UNELECTED JUDGE TRAMPS ON WORKERS' RIGHT TO STRIKE: stand by the posties!

An unelected High Court judge today trampled basic, democratic workers' rights in the muck, as he rushed to the defence of absentee multi-millionaire Royal Mail boss, Rico Back.

Mr Justice Swift was quick to ban the right of 110,000 postal workers to go ahead with strike action in defence of their jobs, dignity at work and the vital public services they deliver, despite 97.1% of them voting for such action, in a landslide 76% turnout in the ballot.

This upper-class representative of the rich and powerful - who has the brass neck to be adorned with the title 'Justice' Swift - was obscenely hasty in his defence of the profiteers who've taken over the reins in Royal Mail, only to shred the Four Pillars Agreement signed with the CWU union a year ago. 
As CWU postal section leader Terry Pullinger rightly, angrily, declared, "The Courts of Justice are here to defend millionaires and the establishment."

Members of the CWU are raging at the outrageous accusation that their union is guilty of "improper interference" during the strike ballot in September,  in what the bewigged dictator called "a form of subversion of the ballot"
His bogus accusations were based on the claim the union had encouraged a Yes vote, and that some members opened their ballot papers at work rather than in the privacy of their homes. 

Not One of 110,000 Complained! 

As CWU leaders from every region of the country spelled out, not one single member of the 110,000 workforce ever complained to the independent scrutineers about interference in the ballot, or about being pressurised by the CWU, or any other objection to how this phenomenally successful exercise in mass democracy was conducted. 

The brutal truth is that Swiss-based Rico Back and his unelected Royal Mail Group board are hellbent on smashing the working conditions and jobs of these workers, hoping to scrap 6-days-a-week delivery, renege on the agreed transition to a 35-hour week by 2021 without loss of pay, and create an insecure Parcelforce operation modelled on the gig economy, bogus self-employment and zero hours contracts  - as practised by Rico Back already on the European continent. 

The equally ugly reality is that this boardroom of vandals fear the impact of united strike action prior to Black Friday and Christmas, and have employed the services of the class-ridden judiciary to invent stories of irregularities and ban such strikes. 

A Threat to All Workers 

The entire trade union movement needs to awaken to the profound significance of this assault on the CWU and its membership. 
It's an assault on the right to campaign as a union; the right to vote and uphold that vote;  indeed the right to strike.  
The wider unions need to rally behind the CWU, in whatever action their members decide to take in response to this crusade by the marauding millionaires and their Courts, in what Dave Ward has described as "a call to arms". 
This is as-near-as-damn-it to a ban on the right to strike, even the right to vote... without "improper interference" by the Courts, in "a form of subversion" of what masquerades as democracy under the rule of the capitalist rich. 

A Mandate for Defiance 

The strength of feeling in the sorting and delivery offices had already triggered unofficial walkouts at the rate of one a week, and then fuelled the phenomenal vote to take the first national strike action in a decade. 
Whatever the CWU decides to do in response to this brazen trampling on workers' rights by the Courts, media and Boris Johnson's outgoing Tory regime, this mood for resistance should not be allowed to dissipate. 

As we've written previously, the scurrilous attacks on the posties for daring to vote to strike at the busiest time of year, and during a snap General Election, should only serve to highlight just how critical these workers are to the functioning of several aspects of society.  
And that pivotal role should be harnessed as leverage in defiance of this High Court bosses' subversion, to stop the industrial vandals from obliterating not only the postal service,  but fundamental rights won through hard battles by past generations of trade unionists and socialists. 

Stand by the Posties

Likewise, just as the Courts, mainstream media and Tories have combined forces, so too the workers' movement needs to rally behind the posties in this hour of greatest need for solidarity. 
The Scottish Socialist Party is on standby to help enlist support in our unions and communities for that call for solidarity from the posties and CWU. 

PETERLOO MASSACRE,1819: Rise Like Lions!

Two hundred years ago, on 16 August 1819, one of the defining events of working class history in Britain occurred; the Peterloo Massacre. 

A crowd of 60-80,000 working-class men, women and children gathered in St Peter's Fields, near Manchester, demanding radical reforms in the face of rampant political corruption, and ruin and starvation for the people. 

The ruling authorities - magistrates, politicians and military officers, fully endorsed by the UK government - replied with a savagery that profoundly changed the outlook of the masses in the days and years that followed. 

At least 15 were killed and 700 wounded as the cavalry of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry charged, swords drawn, hacking left and right into the crowd, under the orders of magistrates safely ensconced in a nearby mansion, who feared the entirely peaceful, well-disciplined crowd would challenge their economic and political monopoly of power. 

The first to die was two-year-old William Fildes, knocked from his mother's arms as one of the cavalry galloped to St Peter's Fields, intent on helping to put these protesting workers back in their box.

Political corruption remains today - if modified compared to 1819

Corruption and Famine

The demands of the mass rally arose from bitter anger at their treatment by those in power, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, and in its wake led to a very brief boom in textile manufacturing, followed by deep and chronic depression. 

Whilst the mill owners and other rising capitalists continued to luxuriate in wealth, mass unemployment, starvation and actual famine stalked the country, including Lancashire, the main centre of textile weaving and spinning. 
The Corn Laws of 1815 exacerbated the conditions of mass starvation, imposing tariffs on foreign grain imports, forcing food prices up and the quality of food down, triggering outbreaks of famine. 

Rotten Boroughs

Propping up the inequality and mass hunger was a political system stinking of the worst corruption.  

Voting rights were restricted to adult male owners of freehold land above a threshold rental value. This tiny, narrow franchise - part of the shoddy compromise between the landowning and capitalist classes in the decades after the English Civil War - totally excluded the wealth producers, the working class, those rightly described by many historians as "the manufacturing class". 

For instance, Manchester and surrounding towns had a population of a million, but the whole county of Lancashire had just two MPs, returned by a tiny handful of the propertied class. 

Of 515 MPs across England and Wales, 351 were sent to 'the Mother of Parliaments' by a minuscule 177 rich individuals - and every single one of Scotland's 45 MPs relied on the same system of patronage. 

In at least two separate seats, two MPs (in each) were elected in a 'rotten borough' by one, single, solitary voter! So twice as many MPs as voters! 

Next time you get a lecture from a Tory, or employer, or lickspittle defender of the wonders of capitalist democracy, it might be worth acquainting them with this slice of rotten, corrupt reality. 

Peaceful Demands for Democracy

The 60-80,000 who assembled, after marching in well-drilled formation from neighbouring towns and districts, carried banners with slogans like Universal Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, Annual Parliaments, No Corn Law, Liberty and Fraternity, Unity and Strength. 

They were entirely peaceful, but put the fear of rebellion into the corrupt, cankered hearts of the rich and their magisterial agents. They amassed troops from Special Constables and several cavalries, thousands of armed men in total. 

"The Tory party in arms" feared revolution and assaulted peaceful meeting 

Business Mafia on Horseback!

These sabre-wielding militias were enlisted from the class of tradespeople, shopkeepers and especially publicans, described at the time by one local newspaper as "the fawning dependents of the great, with a few fools, who imagine they acquire considerable importance wearing regimentals." 

More recent historians have described them more succinctly: "The local business mafia on horseback", or, in another case, "Young members of the Tory party in arms."

Next time you're assured British democracy is a God-given blessing we should be grateful for, it's worth remembering the struggles and martyrdom workers went through to even win the elementary right to vote every few years - and the armed savagery in opposition to basic democracy of "the Tory party in arms", the "business mafia on horseback". 

From Peterloo to Chartism

The horror and outrage at the massacre in St Peter's Fields - dubbed the Peterloo Massacre in bitter ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo, just four years earlier - spread beyond Lancashire to the whole country. 

But it met with an escalated bout of repression, including the arrest and prolonged imprisonment of those who organised and spoke at the Peterloo rally, such as the radical orator, Henry Hunt. He was slapped in jail for 30 months. Workers were sacked, leaving their children to starve, for merely attending the rally. 

But repression cannot hold down the working class indefinitely. Henry Hunt contributed to a new force in the decades after Peterloo, the Chartist movement, Britain's first working class political party. 

Gradually, through mighty battles, general strikes and attempted insurrections included, this movement squeezed incremental reforms on the right to vote from a capitalist ruling class that fought brutally to retain a monopoly not just of economic but also political power. It took over a century after Peterloo to win full suffrage for the working class, for women as well as men. 

Democracy Today - a Good Idea!

Today, of course, we live in a very different world - in some respects! 

Past generations fought and suffered to win the limited democratic rights of today. The demands for universal suffrage and vote by (secret) ballot have been conquered, at a high price for earlier generations of fighters. 

But unless we win economic democracy there can never be full-blown political democracy.  

Two hundred years on, we may not be suffering famine in this country - but that's the cruel fate of millions in the global South, and here in the fifth-richest economy on earth, we have mass reliance on food banks. It's sobering to register that one of the causes of this is the fact real wages have declined more and for longer in the last ten years than in any decade since Peterloo! 


We may have the right to assembly - so long as the ruling powers deem it safe to allow us to exercise that right. Police assaults on striking miners' demonstrations in 1984/5 were a harsh reminder of the limitations of even that right, so long as we have a capitalist  minority in ownership of the main centres of wealth. Likewise, their kettling of anti-capitalist protesters on numerous occasions since. 

Orgreave: Capitalist state was mobilised to smash miners' union 

Workers in Chains - Still!

The (anti)Combination Acts passed 20 years before Peterloo were torn to shreds by mass workers' resistance, but the whole array of anti-union laws - introduced by Tory governments, retained by Labour governments - still make this one of the most repressive countries in the developed world. 

The rights fought for by the pioneers at Peterloo and in the Chartists are still often denied to workers, such as the growing number of employers who refuse to permit let alone recognise and negotiate with workers' collective trade unions. 


We may have the right to vote in this country,  but we don't really have the right to decide.

The working class majority population are still dictated to by a few capitalist monopolies: a few big banks; the Big Six energy companies; private shipyard owners who throw skilled dedicated workers on the scrapheap; one-man capitalist dictators like Jim Ratcliffe of INEOS who threaten to shut down the whole Grangemouth plant and hold the Scottish government to ransom; Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or the Walton family (ASDA owners) who threaten workers with the sack if they don't surrender to their dictats, and likewise instruct governments on what they must do, even when it subverts the will of those who elected the governments.

Break the Chains!

In saluting and honouring our dead and maimed predecessors at Peterloo and elsewhere, we should redouble our determination to fully achieve real democracy. 
Including workplace democracy, economic democracy, as well as an end to political rule by a rich, powerful elite. 

We need to relentlessly expose the corruption and inherent exploitation and inequality of capitalist rule. We need to paint a picture of a socialist democracy, where those who produce the wealth of goods and services also collectively own and control that wealth, taking concrete steps to eradicate poverty and inequality. And use that vision to inspire others to rise like lions. 


As a modest contribution to that effort, I wrote the book, Break the Chains. It strives to arm activists with arguments for socialist change, and elaborate the case behind a whole package of 21st century policies that would transform the lives of millions.

Introduction to Break the Chains

I quite consciously referenced the Peterloo Massacre in the Introduction to Break the Chains - and just as consciously quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley's inspirational poem, written in anger at the Massacre.  

In Shelley's phrase, the working class still, 200 years later, need to "Rise, like lions after slumber/In unvanguishable number!" 
Never forgetting that - even more so than in the world of 1819 - "Ye are many - they are few." 

Copies of Break the Chains available HERE

KILL THE BILL: stop Tory wipe-out of workers' rights!

Even before the election of the Tories - by a mere 24% of registered UK voters - Britain boasted the reprehensible record of having some of the most repressive anti-worker, anti-union laws in the western world. Now David Cameron and his Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, have declared a war on workers' rights that exceeds even the worst assaults the hated Maggie Thatcher dared impose.

Their Trade Union Bill - and three accompanying so-called 'consultations' designed to add an additional dose of repression to existing laws without having to pass primary legislation - are potentially the biggest threat to rights at work in at least 50 years, and possibly since the infamous Taff Vale Act of 1901.

The latter came about in the wake of powerful collective action by railway workers, but was aimed at crushing the power of all unions to function, by making them liable for any loss of profits caused by a strike. It triggered a wave of strikes and the formation of what became the Labour Party, to give workers a political arm to fight with. Waves of united action won repeal of the Taff Vale Act in 1906.

THATCHER'S ACTS - KEPT BY LABOUR

Fast forward to the 1980s, where Thatcher's Tory regime imposed six major anti-union Acts. They were a coldly calculated reaction to the growth of workers' militancy in the 1970s and early 1980s, when millions took collective action to defend themselves and their communities from a concerted onslaught by successive governments seeking to restore the profit margins of the capitalist minority.

Thatcher's laws - which are intact to this day, left undisturbed by the 13 years of Labour in government - throw up multiple obstacles to the functioning of unions as a defense force for workers.

They insist on secret postal ballots (with full media interference on behalf of the employers) prior to any industrial action, rather than the fulsome debate of workers mass meetings and a vote on the spot. They incorporate the legal requirement to give employers at least 7 days notice of a ballot and another 7 days notice of any industrial action arising from a ballot.

They tightly restrict the definition of a trade dispute, banning 'secondary' solidarity strikes or any deemed 'political', such as against privatization.

They include multiple legal hurdles on the wording and conduct of industrial action ballots, which employers' lawyers have crawled all over for years, winning numerous injunctions in the Courts to outlaw democratically agreed strikes.

They make unions prey to seizure of their funds and assets, which has made many union leaders quivering wrecks in the face of demands by members to take action when it's the only means of self-defense.

UNION WEAKNESS INVITES TORY AGGRESSION

But now we witness the ultimate paradox; the terrible consequences for workers of the failure of the majority of union leaderships to resist and defy this legal straitjacket for decades. The subsequent weakening of the trade union movement means the state and employers feel far less need to accommodate the unions than if they'd put up a concerted fight. The TUC and individual unions' readiness to embrace 'social partnership' with the employers, instead of independently standing up for workers' rights and distinctive class interests, has reduced the employers' need for social partnership!

They instead feel confident in resorting to brutal, undisguised class warfare. Not because there's been a massive wave of strikes, as the Tories try to tell the more gullible population in their 'justifications' for their new Trade Union Bill; last year saw 788,000 days of strike action across the whole of the UK, which was a rise compared to recent years, but on a puny scale compared with the 11.9 million strike days in the 1980s.
No, this new onslaught is born of a recognition that the unions - with 6.5 million members in Britain, 630,000 in Scotland alone - still represents a powerful foe as the Tories plunge the knife into benefits, jobs, services and pay...provided union leaders stop pussy-footing around with empty rhetoric and apply themselves to a coordinated plan of action to halt austerity.

So the Tory Trade Union Bill is not the result of some public clamour for action against already-existing strikes and protests by organized workers, but rather a savage attempt to cut off that path to working class people who are increasingly furious at the poverty and inequality we face.

BALLOT RIGGING

The measures included in their Bill and accompanying 'consultations' are a full-frontal assault on the human and democratic rights of working class people, and indeed in breach of various European Court of Human Rights articles - which is a core reason the Tories aim to scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, and seek to negotiate Britain's exclusion from many European legal directives.

In flagrant breach of ECHR rulings that "only the votes cast should count", the Tory Bill insists on a threshold of at least 50% of all who are eligible to vote in any union ballot for action. So those abstaining are counted as a vote against the action.

In a move that goes even further in its attacks on democracy than even those mentioned in the Tory manifesto or subsequent Queen's Speech, they insist on another hurdle of 40% of all those eligible having to vote for the action in the case of what is now dubbed "important public services". This adds to their original list of "essential public services", so it now includes workers in health, transport, education (of all those aged up to 17), fire services, border security and nuclear decommissioning and waste disposal. A pernicious added clause includes workers who are ancillary to such "important public services".

So for the millions thus affected, it's not enough to get a majority of the votes cast, but it must also be at least 40% of all the members eligible to vote, regardless of whether many of them abstained.

This ballot rigging is from a Business Secretary elected by only 38% of his local electorate; in a parliament with 331 MPs elected without a majority; by a Cabinet whose number would be cut by half, and the number of Tory MPs would drop by 270, if they'd had to win the 50% and 40% votes they now want to impose on workers and their unions.

The only other countries with similar outrageous barriers in ballots on the right to strike are Bulgaria and Romania - states not frequently quoted as a model for progress by the Tories!

LEGAL MINEFIELD & ARMY OF STRIKE-BREAKERS

But those outrageous 'high hurdles' are just the start of the effrontery to the free functioning of unions in the Bill.

Ballot forms will have to give "reasonably clear details of the matters in issue in the trade dispute" (so bosses' lawyers can challenge whether they are 'reasonably clear'); "the types of industrial action" when it's not a strike (again, a recipe for legal challenges compared with the current 'action short of strike action'); and "the period or periods within which action is expected to take place" (so employers can plan to undermine its effectiveness, and legally challenge it if dates change because the situation demands tactical changes - and in any case, how in hell are unions expected to know the exact dates of action well over a month beforehand?).
Instead of giving 7 days' notice to employers, 14 days' notice will now be required; again, neutering the impact by giving bosses ample time to plan counter-measures. And among the latter options will be the hiring of Agency workers to do strikers' jobs, as the Tories plan to scrap the ban on that which has been in place since 1973 - including right through Thatcher's years!

So they are arming employers with a legal minefield to stop action, and an army of vulnerable Agency workers issued the choice of 'scab or be sacked'.

ORWELLIAN POLICE REGIME

If, despite all this, a strike goes ahead, new laws on picketing aim to criminalize workers with the courage to fight back. The current Code of Conduct on picketing that limits it to six will become a law, so any more than that would be committing a criminal offense. So the more popular a strike, and the bigger the show of support on a picket line, the larger the number of workers to be branded criminals!
Unions are to be legally obliged to have a Picket Superviser, named to the police, with a badge or other ID, always either on or near the picket line, and in possession of a letter to produce to the police "or any other person who reasonably asks". An outrageous intrusion on the privacy and civil rights of union activists, and a trampling on the autonomy of unions.

Unions will have to inform the government of pickets and protests in advance, and "whether there will be loudspeakers, props, banners, etc"!

And contrary to the loaded language of the Tories' 'Consultation on Intimidation of Non-Striking Workers', these police-measures are not aimed at some rash of threats by pickets in the past. In fact, they set up the 2014 Carr Inquiry to try and find some evidence of this, to justify themselves, but none was found!

It's purely to intimidate workers into not exercising the right to withdraw their labour - a right that should be enshrined in any democracy's constitution. On top of that, they are 'consulting' on a new criminal offense of 'intimidation on picket lines'.

In a further Orwellian outrage, unions will have to give 14 days' notice of intent to use social media during industrial action, and "what blogs and websites will set out", or face fines.

Local authorities are expected to use Community Protection Notices against protesters - a measure aimed at successful pressure campaigns in support of workers in struggle.

INTERFERENCE IN UNION AFFAIRS

A whole raft of other measures likewise not only seek to effectively abolish the right to strike, but are a gross invasion of the internal democracy of unions, and of union reps ability to actually represent members at work.
Public sector employers will be forced to account in minute detail for every hour of union facility time granted to the elected union reps, every penny in wages paid to them, and the government will accrue the power to overrule agreements between such employers and unions, with the power to stop all facility time for union reps. And this will not only apply to shop stewards/reps, but also Learning Reps and Health & Safety reps.
The trade union Certification Officer is to be granted vast new powers to interfere in union affairs - even when not a single member has complained or demanded intervention. These include membership registers; union elections; ballots on mergers; political funds and rules; power to demand handover of union documents; and to question union staff and officers. All on pain of a £20,000 fine for failure to fully comply. All the entire policing exercise on behalf of the state is to be funded by a special levy on the unions!

CATACLYSMIC ATTACKS REQUIRE DEFIANT ACTION

This battery of new measures is a cataclysmic attack on the right to be in a union that is in any way effective as a collective defense of workers' rights and conditions; the right to strike; the right to free speech and freedom of association.

Those union and Labour leaders who spent two years telling workers to vote against Scottish independence and wait for 'justice with Labour' have a lot to answer for. But waiting for independence is not an option either, given the scale of wipeout of workers' rights we face here and now.

Urgent, immediate action in confrontation with the Tories, combined with a clear vision of an alternative future, is the order of the day.

The Tories' bogus 'consultation' ends in early September, followed by a second reading of the Trade Union Bill.

The TUC has promised a day of action when that debate in Westminster happens, and a demo at the Tory party conference on 4 October.

Each trade union, the STUC and TUC need to act with utmost urgency, calling meetings and forums of trade unionists to arm them with the facts, motivate them into taking action with a harsh warning of what is threatened.

They should call a genuine day of action as an opening salvo, with strikes and rallies in every region or city, appealing not only to those workers most immediately in the firing line - those in 'important public services' - but all trade union members, and indeed non-unionized workers, such as Agency staff, who face the horrendous choice of being ordered to cross picket lines to undermine fellow-workers' jobs and conditions, or lose their own job.

DEFY ANTI-UNION LAWS!

Such strikes would often be in defiance of existing anti-union laws, let alone the new additional repressive measures being grafted onto them; so be it! Unless union leaderships have the courage to take such action, the Tories will continue to feel emboldened into pursuing their dictatorial measures against workers. And unless such a lead is given, workers will lack belief in the ability of the movement to defy and defeat the Tories.
On the other hand, bold united action would win widespread support and involvement from working class people not yet even in a union. They need a vehicle to resist austerity.

SCRAP ALL THE REPRESSIVE LAWS

In fighting to kill off the Bill, the trade union movement and its allies need to make two other things crystal clear: a readiness to defy the Bill's measures even if the Tories ignore opposition and implement it; and a call not only to Kill the Bill, but also to repeal the entire package of already-existing anti-union laws that these new measures are being grafted onto.

It's widespread failure by most union leaders to defy the previous 30 years of anti-union laws that has emboldened Cameron et al. In contrast, those groups of workers who have defied these laws have always won huge concessions e.g. oil refinery construction workers.

DEVOLVE TO DISSOLVE!

The battle to confront and finish off the Bill should be combined with the demand for power over employment laws to be devolved to the Scottish parliament. That will unify workers who voted Yes and No in the Referendum. It points to an escape route from Tory Westminster dictatorship. And whilst the SNP leadership have never once publicly pledged to repeal the anti-union laws - the most vicious in the western world - the unions have the potential power to pound Holyrood into traveling that road, with the demand for a Charter of Workers' Rights to be ushered in as an example to the rest of the UK and beyond.

That's what the Scottish Socialist Party has consistently fought for. That's what the 630,000-strong trade union movement in Scotland needs to take decisive action in pursuit of.