WHY SHOULD UNIONS FEED THE (LABOUR) HAND THAT BITES THEM?

There are growing signs that many trade union activists are seeking to break the strangulating ties with Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party, seeking other means of struggle in defence of jobs, livelihoods and workplace rights. Two developments in the one week are signposts of this shift in outlook.

The three-way contest for the new general secretary of the giant Unite union was won by Sharon Graham, whose main campaigning slogans were ‘Back to the Workplace’ and ‘Payment by results’ for politicians, rather than blanket financial backing for a Labour party hell-bent on crushing the last remnants of socialism from its membership and its actual practices.

The right-wing candidate, Gerard Coyne, was the darling of most of the capitalist media, Blairite and Starmer's pet candidate.  He sought to play on discontent in the ranks with bogus calls for ‘change’, but his track record of cosying up to big business in partnership agreements and his virulent opposition to both Jeremy Corbyn and outgoing general secretary Len McCluskey did not inspire a right-wing coup by Unite members. In fact, Coyne’s vote crashed by 20,000 compared with when he stood against McCluskey in 2017.

UNITE: Sharon Graham Wins Despite Divided Left Vote 

Many workers understandably feared that Coyne might slip through the middle given the divided left vote, where initially there were three self-declared left candidates: Howard Beckett, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham. After putting up a vigorous challenge during branch nominations, with a powerful cache of left-wing policies and high-profile campaigning against the virus of Fire and Rehire, Beckett then withdrew and made the bizarre decision to support Turner. That left two candidates competing against the nakedly right-wing Coyne.

Although declared as the official United Left candidate in a hotly disputed vote, and supported by many of the Labour left and the Communist Party, Turner would have been a move to the right compared with the outgoing McCluskey regime, and much tamer in his approach both to employers and Starmer's right-wing cabal. For instance, Turner declared throughout that there was “no need for an attack dog general secretary”, advocating one prepared to do deals behind the scenes.

Workplace Organisation

Whilst the claims by an extremely well-paid full-time national official of the Union to be ‘The Workers’ Candidate’ is a dubious concept, nevertheless Sharon Graham's well-crafted message of building more powerful workplace organisation hit home with many of the best Unite workplace activists. It's true that a major part of her campaign team were actually full-time paid officials in her own Organising Department of Unite, but they were added to by a whole raft of shop floor fighters, attracted by her fighting talk. For instance, Manchester bus workers who recently defeated fire and rehire through prolonged strike action, and construction industry electricians who likewise defeated deskilling of their jobs by the employers, openly campaigned for Graham, as did hundreds of other workplace activists. 

For many Scottish Unite members, Sharon’s openness to the right of the Scottish people to a second independence referendum - in sharp contrast to her opponents - was an added attraction.

 

Loosening Ties to Labour 

But alongside her promise to pour resources into workplace organisation, her association with high profile campaigns to unionise - such as Action for Amazon – and leverage campaigns to bludgeon employers into concessions, the other significant appeal from her campaign amongst many activists was undoubtedly a refusal to give carte blanche to the Labour Party, including with Union members’ cash. 

She pledged to fight any local authorities, including Labour councils, which imposed cuts and to only support political candidates who side with the workers she represents: “payment by results”.

This undoubtedly points towards a rapid loosening of ties between many union activists and the Increasingly anti-worker, anti-socialist Starmer Labour Party. That process of course is miles further ahead in Scotland, where Scottish Labour is not even a shadow of its former self and is widely reviled amongst many of the most active trade unionists. 

Bakers Union Threatens Disaffiliation from Labour 

Even more stark evidence of the growing breach with Labour is revealed by the Bakers Union, which although small is one of the most combative, fighting unions around.

In April 2020, alongside the Fire Brigades Union and an array of left formations inside the British Labour Party, the Bakers Union launched ‘Don't Leave, Organise’ as an umbrella to resist the charge to the right in Labour, in the hope of reconquering the party for left-wing, pro-worker policies. Less than 18 months later, on 18th September, the Bakers Union are holding a recall conference to debate the possibility of disaffiliating their union from the Labour Party. 

That dramatic step, after helping found the Labour Party in 1902, follows the decision by the Starmer   leadership and their McCarthyite machine to expel Bakers Union President, Ian Hodson, from the party, as part of a wider purge of socialists. In a survey of members earlier this year the majority of Bakers Union members voted for disaffiliation from Labour. It remains to be seen whether the Union sticks by its ‘don't leave, organise’ philosophy or makes the break from a party utterly incapable of mounting serious opposition to the reviled Tories. As Bakers Union general secretary, Sarah Woolley, has said, “We will not accept bullying from any bosses or a party that seems to prefer to be on the bosses’ side.” 

Make the Break – Why Feed the Hand that Bites You?! 

The events in both Unite and the Bakers Union highlight what the Scottish Socialist Party has argued for over 20 years: the modern Labour Party, particularly since the Blair/Brown leadership, transformed into a nakedly capitalist party of New Tories. And although a brief interruption to that process occurred with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, his removal even from party membership and Starmer's gallop to the right have reasserted the anti-working-class nature of that party.

Increasingly, the demand first championed by the SSP over 20 years ago to ‘Make the Break from capitalist Labour’ will revive in popularity amongst trade unionists. 

Why should union members’ fees be used to prop up the party that at local government level attacks them, and nationally is incapable of seriously standing on the side of workers and prefers to cosy up to big business? 

To invert the ancient proverb, why feed the hand that bites you?!

Reject Non-political Trade Unionism 

The SSP firmly rejects the notion of non-political trade unionism. Every daily issue facing workers throws up political choices and questions. 

The battery of anti-union laws which suppress wages, conditions and workplace rights and permits vicious thuggery like Fire and Rehire are the result of political decisions - first by Thatcher's Tories and subsequently by successive Labour and Tory governments. 

Pay cuts and job losses amongst half-a-million Scottish workers employed in the public sector are decided upon by politicians, whether Tory, Labour, SNP or Scottish Green.

Workers need a political vehicle to defend and advance their rights and conditions. Individual members of Unite, the Bakers Union or any other trade union can assist that struggle for political change in favour of the working class by joining Scotland's socialist party, the SSP.

Active trade unionists can enhance the democracy of their unions by demanding rule changes that allow members a multiple choice of pro-trade union parties (including the SSP) which they can fund through the political levy.

Sharon Graham, the Bakers Union leadership and others can boost the struggles of workers against the onslaught by the employers and governments both through workplace organisation and militant collective action, and by helping to build a mass political alternative to the Labour Party which has so demonstrably abandoned workers. 

This article was written on 25 August 2021 for publication in the Scottish Socialist Voice. 

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UNIONS MUST BREAK FROM LABOUR TORIES: stop funding arsonists to torch your home!

On 1st July 2014 I wrote a blog - "Ructions after Referendum" - which included the statement: "The exposé of Labour as open collaborators with the avowed Tory enemy of workers has added immensely to the process of workers unshackling themselves from their old Labour loyalties...After September 18th we are likely to see eruptions, schisms and a haemorraging of members from Labour in Scotland."

Within weeks of the Referendum result - a No majority won primarily through the agency of Labour lies, scaremongering and false vows! - absolute ructions have erupted in Labour, with an intense squeeze on them from the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists who fund their party. 

Workers without a mass party 
The Labour party was founded 120 years ago by pioneering socialists and trade unionists who had seen through the false promises and capitalist ideology of the Liberals, who up until then had enjoyed the loyalty of big swathes of the working class. They sought to build an independent mass party of the working class, a political wing of the trade union movement. 

But that was then! History has turned full circle. Workers entered the 21st century with no mass party to represent and voice their aims, interests and aspirations. Labour's attachment to the UK state, displayed during the Referendum, is an expression of its deeper ideological devotion to capitalism. Since at least the 1990s Labour has transformed into an openly capitalist party, the New Tories.

Labour's shameful record
That was harshly exposed under the spotlight of Labour being in government from 1997-2010. Thirteen years in which Labour retained the most vicious anti-trade union laws in the whole of Europe; announced the slashing of 100,000 civil service jobs; scrapped the 10p tax rate for the lowest paid; implemented rampant privatisation; raided workers' pensions; allowed the worst levels of inequality since 1886, according to Oxfam; and dragged us into the blood-soaked killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq. 
Not to mention Gordon Brown's boasts of having ended the capitalist cycle of 'boom and bust' being smashed to smithereens by the bankers' crisis of 2008; a crisis which Labour obliged workers to bail out and pay for through subsequent years of austerity.

Make the Break campaign 
Back in January 1999 the SSP launched the 'Make the Break' campaign, appealing to trade unions to end their funding of Labour's New Tories, instead demanding a democratic choice of pro-trade union parties that workers could help fund through their union fees - on top of what individual workers could do by joining the SSP to pursue the goals long since abandoned by Labour. 
Some unions did in subsequent years, but now the time is rotten ripe to 'Make the Break' and help build a mass, working class socialist party. Immeasurably more so than in 1999, especially after the mass politicization of working class people that the Referendum debate produced.

Millions for a party supporting millionaires!
Yet many trade union leaderships persist with Labour affiliation and funding of their own worst enemies. It might be only a few pence a month that each union member gives to Labour (usually without knowing it!) if they're in one of the affiliated unions. But over a period it adds up to £millions of members' hard-earned money going to an outfit that couldn't give a toss about low pay, inequality, workplace victimization or the shackles on workplace rights imposed by successive Tory and Labour governments.
Given their track record, it's obscene to note the level of trade union funding since 2001: Unite has given Labour £41.4million since then; Unison £19.6m; GMB £15.7m; Usdaw £12.29m; CWU £7.6m. And in 2013, the trade unions accounted for 77 per cent of the total funding enjoyed by Labour.
It's time to end this madness. It's equivalent to holding a whip-round at work to buy the fuel to hand over to an arsonist to torch your own home!

Don't resign - organise! 
Thousands of workers in Labour-affiliated unions are in revolt, rightly furious at the treacherous role of Labour in blocking Scottish democracy, the right to rule our own country. And at bottom this is a rebellion against the continued anti-working class policies of capitalist austerity on offer from Labour.
Hundreds in each of several unions have furiously - but foolishly - resigned from their union in disgust at being told to vote No by a leadership that failed to hold democratic debates or votes amongst members first. That includes Usdaw, GMB, CWU. 

Foolishly, because in most cases that leaves them with no alternative union that is recognized by their employer, leaving workers defenceless in the face of exploitation or victimization.
Hundreds have taken the much more constructive and wiser route of staying in the union but withdrawing payment of the political levy to Labour, by filling in exemption forms. And vowing to fight for democracy in their own union. To illustrate the scale of this growing force determined to punish Labour, almost half my own Usdaw branch members have completed these forms in the past few weeks - with more to come! And that includes many who voted No, but feel abandoned and betrayed by Labour.

Life's political
But it's important to avoid the pitfall of believing that "the unions should stay away from politics". That is impossible. Workers' conditions, incomes and rights are determined by political decisions.
Anti-union laws have helped reduce wages to their lowest share of national wealth in 60 years. The pathetic level of the minimum wage - which has become the norm rather than the minimum - needs to be challenged politically. Not with Labour's recent insulting promise of £8 by 2020 - which would barely even match inflation - but with the demand of the SSP for a £10 minimum here and now.
Political decisions on public services, privatisation, fracking, Corporation Tax levels and a multitude of other issues deeply affect our daily lives. Workers need an organised socialist voice and vehicle.

Democratise the unions 

And as hundreds of thousands demonstrated by their participation during the Referendum, we should never leave those decisions to an elite, the 'political class' of career politicians, most of whom have never done a day's work outside the machinery of their own party and parliament.
We need to demand union members' meetings and decision-making Scottish conferences, where as well as pursuing the fight for measures to tackle poverty, inequality and the dictatorship of capital, we can democratically decide which political parties members' fees can contribute to. A multiple choice of pro-trade union parties. That would assist workers in choosing to help construct a mass socialist party that stands up, unashamedly, for the working class against the profits, power and privileges of bankers, billionaires and bosses of big companies.

Murphy's Blairite claptrap

When contender for Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, launched his mission statement with talk of "representing both the prosperous and the poor", he is repeating the nauseous, dishonest claptrap of Blairite New Labour. In reality they represent 'the prosperous', at the expense of 'the poor'.
At their recent Scottish Labour Gala Dinner, these worthies forked out £200 each in the city where people rely on foodbanks for handouts to avoid literal starvation.
They have countered the Tory Coalition's additional £25billion in cuts over two years with their own cuts over three years - of £27billion!

Murphy epitomizes all that is rotten about modern Labour: a capitalist party that tries to disguise its devotion to capitalism with empty sound-bites that try to hide and deny the class realities of society to their working class electorate, whilst cooing messages of reassurance to the City of London spivs and profiteering capitalist class. 

Murphy's former spin doctor, John McTernan, has claimed that the really significant vote in the Referendum wasn't the 53% Yes vote amongst working class Glaswegians, but the 61% No vote in Edinburgh's middle class. He concludes that Labour in Scotland should tack to the right and win over the "aspirational middle classes" as well as its traditional heartland working class. 

Facing both ways

Classic Blairism. But the material basis for this con-trick has melted away with the 2008 banking crisis, which burst the financial bubble that for a short spell in history had deluded not only "the aspirational middle classes" but also sections of workers that things were getting better under New Labour. Based on plastic wealth, credit, that inevitably turned into debt and demolished any temporary feel-good factor in the working class. 

Since then, the class divide has deepened, making it all the more untenable to keep up the pretense of simultaneously 'representing the prosperous and the poor' for any length of time. Something Labour is discovering as their support in working class Scotland plummets at an unprecedented rate. 

SSP upholds principles of the socialist pioneers
Workers and their unions don't have to imprison themselves with a choice of two factions of Thatcherism. They should stop funding their Labour enemy, demand democratic choices and membership control of their unions' political funds - and join the SSP in pursuit of the democratic socialist aims of the labour movement pioneers, often enshrined in their own union rule books.

A VERY EARLY SHIFT FOR YES/TAK ON D-DAY!

This truly is a day destined for the history books, decision day on Scottish self-rule, potentially the first day of an entirely new chapter in history, with all its repercussions for the might and swagger of British imperialism, and its boost to the demands for independence for the likes of the Catalans - who are staging a vigil in hope of a Yes vote in Scotland!
In some ways it's also like most other days. Up in the pitch black of night to start work at 5am. 
But today, making sure I switch my Yes badge to my clean uniform, and double-checking I've got the bundle of Yes leaflets - one in Polish for Tak, the other with the apt message: 'One opportunity - to end Tory rule forever'. 
The first batch of fellow workers I encounter show all the traits that have been noticeable for a while: the sparkle, enthusiasm, talkativeness and straightforward happiness of spirit of those we've convinced to vote YES over recent months, and in contrast (with a couple of rare exceptions) the quiet, subdued, even sullen silence of those sticking to NO.
It will never stop me standing up for their rights and conditions as their union convener, but the NO voters generally display a lack of confidence in demanding improvements in their lives; the Yes voters seem empowered with vastly raised expectations.

While doing my job, people walk past, stopping to chat or comment on my badge. Many of them go away with a leaflet, a reminder of a core reason for YES. As a group of three pass me I shout 'Yes, Yes, Yes?'. All three reply YES in unison, one adding: "It's not even a question any more". 

Another jokes "You can't be wearing that Yes badge alongside your union badge!" He is referring to Usdaw's affiliation to Better Together, without prior debate among the members and branches. "But I knew you had the bottle to make your own mind up." We then discuss what happened with the Usdaw decision and what members can do about it.

NO WARNS OF ANOTHER UKRAINE!!
A recent recruit to the union describes how he was NO until a few weeks ago, but one of several experiences that changed his mind was a telephone canvass from the NO campaign, somebody up from England.
"I declined to say which way I was voting, repeatedly, and then this guy told me to consider what was happening in Ukraine and our fight against the Nazis. I couldn't believe it. I asked him if he was saying a YES vote would lead to invasions and civil war like Ukraine and Russia, and his reply was 'Stranger things have happened'. That was the end of the call for me!"

A slight majority of the Polish workers I spoke to were going to vote NO. After a five minute chat one of them said she would definitely now think again "because I've never heard the information you've given me before". 
In previous conversations I'd picked up a rumour, so on asking some Polish workers straight out this morning, they confirmed they'd been told that a YES vote would mean they would have to leave Scotland. A dirty lie, systematically spread by at least some of the NO campaign, brutally playing on the fears of migrant workers who have settled in Scotland for a better life. As well as Scotland planning to welcome MORE migrant workers, the only real threat to them staying in the country is a NO vote, a subsequent Tory or Tory-UKIP government at Westminster next May, and then their In/Out Referendum on taking Britain out of the EU.

BUILDING THE UNION
Two more new recruits to the union this morning.
One woman who spotted my Yes badge and showed how she had a slightly more discreetly displayed one on her uniform!
A man who started in our place recently, who it turned out had been leafleting for Yes at a polling station before his shift. When I introduced myself he said: "Oh, you're the one I've read about debating in the union?". Which he must have read on www.newsnetscotland.com, a report of our branch members' meeting where, after a brilliant, vigorous debate, members voted 87.5% YES, with ZERO for NO. A debate that has caused a huge buzz at work over the past week, including among people unable to attend who have had reports from members at it, winning round big numbers of NOs and doubters to YES. In the past two days at least 3 of the Undecided voters at our debate have confirmed to me they are now firmly voting YES.

DON'T RESIGN - DEMAND UNION DEMOCRACY
But while we recruit to Usdaw and gain improvements at work for an increasingly strong membership, our UK and Scottish union leadership are driving people out of the union. Several members today again spoke to me about "That letter". The one posted to every one of USDAW's 46,000 Scottish members, from UK general secretary John Hannett, asking us to vote NO - even if we Don't Know! The letter was a rehash of the email all members got from him last week.
It's created fury, and massive threats of resignation, because members were never given the chance of branch debates or a ballot of members before Usdaw decided which side to support.

So while campaigning for workplace improvements, I am also fighting to stop union membership bleeding away.
The fury of members is entirely justified. But resigning from the union - something happening across numerous workplaces on a big scale - would be a terrible blunder, a disastrous mistake in the extreme. It would leave workers defenceless in times of need with their employers. And it would weaken the fight for greater union membership democracy, if critics of the current USDAW leaders' undemocratic methods on the Referendum just walk away from the union.
They should instead stay and demand democracy. And they can opt out of paying money to the Labour party whilst staying in the union. Numerous members in our workplace have asked for the forms to do that. Just home, and a supply of Usdaw Political Fund Exemption Notice forms has arrived in the post.

Off to vote, to apply a pencil to paper as a contribution to the quiet revolution of working class people we are witnessing; then onto the streets for the rest of the day to help shore up the YES vote, so all workers can shape Scotland in our best interests.
Vote YES, vote TAK, and seize the reins of power for the working class majority!