Saturday 10 December 2022

UNITE WITH A 24-HOUR GENERAL STRIKE





“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

https://socialistvoice.scot/subscriptions/


Wednesday 12 October 2022

DEFY AND DEFEAT CRISIS-STRICKEN TORIES


Workers' livelihoods and rights are being assaulted by an unelected Prime Minister, at the head of an extremist, unelected Tory government.

Whereas 100,000 Royal Mail posties voted to strike in defence of their pay, their working conditions and the public service they provide, a mere 80,000 backwoods Tories elected Liz Truss to preside over the fate of 67 million people. That's a lesser level of democracy than back in the 18th century! Yet the same Tory junta lectures us on how trade union ballots should be conducted, poised to impose more vicious obstacles to workers defending themselves than even Truss's obnoxious idol Maggie Thatcher dared to implement.

However, this is a Tory government ripping itself apart, with internal divisions, plots and crises swamping Tory party conference, and many of their own MPs bolting early to avoid the train strikes timed to hit their trips to and from Birmingham, thereby missing Truss's address to the assembled reactionaries.

They've already been compelled into two screeching U-turns, because of the public fury at rocketing energy prices and their plans to axe the 45 percent tax on income over £150,000. At time of writing, the Tories are likely to be forced into another humiliating U-turn on the question of capping benefit increases to the rate wages have risen, as opposed to the twice-as-high Retail Price Index inflation - which even a right-wing think tank predicts will drive a further 450,000 people into poverty.


Drive Tories Back – Drive Tories Out!

This is a brutal regime which has launched shameless class war on the working class, but one which is ripe to be defied and defeated; not just driven back but potentially driven out, if only the national trade union leaderships harness the growing anger in the population into mass, united and decisive collective action.

The Tories’ mini-budget was a rude awakening to class politics for anyone lulled into swallowing the lie that we are all in this together, in an orgy of cross-class ‘national unity’ which the ruling powers systemically sought to whip up, in two relentless weeks of pomp, pageantry and parades of naked state power after the Queen died.

Kami Kwasi Kwarteng!

Public outrage forced ‘kami Kwasi’ Kwarteng into abandoning abolition of the top 45p tax rate, pleading with the population that this measure had been ‘a distraction’ from the rest of the Tories’ wondrous budget. From an opposite, working-class standpoint, this U-turn is itself something of a distraction; a mere tactical retreat in the war on the working class which the rest of the budget amounts to.

After all, the UK’s top rate of income tax before Maggie Thatcher won power in 1979 was not 45 percent but 83 percent. More contemporarily, the combined impact of freezing the lower income tax threshold and cutting the 20% basic rate leaves everyone earning less than £40,000 worse off.

A millionaire will be £55,000 better off from the Tory budget, whereas the median workers’ wage is less than half that leap in wealth, at £26,000. Naked class-based generosity to the grotesquely rich.

The poorest 3 million of the population will gaìn the grandiose total of 63 pence - per month! - according to the viciously anti-socialist Times newspaper. Across the gaping class divide, £85billion has already been forked out in dividends to big shareholders in 2022.

Nationalise - Don't Subsidise Profit!

The Tories’ alleged restraints on household energy bills means they’ve more than doubled since August 2021, whilst giant energy companies were gifted £100billion in subsidies from taxpayers’ funds – which will further crucify spending on essential services. 

Regressive tax cuts, plus subsidies to giant energy companies, will in part be paid for in an orgy of cuts to public services - on top of real-terms cuts to wages and benefits. 

Public spending cuts to the tune of £60billion (equivalent to almost two years of the Scottish block grant from Westminster), according to new calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.   

Workers in the UK have already suffered one of the steepest falls in real wages in any of the advanced OECD countries over the past year. If the Tories have their way, that mass transfusion of wealth to the rich from the rest of us - to profit from pay - will be greatly added to.

That's where determined, well-prepared collective resistance by the organised workers’ movement is often literally a matter of life and death.


NHS in Crisis

The NHS, widely regarded as the greatest reform ever won by the working class, is in a terrible state of collapse - after decades of underinvestment, accelerating privatisation to gouge profits, and collapsing morale amongst staff after years of being undervalued, understaffed and underpaid.

This crisis precedes COVID-19, which then exacerbated the problem. Many families are losing loved ones to avoidable deaths from cancer, due to horrendous delays in diagnosis and treatment, because the governments of both Westminster and Holyrood have failed to adequately invest, allowing austerity driven by profit maximisation to prevail over people's health.

As the chair of the Royal College of Nursing, Julie Lamberth, declared - as they conduct a ballot for the first strike action in the 100-year history of the RCN –

“Patient care is suffering, staffing levels are unsafe, and members are facing a daily battle on how to feed their family, heat their homes and travel to their work. None of this is new and as we head into another winter, we know it's only going to get worse. This is our opportunity to take a stand for our patients and our profession, to show the Scottish government they must act now and that is why I am urging members to vote in favour of strike action.”

It's an incredible indictment of the state of the NHS that the RCN - historically not even regarded as a real trade union by most of the movement - has now been sufficiently radicalised to step out on the road towards strike action, alongside members of UNISON, GMB and Unite who are also balloting for action, calling for a pay rise 5 percent above inflation!


Strike Wave Rises

Simultaneously, 150,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services union, PCS, are being balloted for strikes by the biggest number of members in the union's entire history. They are demanding an inflation-proofed pay rise; £15-an-hour minimum wage; reversal of plans to slaughter 91,000 jobs - and their redundancy terms to boot; plus a 2% reduction in workers’ pension contributions, after government figures prove they've been overpaying into the pension pot for several years.

Royal Mail workers - over 115,000 of them - are launching 19 days of further strike action against savage attempts to not only suppress their wages, but dismantle the entire Royal Mail, breaking up letters and parcels into separate businesses; scrapping the guaranteed 6-day delivery currently written into the Universal Service Obligation; on top of outrageous attacks on working conditions, whereby posties would have to work late into the evenings, and work longer hours in the winter months than during the summer.

Food Bank Phil

Fellow members of the CWU in BT and Openreach are sustaining strikes of 45,000 workers against the pay cuts being imposed by what they’ve dubbed FoodBankPhil – Philip Jansen, the chief executive whose salary last year rocketed by 32% to £3.5million, whilst several offices have set up food banks for their own staff, such is the crisis in their living standards.

As we report elsewhere, 45,000 railway workers in Network Rail and 15 train operating companies have now been joined by over 2000 ScotRail members of the RMT in strike actions, not just on pay, but on safety for the travelling public as the ‘Railway Rich Listers' try to slaughter at least one-third of maintenance workers’ jobs and cut maintenance services on our railways by half – a sure recipe for death and disaster.

Members of UNISON at several universities are already taking strike action and trade unionists at Dundee University have passed the incredible milestone of being engaged in strike actions for a full year. 

Meantime university lecturers, school teachers, firefighters and control staff are amongst the growing army of workers rising from their knees because everything is rising apart from their wages.


Build a 24-hour General Strike

This welcome recovery of workers’ self-confidence needs to be harnessed by the STUC, TUC and each national union leadership in combined collective action around fighting demands that could transform the lives of millions.

Coordinated and united strikes - including a 24-hour general strike that brings every worker into action in a mighty display of workers’ power - could not only force concessions out of individual employers, but potentially topple the crisis-stricken, divided Tories. It's an opportunity that has not been available to the same extent for several years and needs to be seized.

As an integral part of an expanded, escalating plan of collective action, a 24-hour general strike would not only embolden workers with their own power, and warn off governments, but would be a critical component part of defeating the new batch of anti-union laws being hatched by the Tories. 

The best way to defend the right to strike is to strike – together, across different sectors, in unity.

STUC: Scotland Demands Better

In a welcome move, the STUC has launched a ‘Scotland Demands Better' campaign, around a series of nine quite modest demands on the Scottish government, including wages, benefits, rent controls and genuine implementation of fair work practises.

These demands would at least ameliorate some of the worst savagery against working people and their families. But unless the STUC seriously mobilise - with demonstrations and by spearheading a Scottish one-day general strike - there can be no guarantee of the SNP-Green Party Coalition changing course.

It took determined and courageous strike action by cleansing workers - and the imminent prospect of them being joined by thousands of school workers - to force the same Scottish government into conceding (in round figures) a 10% pay rise, about £2,000 increase for most workers, after months of them insisting it wouldn't break their 2.5% public sector pay cap.

And hot on the heels of workers’ action forcing this Scottish government U-turn on pay cuts, John Swinney announced a ‘difficult choice’ of £500million in cuts to the public sector. In all likelihood deeper cuts still will be added as a consequence of Westminster's escalated butchery.


Don't Buy Petrol for an Arsonist!

There is no need to elaborate on the fact working-class people cannot rely on the Tories - the chief party of capitalist big business, bankers and warmongers.

But neither can we rely for salvation from the Scottish government, which has never once defied Westminster cuts, nor mobilised the Scottish people to win back some of the stolen £billions off Westminster, in order to protect jobs, wages, public services and workers' conditions - which is precisely what a socialist government in Scotland would do.

But any worker who thinks Starmer's Labour is a lifeboat from renewed austerity and class warfare is just as liable to volunteer wads of cash to an arsonist to burn down their own house.

Starmer instructed his Labour Shadow Cabinet members to go nowhere near a workers’ picket line and expelled from office the handful who defied him. 

Whilst spurning even a hint of solidarity with workers, the same Starmer has mobilised his Treasury team in what has been christened ‘a smoked salmon offensive’ - holding at least 250 meetings with Chief Executives of major capitalist companies. They are desperately trying to reassure the profiteering class that Labour is a safe alternative to the Tories, as the latter spook even the moneybags of finance capitalism with their recent mini-budget.

Whilst bending to the rising clamour for nationalisation of the railways - at least in words – Starmer’s right-wing Labour has tried to con people with talk of a publicly-owned Great British Energy, which would merely be yet another energy company (heavily dependent on nuclear power) competing with the existing capitalist Big Polluters - who are driving millions into fuel poverty whilst trashing our planet for profit. So no doubt which side of the class war Starmer's New Blairites stand, then!



SSP: the Workers' Party

In stark contrast, the SSP has no interest in reassuring big business. We instead assure the working class we are on the side of workers and their communities, part of the working class, helping to organise and celebrate every penny extra pay, every minute off the working day, without loss of earnings – but never losing sight of the bigger fight to transform society into a socialist democracy, founded on public ownership of all forms of energy, construction, public transport, telecoms, banking.

We are quite clear: nationalise, don’t subsidise!

Instead of propping up the profits of big corporations – as has just been done for the energy giants – the power of the state needs to be deployed to organise publicly owned industries and services, with elected boards of management and a built-in majority for working-class representatives.

To achieve such a democratically planned economy, the full might of the one productive class in society, the working class, will need to be mobilised for socialist change in the years ahead.

Mobilisations for at least inflation-proofed wages; a £15-an-hour minimum wage; democratic public ownership, and defence of the right to strike in the immediate weeks and months ahead – including through a 24-hour general strike – would be a major advance down that road.

Monday 26 September 2022

RESIST TORY CLASS WAR: COORDINATE STRIKES WITH SOCIALIST DEMANDS



The Tories’ mini-budget has been variously described as Thatcherism on steroids, a bludgeon to workers, the launch of all-out class war. It’s all of the above and more, with shameless plans to effectively outlaw the ability of workers to withdraw their labour in resistance. 

The critical question is what the organisations of the working-class majority, and specifically their leaderships, are prepared to do to combat this brutal, indeed unapologetic Tory assault on millions of us on behalf of the millionaires, billionaires and bankers.

Now the seemingly endless royalist mournfest is past - with its relentless display of sycophancy towards unelected, fabulously rich royals, and the pomp, pageantry and prolonged displays of naked state power in all its fineries and military might - the class struggle continues.


The same week that at least £10m, and probably far, far more of public funds was splurged on a state funeral, Scottish charities reported countless cases of misery and degradation for people who simply can't survive, let alone live a meaningful life. Parents telling them “I just eat leftovers from the little one’s plate"; others describing that going without meals to ensure their kids are fed means they’ve lost so much weight their jeans fall from their waist, but they can't afford a new pair; many admitting they are literally suicidal in the face of mounting poverty.

While grovelling media editors obsessed over their health concerns for the thickness of King Charles’ fingers, frightening reports of escalating deaths from cancers - due to lack of NHS resources to treat people early enough - peeked through the fog of ‘one nation’ propaganda.

All this in a state where we’ve been bludgeoned with the 24/7 media propaganda of us being ‘one nation’, kings and commoners alike; where anyone who dared suggest otherwise, or advocate a democracy without monarchs ruling their subjects, faced summary arrest and vicious verbal abuse.

Tory Class War Doesn't Respect the Dead

Leaders of the CWU, RMT and other unions were, on balance, tactically wise to suspend planned strikes in the immediate aftermath of the Queen's death, to avoid splits in their own ranks and unprecedented vilification by a craven media. Where many of them failed badly, however, was in their explanations of why they'd done so.

Instead of often echoing the grovelling tone of the Tories, Labour and indeed SNP leaders towards the medieval monarchical system, these union leaders should have called for the Tories and profiteering employers to match the sensitivity of workers’ unions by publicly declaring an end to their assault on wages, jobs, workers’ rights and public safety. Because that would have exposed the stinking hypocrisy of the Tories and capitalist exploiters, who never for one second paused in their pursuit of a class war against workers and their families, for the benefit of a grotesquely rich handful, which the whole institution of the monarchy both epitomises and helps sustain, by fooling some of the people at least some of the time that we are all one big happy family.



Tory Daylight Robbery

Those who thought the obnoxious Boris Johnson was the problem, rather than the entire Tory party and rip-off capitalist system they represent, got a harsh lesson in class-based politics in the mini-budget.

The expression ‘daylight robbery' arose in the 1690s when King William 111 levied an additional tax on any house with more than six windows, forcing many to brick up these sources of sunlight. In 2022 the Tories applied this term with ruthless zeal, handing £100billion of taxpayers' money to subsidise the profits of giant energy companies who already made £170billion in ‘excess profits’ this year; giving twice as much ‘relief’ to the richest 10% of households as to the poorest, through their misnamed Energy Price Guarantee and NIC rates; making everyone on incomes below £155,000 worse off, in a proud, boastful declaration of ‘free market', red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism.

Even the anti-socialist Times revealed the poorest three million households will only be 63p better off – per month! – from the NIC changes, whilst bankers can now award themselves limitless bonuses “to make the City of London finance sector attractive"!

Alongside which Kwarteng and Truss scrapped the ban on fracking and issued 100 new North Sea Oil licences; abolished the obligation on ‘developers’ to meet affordable housing targets and environmental standards; and plan legislation to enforce ‘Minimum Service Standards’ during strikes in transport and other sectors, plus manacle unions even more than the hated Maggie Thatcher dared to.

The biggest tax cuts for the rich since those of Chancellor Anthony Barber in Ted Heath's Tory regime, in 1972 – which caused the economy to tank – will add to the savage slaughter of jobs and public services, in an economy the Bank of England reports is already in recession, and as desperate people need frontline services just to survive.


Defy or Comply with Tory Butchery

The response of the Scottish government is a warning that the working class need to rise in collective revolt rather than rely on salvation from the SNP/Scottish Green coalition. John Swinney has already announced ‘tough decisions' to slash £500million from public services. This highlights two intertwining issues: the case for independence, but ‘not as the SNP know it’.

Instead of meekly implementing the horrendous cuts by Westminster, a Scottish government worth its salt would here and now lead a mass mobilisation of Scottish workers, communities and young people to win back some of the £billions stolen by Westminster. And to escape Tory butchery, or its tartan imitation, Scottish workers need to be mobilised around the vision of an entirely different type of society: an independent socialist Scotland.

Unions Need Decisive Leadership

The STUC, representing over 600,000 organised trade union members, rightly slated the Tory mini-budget as “acceleration of free market, trickle down economics that deepen inequality and embeds social injustice", declaring that “workers are in for the fight of their lives... it’s a fight we intend winning.”

Absolutely! But the crunch question is what is done to turn this into mass action, led by the trade union movement.

It’s no accident the Tories are hell-bent on hamstringing workers in their right to strike even more severely than the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world already do. These class enemies of the working class – indeed of ‘the 99%’ – recognise that the right of workers to strike is what makes us different from the slaves of ancient millenia. And the best way to defend the right to strike is to strike together, decisively – with clear, fighting demands that can inspire millions to fight back against a government and economic system that will confront vast numbers of people with a choice, literally, of freezing or starving, or both, this winter.

That’s why the renewed wave of strikes and protests this autumn, after the summer of solidarity, needs decisive leadership from the trade union movement.


Striking Back

Each group of workers in different industries or services will of course need to democratically thrash out – through forums of their elected union representatives - distinct, effective forms of strike action and other protests, for maximum impact on their employers. Sometimes a gradual escalation of the duration of strikes; sometimes targeting major events or financial deadlines; other times all-out indefinite strikes, after thorough preparations amongst the members.

But increasingly, as the general onslaught on the standard of living of workers of varied occupations by governments and profiteering employers becomes more obvious, the call for coordinated strikes has gained popularity. As I and the SSP as a whole have often expressed this in recent months, “march together, strike together, win together! “


Coordinate the Strikes

But what does coordinated strike action mean? Let’s use two contrasting cases to illustrate the different answers.

In the recent local government strikes, initially involving council cleansing, roads and parks departments, failure by union leaders to agree on strike tactics led to the totally unacceptable situation where overwhelmingly low-paid members of one union (GMB) were confronted with the choice of whether to cross the picket lines of another union (UNITE), often comprising supervisory workers and certainly much fewer workers, because UNITE were on strike more days both before and after action by the GMB. Instead of that divisive situation, hitting low-paid workers hard in their pockets, there should have been an agreed package of strike dates, since all the workers in different unions are in the same workplaces. A simple lesson for the future.

In the very different situation on the railways, where train drivers are overwhelmingly members of ASLEF, and most other railway workers in the RMT, it would be daft to insist on them all being out just on the same day, all of the time, when one-day strikes are being used to defend wages, jobs and public safety. Coordination in this instance could mean a mixture of common strike dates to maximise the feelings of solidarity and unity between members of the 3 railway unions, and staggered days of strike action, planned by united committees of the separate unions, for maximum impact on employers with minimum loss of wages.


Build a 24-hour General Strike

However, as the SSP has persistently advocated in speeches, articles, leaflets and in our own unions over the months since May, the spreading strike wave raises the case for another, higher form of coordinated action – the call we’ve initiated and popularised for a 24-hour general strike. Not instead of the previously described strikes in each company, but an additional, integral part of coordinated, collective workers’ action.

Such a one-day general strike would serve the purpose of showing workers across sectoral, occupational and trade union boundaries the latent power of a mobilised working class. Equally to the point, it would warn the employers and governments of that collective class power, and help bludgeon them into retreats and concessions.

Fighting Socialist Demands

To be effective, a 24-hour general strike should not be a passive stay-away, but an active display of working-class unity and power, involving rallies in towns and cities as well as mass pickets. And critically, tied to clear fighting demands on an agreed set of measures that would match the interests of millions of working people and their communities.

For instance, currently, that would need to include demands for a pay rise for every worker that as a minimum matches current RPI inflation, without any cuts to jobs, terms or conditions; and implementation of a minimum wage of £15-an-hour, as recently demanded by the TUC - not in 2030 as the TUC has called for, but immediately.


Public Ownership of Energy

In face of the fuel poverty catastrophe, a one-day general strike should also be a mass mobilisation around demands for cuts to energy prices to their pre-April 2022 levels; nationalisation of all forms of energy to scrap profiteering, slash bills and provide clean, green affordable energy instead; alongside calls for the Scottish government and local councils to invest in a massive programme, hiring thousands of council workers and apprentices, to retrofit every house and public building with new boilers, insulation and draught proofing  - free of charge - to slash fuel bills, fuel poverty and carbon emissions. A new TUC analysis proves nationalisation of energy would save every household an average £4,400 over the next two years, backing up a policy which the SSP is alone in consistently, publicly campaigning for.


Beat Governments into Retreat

Such a 24-hour general strike would evolve beyond narrower sectoral economic demands to broader, unifying political demands, on concrete, material issues facing the working class as a whole. It would be a powerful lever in forcing embarrassed politicians into retreat, on a vastly greater scale than the courageous strikes by a few thousand cleansing workers which forced the First Minister into helping to broker a much-improved offer (10% for lower-paid workers) compared to the miserly 2.5% offer by COSLA for months before, in keeping with the 2.5% pay cap imposed by the same SNP/Green Scottish government.

Above all, at a time when strikes are resuming on the railways, Royal Mail, BT and Openreach, and new sectors are voting for strikes - including teachers, university staff, civil servants, NHS staff and others - the call for a 24-hour general strike takes on renewed force, as part of building an autumn and winter of solidarity.

Workers’ Class Power

It would show at least hundreds of thousands in Scotland that they are not isolated, not just a worker in a particular job or union, but members of one big, powerful class – the one productive class in society, who should collectively own and control the wealth and services their collective labour creates and provides.

Workers face the fight of their lives. Leadership is critical if we are to defy and defeat the catastrophe being implemented by the Tories. It requires courage from the tops of the unions; mass involvement of members in deciding the most impactful forms of action; coordinated strikes, including a 24-hour general strike; and a vision of a socialist alternative that can inspire masses of people that it’s a future worth fighting for.

 

 

 

 


Sunday 29 May 2022

THIS IS CAPITALIST CLASS WAR!



The Tories don't bother preaching class war because they're far too busy practising it. 

They and the capitalist class they are part of have launched the most bitter assault on working-class people in living memory - as we persistently warned they would do, during the pandemic.

Inflation has reached the highest levels in at least 40 years. 

The global food price index is at the highest ever recorded. 

New official reports in Scotland confirm 20% inflation in the cost of supermarket shopping over the past 2 years. 

And the poorest Scottish people suffer far higher inflation than the richest: 10.2% already, compared with 8.7% for the wealthiest tenth of people. 

All the different schools of capitalist economists and their political echoes try to convince us that inflation is caused by rising wage demands. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, who recently claimed under questioning at the Westminster Treasury Committee that he “can't remember” his salary of £575,000, lectured workers that “we do need to see restraint in wage bargaining”. 

The Tories perpetrate the same lie and do everything in their power to slash wages and neuter the collective strength of trade unionists in the defence of living standards. 


ASLEF members demonised and granted some concessions 

Class Hatred Towards Train Drivers 

We see their class hatred in response to the demands of a modest pay rise by train drivers in the face of inflation already at 9%, with forecasts of at least 14%. 

The full might of the media - broadsheet and tabloid alike - has been unleashed to demonise these workers. MPs, 200 of whom have second jobs that brought them in an additional £9million on top of their £84,000 salaries – use the media to denounce the drivers as overpaid, with utterly false and hypocritical sudden ‘concern’ for the comparative wages of nurses and teachers, dredged up to try and isolate and defeat ASLEF members. 

Of course, meantime not a word is muttered about giving inflation-matching pay rises to the very same NHS workers, after the hell they've lived through during the pandemic, with rampant burnout, early retirement, and a growing crisis in an underfunded, understaffed healthcare system. 

Defend the Right to Strike 

Faced with the power at the point of production held by London Underground workers and railway workers in general, and their critical role in the wider economy, the Tories have unleashed renewed threats of effectively banning the right to strike, with proposals to legislate ‘minimum service requirements’ on the railways (and other essential services) during any industrial action - which would effectively mean strikes were banned. 

On that issue the Tories did preach class warfare, but only in the hidden depths of the Tory election manifesto, as we exposed at the time; they now aim not just to preach class war on railway workers but also practise it. 

Like a second-rate echo chamber of Tory propaganda, SNP Education Minister Richard Lochhead has joined the shoddy chorus of demands that workers should restrict themselves to what he calls “sensible wage claims". 



Spreading Strikes 

A vast variety of workers are already taking action on pay as the skyrocketing cost of essentials like food, energy, transport and housing devours their real wages. 

FE College lecturers are striking for decent pay, with a claim for 5,000 staff which would only cost approximately £1.5million in total, whereas the combined salaries of 26 College Principals cost the public purse £2.7million. 

School teacher members of the EIS have overwhelmingly rejected a 2% pay offer by COSLA, as have hundreds of thousands of local authority workers, ranging from Social Care staff to cleansing workers and many others. 

RMT members in Network Rail and 15 Train Operating Companies have smashed the Tory anti-union barriers with a 71% turnout and an 89% majority for strike action, which would be the biggest such industrial showdown on the railways in 40 years. 

The sheer scale of this vote for action may well force some concessions from the employers, but anything short of inflation-proofed pay rises after 2 years of zero increases, alongside reversal of the planned loss of 2,500 Network Rail maintenance jobs, would be unacceptable. 

RMT members on ScotRail are voting for action after a derisory 2.2% pay offer, while the SNP/Scottish Green Party government try to square the circle, claiming credit for ‘nationalising' ScotRail on 1st April, then claiming “we are not in the room" when it comes to this pay dispute, whilst of course ScotRail is not only owned and funded by the Scottish government, but their (grossly overpaid) bosses have to get Cabinet permission for any pay rise above the same government's public sector pay cap. 

Royal Mail workers are balloting to protect their pay, and are about to be joined by fellow members of the Communication Workers Union in the BT Group. 

Countless groups of Unite the union members are likewise squaring up to the employers with demands on pay to catch up with inflation. 



Tories Battered into U-turn 

This rolling thunder of industrial fightback by hundreds of thousands of workers is what helped to terrify the Tories into a U-turn on a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, as they face fights on far too many fronts for their own liking. 

After months of stubbornly rejecting the notion of taxation of the grotesque super-profits of the energy giants, as their profiteering drives millions into fuel poverty, the Tories have conceded a temporary 25% tax on the profits of North Sea oil and gas companies, which they claim could raise up to £5billion. 

Whilst that figure dwarfs the pathetically weak windfall tax demands by the Labour leadership - which they themselves estimate would have raised £2billion - it still goes nowhere near matching the life-threatening hike to energy bills which have already been imposed, with an additional £800 increase forecast by Ofgem's chief executive for October. 

Whereas the universal £400 energy subsidy is a welcome, hard-won concession, it doesn't match even half the rise in bills. 

And in contrast to everything the Tories stand for, they've felt compelled to offer targeted (but totally inadequate) additional aid on mounting fuel bills, in a battle for electoral survival. To pensioners, a demographic with a higher than average propensity to vote; and to some of the most impoverished of the working class, to appease their rage in the so-called Redwall seats of northern England - former Labour fortresses recently conquered by the Tories. Classic ruling class tactics: limited reforms from above to prevent 'revolution' from below. 


Public Ownership of Energy 

And the windfall tax is tied to bountiful concessions to the Big Polluters, which threatens to not only subsidise their profits from taxpayers’ money but also vastly exacerbate the climate crisis. 

Shell, BP and the other fossil capitalists have been promised 91 pence back out of every £1 windfall tax provided they invest in energy production - with absolutely no precondition that such investment should be in clean, green renewable energy. 

It feeds into the renewed drive by Boris Johnson for increased fossil fuel production alongside a binge of nuclear power investment, neither of which offers any short-term answer to the energy crisis, and both of which only add to pollution and the threat to the lives of people and our planet. 

And the super-profitable electricity generating and supply companies and privatised National Grid are sheltered from the Tory windfall tax, which targets only oil and gas producers - leaving profiteering out of people's misery intact. 

Nothing short of public ownership of all forms of energy, democratically controlled and managed by elected boards comprising union representatives of energy workers, alongside representatives of the wider working class and governments, can begin to tackle the underlying energy crisis, cure poverty and pollution - all of which requires the planned production of clean, affordable green energy in a People's Energy Service. Made affordable by taking the profit out of it. And made clean by a worker-led transition to renewables. 

Tories party whilst thousands die in isolation 

Tories Can be Beaten! 

However, the £15billion package of concessions on the cost-of-living crisis, wrung out of the hands of Rishi Sunak against all the Tories’ ideology and inbuilt instincts, holds rich lessons for the wider struggles of working-class people. 

Despite their parliamentary majority the Tories are not invincible. They can be beaten. This is something like the 25th U-turn in their short period of office since December 2019. 

They are in crisis, as is the capitalist system they are part of, and can be driven back or even toppled. 

Public outrage at ‘partygate’ has laid siege to Boris Johnson's callous cabal, who arrogantly partied, quaffed alcohol to the point of vomiting all over 10 Downing Street and abusing cleaning staff, at a time when everyday people couldn't even say goodbye to dying relatives, at the height of the pandemic. 

Fury at the outrageous behaviour of this entitled, upper-class razor-gang, led by a serialised liar, has fused with rage at the rising cost of food and fuel, leading to a very significant upsurge in the readiness of workers to strike back through collective action. 


Coordinate the Strikes 

Instead of allowing employers and the government to isolate and pick off one section of workers at a time, national trade union leaders should urgently organise coordination of strike action, including the potential for a 1-day general strike, with common demands on wages, prices and job protection. 

The TUC’s ‘We Deserve Better’ national demonstration in London on June 18th is a welcome opportunity to rally the combined forces of the trade union movement. 

It cannot just be an exercise in going through the motions and letting off steam. Instead, it should be used as the launch-pad for systematic coordination of struggles, including strikes, across different sectors, to demand pay rises that at least match inflation; in round figures, at least 10% across the board. 

In doing so the TUC and individual national union leaderships need to take up the cudgels to bury the malicious myth that wage rises are what cause inflation. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Wages are lagging behind prices, and have been doing so for years. To illustrate the point, figures from the USA show that in the 20 years before Covid, corporations systematically suppressed wages, making labour's share of national wealth the lowest ever by 2019. 



Wages Don't Cause Inflation 

Real weekly wages only rose by 0.4% per annum, whereas annual growth in the national economy (GDP) was over 2% a year. In the period 2012-19, corporate America (excluding the financial companies) made $1trillion a year in profit; in contrast they made $1.7trillion profit last year alone. 

Corporate profit margins are at their highest since 1950 – increased by a median 49% in the last two years, whereas workers’ wages have only risen by 1.6%. The same pattern applies across the globe, including in this country. 

It's fattening profit margins which are causing inflation, not wage rises, which are failing to keep up with inflation. As the Economic Policy Institute sums it up, 54% of all price increases are due to increased profit margins, with labour costs only accounting for less than 8% of price rises. 

One more stark example: the big energy companies recently reported their profits had doubled in the last quarter, at the same time as most people's energy bills have doubled, as their real wages are collapsing, after over a decade of wage stagnation. 

Fattening profits fuel inflation, combined with the bottlenecks in supplies of certain goods because of snarl-ups in the logistics of shipping supplies across the oceans, which was previously hailed as the magic of globalisation, with its ‘just in time production’ slashing costs and turbocharging profits for global multinationals. 

The impact of Covid lockdowns, including port shutdowns, has thrown the globalisation ‘dream’ into chaos, creating supply chain bottlenecks and terrible costs to the working class worldwide, as scarcity of supplies pushes up prices. 

The crises of capitalism create inflation, not wage rises. 

Demand Price Controls 

The TUC London demo should also be used to demand price controls, as at least some governments did in the aftermath of a similar inflationary spiral caused by blockages of goods supplies in the aftermath of World War Two; to be monitored and implemented by Price Committees of workers and consumers. Cut prices and profits, not pay! 

Going beyond that, the trade union movement needs to crank up a serious campaign for democratic public ownership of key sectors like energy, transport, construction, food production and retail, to end the grotesque profiteering and horrendous escalation of food poverty, fuel poverty, substandard housing and social isolation. 

Trade unionists and socialists need to bombard the Scottish government and local authorities with demands for an emergency plan to retrofit every home free of charge, with insulation, draught proofing, new eco-friendly boilers and fast broadband – to slash energy consumption, fuel poverty, and create tens of thousands of skilled jobs into the bargain. 

The Scottish TUC missed an opportunity for far greater mobilisation of workers in Scotland on 18th of June; instead of just laying on transport to London they should have organised a Scottish demonstration to pound the employers and politicians closer to home with demands for pay increases of at least 10% across the board, underpinned by a Scottish minimum wage of at least £12 plus inflation. And investment in a Socialist Green New Deal based on public ownership of energy, all forms of transport and construction, rather than allowing the Scottish government hide behind the limitations of devolution as an excuse for following fundamentally the same path of real terms wage cuts as that being pursued by the Tories. 


Build a Scottish Mass Demo 

The STUC summit on the cost-of-living crisis on 17th of June is a golden opportunity to plan just such a mass demonstration in Scotland, to build solidarity with the various groups of workers taking industrial action, mobilising communities alongside trade unionists, and to rally behind an emergency programme on wages, job creation and a Socialist Green Recovery Plan to combat the cost of living crisis - which in reality is the cost of greed crisis, the cost of profiteering inherent to a capitalist system of production.

Protesting P&O, an obnoxious example of class war by employers 


 Seize the Billionaires' Wealth! 

We live in a fabulously wealthy economy, with no excuse for people having to choose between heating and eating; making all the more reprehensible the reports by Energy Action charity of people in Scotland literally burning furniture and floorboards to heat their homes. 

The combined wealth of Britain's 177 billionaires rose by 9.35% last year, to £653billion. A rise of £55billion in a year for 177 bloated fatcats. No ‘sensible wage demands’ for these creatures, one in three of whom have funded the Tory party. 

 The state of crisis facing millions of working-class people screams out for seizure of these exploiters’ ill-gotten wealth. For a socialist overturn of the class-ridden system that condemns millions to impoverishment whilst blessing the billionaires with wealth beyond human imagination. 

It’s time to meet the Tory class war on workers with equal determination and collective action. And we are many, they are few! 


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