livelihoods but indeed for the safety of the patients who suffer the consequences of it being commonplace to have only one nurse to a ward of 30 patients.
There is indeed a mood of radical change, with new forces coming into struggle, new faces on the picket lines compared to previous strikes at the same place, and an encouraging number of younger workers taking part in most disputes, after years of low participation by young people in unions.
The mood and readiness to fight back must not be squandered. Opportunities to broaden and deepen the fight, for a greater share of wealth for those who produce it in the first place, don't come all that often.
For 6 months, the Scottish Socialist Party and I have consistently advocated maximum coordination of the strikes in different sectors, to enhance their impact and demonstrate the power of united workers’ action - not only to workers themselves, but to the employers and governments they confront in this class war, launched by the Tories and capitalist profiteers. Specifically, we have advocated serious preparation of a 24-hour general strike.
Imagine if the national trade union leaders agreed the date for combined strike action by – at the very least - the one million workers who have already voted for strikes, with mass rallies in town centres and outside the Parliament. It would certainly concentrate the minds of the employers and the governments as they wield the axe to pay and services.
STUC Budget Lobby, 8 December
In a very welcome move, the Scottish TUC have called a Rally at the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 8th December, a week before the Scottish government declares its Budget.
The STUC’s modest demands include a real pay rise for all public service workers; warm homes through municipal energy companies; action to tackle rents; universal free school meals; cheap publicly controlled public transport; a social security system that loosens the grip of poverty; more support for childcare, and enforcement of Fair Work.
Scottish and UK union leaderships should have named the 8th of December as a day of action, including combined strikes, to mobilise the pressure on the Scottish government around these modest demands.
As a minimum they and the STUC should now use this pre-Budget Rally to declare and systematically build for a 24-hour general strike to bring the full might of united working-class action to bear on governments and employers alike.
Demand a 24-hour General Strike
Union branches and stewards’ committees should bombard their own leaderships with demands for this concrete course of action, in the knowledge it would gain widespread support from workers.
After I had been invited to speak at the UCU strikers’ rally outside Strathclyde university and raised this demand - to warm applause - many strikers came up asking, “How close do you think we are to a national strike?”, others commenting “Absolutely, we need a general strike instead of us being out all sorts of different days in different workplaces. After all, we are all fighting around the same demands, so why not come out together?”
Conversations we've had on numerous picket lines of posties, school teachers, railway workers, university staff and Coop coffin factory workers over the last month have evoked similar agreement with the need for a one-day general strike.
The mood for combined action needs to be harnessed with urgency by national union leaders - not allowed to dribble away as employers seek to divide and conquer workers in their crusade to rob pay for the benefit of profit.
The Tories have declared all-out class war on workers. Any hesitation by trade union leaders will be perceived as weakness.
Stand Up for the Scottish Working Class
Scottish workers now face not just one but two governments of austerity. The Coalition government of the SNP and Scottish Green Party plead “We have a fixed budget”, that “We have no more money.”
Humza Yousaf tells NHS workers he cannot pay them any more. Shirley-Anne Somerville appears on TV to tell teachers the same. Deputy First Minister John Swinney responds to being forced into conceding substantial pay increases (£2,000, roughly 10%) to striking local authority workers by immediately announcing £500million cuts to public services – only to top up his planned cuts to £1.2billion weeks later.
The SNP/Scottish Greens rightly condemn Westminster, but display a complete and utter lack of any plan of action to win back more funding; to defy and defeat the Tories’ butchery. John Swinney repeats his mantra, “We have nowhere else to go.”
Defy Tory Austerity
As we have consistently argued, the Scottish government face a stark choice: defy or comply with Tory cuts to pay, public services, jobs and community facilities.
The SNP-Scottish Green Coalition can either mobilise alongside the trade union movement and working-class communities to forcibly demand and win back some of the £5billion stolen from Scotland by Westminster since 2010 – or devolve the devastation to communities who elected them as an anti-Tory, anti-austerity government.
So far it seems clear they've chosen the latter course, with John Swinney announcing £1.2billion cuts to public services - and the Scottish Greens acting as the green mudguards for the SNP’s dirty work.
Workers cannot afford to wait for a Labour government, which in any case only offers so-called ‘economic stability’ from a Starmer leadership just as unwilling to promise to halt and reverse Tory austerity as they are unwilling to give one word of support to workers who, here and now, are fighting back.
It would be dangerous folly to pause the struggle and wait for the capitalist Second Eleven to come into government, where fundamentally nothing will change.
Pound the Politicians
The renewed, replenished trade union movement of course should pound the SNP/Green government with demands that they defy all Tory cuts; to set a No Cuts Budget on 15th December that protects every single job and local service, and that funds pay rises to (at the very least) insulate workers against the ravages of inflation. And then join forces with workers and communities in protests, strikes and civil disobedience to compel the Westminster razor gang into conceding the funds to balance the books.
Why should workers be presented with the choice of either cuts to pay OR cuts to services? That is what the Holyrood government is doing; blaming workers in desperate need of pay that matches inflation for government butchery to services just as desperately needed by working-class communities – including the same workers striking on pay!
The SNP/Green government must not get away with trying to rob Peter to pay Peter!!
Trade unionists, communities and socialists need to take things into our own hands – not meekly wait for or plead with the Scottish government to save us. The STUC should help mobilise masses of people against cuts to pay, jobs, services and workplace rights, regardless of whether this wrecking ball is wrapped in a blood-stained Union Jack or tartan ribbons.
For an Independent Socialist Scotland
The national question in Scotland can be divisive – or turned into another weapon in the hand of workers against the brutality of the 222nd-richest man in Britain and his unelected Tory government.
It should go without saying, the SSP will continue to build solidarity with workers in struggle regardless of whether they are for or against Scottish independence. Workers are and can be united in fighting to protect their wages, working conditions and lifeline services regardless of their views on Scottish self-government.
But how on earth can any conscious trade unionist or socialist wishing to stand up for the interests of the working class cling onto the tired old arguments against Scottish self-government? It’s the obvious escape route from Tory rule and ruination of working-class people, who haven’t given the Tories a majority in a single election in Scotland since back in 1955!
The Tories have absolutely no mandate to dictate over the working class anywhere, after a mere 200 MPs chose the latest Prime Minister to preside over the lives of 67 million people; that’s even more the case in Scotland.
A Means to a Socialist End
However, independence is only a means to desirable ends for the working class, not the actual solution to the crisis facing the majority of the population.
Unless we forge a movement boldly declaring for a Scotland that guarantees a Scottish minimum wage from the age of 16 upwards, based on at least two-thirds male median earnings; wage increases to match inflation; abolition of all zero hours contracts and a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it; pensions and benefits based on a decent minimum wage; abolition of all anti-union laws – why would any worker be persuaded for independence?
Unless we battle for a self-governing Scotland that takes all forms of energy, public transport, construction, major industry and banking into democratic public ownership, and uses that power over production to provide clean, green affordable energy; build 100,000 new, environmentally sustainable Council houses for affordable rent; install free insulation, draught-proofing, eco-boilers and fast broadband in every house; and build a vastly expanded network of public transport, free at the point of use – how otherwise can we tackle the agonising levels of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation in Scotland?
Two families own more combined wealth than the poorest 20 per cent of the Scottish population: two families have more than a million people in the same nation! Is that the kind of Scotland the current Scottish government offer us after independence?
Another ten years of austerity, as ‘promised’ in the SNP government's Sustainable Growth Commission Report, subsequently adopted as SNP policy? What’s attractive about that for any working-class family, let alone those still to be convinced of the benefits of independence?
These are obscene statistical reminders of the need not to change flags, but to change whole systems; for an independent socialist Scotland, instead of the butchery to working-class living standards - either by the Westminster Tories or the current Scottish government, as it lies on its belly in submission to Tory austerity.
People not Profit
The tidal movement of workers from numerous occupations striking back is the most hopeful prospect for years, if not decades. The leaderships of the organised trade union movement have a duty, responsibility and opportunity to harness that movement, unite it to the maximum, including through a 24-general strike in the short term, and provide a vision of an entirely different society worth fighting for.
The case for socialist change has never been clearer, or more urgent. Join the SSP in advancing the cause of a socialist future where the working class not only produce the goods and services in society, but own and control them collectively, putting people’s lives, health and happiness before profit.
First published in The Scottish Socialist Voice on 3 Dec 2022
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