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

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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.