The Unions Fight Back
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“…if a strike is actually effective, and thus inconveniences people — which is literally the aim of such actions — it becomes illegitimate and ought to be broken…”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/30/palestine-impunity-arbitrary-arrests-torture
Thousands of council workers across Scotland have voted to take industrial action after rejecting a pay offer of 2%.Staff at schools, nurseries and waste and recycling centres throughout the country took part in the strike ballot.
It was the largest strike ballot among council workers in more than a decade, the Unison union said.
Nine local authority branches exceeded the required 50% turnout threshold required by the Trade Union Act.
While the politicians talk about manipulating interest rates and tax levels, it looks as if workers are taking their own action to try to mitigate the effects of the current rapid rise in the cost of living. Good on them.
As usual, the anti-union personal smears have begun.
Eddie Dempsey, Mick Lynch’s deputy lives in a council house that he got when earning a far more modest wage despite now having a generous salary.
The Guardian headline was “Unions issue threat of UK general strike”
Read the article and Lynch was actually saying that IF Truss becomes PM and pushes ahead with legislation to limit the right to strike, he would be campaigning for the TUC to call a general strike to oppose it.
Meanwhile, tweedledummer, Starmer, sacks his shadow transport minister for expressing sympathy for the RMT strikers. Sam Tarry conducted broadcast interviews alongside striking RMT workers at Euston station. He was sacked for saying that it was “not acceptable to offer below inflation pay rises” because it would be a real-terms pay cut for workers.
Forget his obsession with Brexit, James O’Brien describes Mick Lynch’s importance to politics in Britain
Workers at the port of Felixstowe in Suffolk balloted 92% in favour of a strike next month, rejecting a 5% pay rise offer from the Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company, which their union, Unite, pointed out would be a real-terms pay cut with retail price inflation standing at 11.8%.
“Workers should not be paying the price for the pandemic with a pay cut,” said the Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham. “Unite has undertaken 360 disputes in a matter of months and we will do all in our power to defend workers.”
Thousands of workers at telecoms giant BT will walk out on Friday in the first of two strikes in a row over pay.
Engineers and call centre staff voted in favour of industrial action after BT offered a £1,500 per year pay rise. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) said the action will be the first national telecoms strike since 1987.
I happened upon this, sent just before I re-joined the party.
Dear Editors,
Considering myself a socialist postal worker, I wish to direct your readers’ attention to an aspect of a recent mail strike.Re-acting to the Post Office’s “slap across the wrist” disciplining of a manager, guilty of sexually harassing a 16-year-old postwoman, the entire Glasgow mail ground to a halt as postal workers came out on wildcat strikes.
Now, what struck me, as a socialist, was the sense of solidarity that has developed, after many years’ experience of industrial action, amongst postal workers. As is the custom, regardless of whether official or unofficial, all mail from Glasgow was blacked, a tactic to foil any Royal Mail attempt to move mail around the country to isolate and defeat a strike-bound office. It is illegal secondary action under the statutes, but the Post Office rarely challenges the refusal to handle blacked mail. On this occasion, however, and no doubt, as a result of their success in forcing through the “way forward” productivity deal, Royal Mail tried to divert letters to Edinburgh who subsequently went out on strike too.
Once again, postal workers have demonstrated the strength of industrial solidarity and expressed a spirit, nobly cited by Anton Pannekoek in Workers’ Councils:
“Direct action means action of the workers themselves without the intermediary of trade union officers…The first and most important task is to propaganda to expand the strike…Capitalists know or feel this quite well and so the only inducement to concessions is the fear that the strike might spread universally…”
Also in his “Ethics And Socialism” article:
“The workers could not be made to understand what wrong they had committed by stopping work for a day in support of a group of workers at war with their employers. The bourgeois journalists argued along these lines:…to go on strike for others through solidarity! (sheer madness, indeed…).”
Does the Socialist Party applaud the Scottish postal workers, as I do?
Alan Johnstone, Livingston
Reply: Yes, even if we don’t share Pannekoek’s view that unofficial, wildcat strikes are always best. As far as we are concerned, any strike to improve conditions or stop them getting worse, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, is all right as long as it is democratically decided and run by those involved. Full-time trade union officials should be the servants of their members, not their bosses as is so often the case today – Editors.
Although we can applaud Lynch and his deputy, Dempsey, we should not forget that both supported Brexit
Is Brexit something we should consider, either for or against. As far as I could see it was a squabble between Big Capital (pro EU) and Small Capital (pro Brexit). Either way the working class get screwed.
While the two leaders of the RMT are calling for united trade union action for the unions, leaving the EU weakened international union solidarity, as would any independence for Scotland.
Also, any legislative action against the unions by a future PM would have been thwarted by EU regulations.
Brexit was an own-goal for those trade unionists supporting it.
115,000 Royal Mail workers are set to strike on four days, 26 and 31 August and 8 and 9 September.
Workers have held unofficial strikes at several industrial sites across the UK including Ineos’s Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland in a dispute over pay.
workers had received a 2.5% pay rise at the start of the year, and would receive a further 2.5% increase in 2023.
However, they calculated this would result in an effective 10% pay cut if inflation climbs to 13%,
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