Whatever happened to the awkward squad?
In New Labour’s second term of government, a
number of major union elections took place. The results were a blow to
the Blairite wing of the trade unions, and to Tony Blair himself, as his
favoured candidates were defeated by those seen to be on the left, soon
to be dubbed ‘the awkward squad’ by the media. BILL MULLINS reports on
where they stand now.
BLAIR’S SUPPORT FOR Sir Ken Jackson, the general
secretary of the AEEU manufacturing union (soon to be part of AMICUS),
whom he had declared his ‘favourite trade union leader’, turned out to
be the kiss of death as Sir Ken was beaten in the election by the
left-backed Derek Simpson. In the Transport and General Workers’ Union
(TGWU) when the general secretary Bill Morris was due for retirement, he
made it known that his preferred successor should be Jack Dromey.
Unfortunately for Jack, he had declared himself a Blair supporter (his
wife, Harriet Harman, was a New Labour minister, after all). Dromey was
beaten by the Broad Left-backed Tony Woodley.
A similar thing happened in the Manufacturing,
Science and Finance union (MSF), where Roger Lyons, who thought he could
fiddle an extension to his term of office as general secretary, was
forced to give it up when the left in MSF took him to court. (Further
court action was taken to force Lyons to give back to the union most of
his extremely generous redundancy settlement, which included full pay
for three years after he retired!) In the Rail, Maritime and Transport
union (RMT), after general secretary Jimmy Knapp died, the right-wing
candidate was thoroughly trounced in the election by Bob Crow, the union
leader the middle-class commuters reading The Daily Mail most hate.
So fast were the right-wing Blairites being knocked
down one after the other, that the Financial Times was moved to say that
it was virtually "obligatory for a trade union leader to be a member of
the awkward squad", and God help anyone who was seen as too close to
Blair.
In the postal and telecom union, the Communication
Workers’ Union (CWU), the right-wing candidate John Keggie was trounced
twice. Firstly, after general secretary Derek Hodgson retired, Keggie,
his deputy, was beaten by the left-backed Billy Hayes. Then Keggie lost
his own job in an election to Dave Ward.
Ward beat Keggie on the issue of opposing wage
increases being linked to changes in working patterns. However, most of
these changes have taken place under Ward’s stewardship anyway, while
Billy Hayes seems to have gone quiet to a large extent, except on the
issue of the union’s links with the Labour Party. The CWU has threatened
to stop financing the party if the government goes ahead with the
privatisation of Royal Mail.
Whilst not openly selling-off Royal Mail, New Labour
is doing it by the backdoor. Management has proposed ‘workers’ shares’,
whilst the postal regulator has announced that the delivery of all mail
will now be open to all-comers. This means that Royal Mail, which has a
responsibility for universal delivery at the same price, will be pushed
out of the most profitable parts by companies which only want these and
nothing else.
This has not been met with any great opposition by
the CWU leadership which, apart from a few press releases condemning
these moves, has yet to begin to mobilise its members to oppose the
government and management plans. These plans will mean the loss of
thousands of jobs and the de facto privatisation of the letter delivery
industry. (The parcels industry is already deregulated and Royal Mail’s
parcel delivery company, Parcel Force, has already lost much of its
market to DHL and FedEx, American multinationals.) European companies
are lining up to pick up business once deregulation for letter delivery
goes through.
Andy Gilchrist of the Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU),
also included in the roll-call of awkward squad members, was the first
of them to be tested and found wanting in the fire-fighters’ strike,
2002-03. In turn, he has been replaced this year by Matt Wrack, an
ex-member of the Socialist Party.
Another member of the awkward squad, Mark Serwotka,
of the civil service Public Commercial and Services union (PCS), has
battled successfully against the government’s attacks. With a majority
of socialists on the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the union,
including ten members of the Socialist Party, he has managed to avoid
the mistakes of some other members of the awkward squad. There is no
guarantee that even the best left leaders will not be forced to retreat
under certain circumstances but the difference for Mark, unlike most of
the others, is the existence of Left Unity in the union, an open,
rank-and-file, democratic broad left. Other unions which saw the
election of left leaders in the past few years included Jeremy Dear in
the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Paul Mackney in the
lecturers’ union, NAFTHE.
Thatcher’s legacy
THE IRONY OF many of these left victories was that
they came about because of the laws introduced by Margaret Thatcher to
cripple the unions in the 1980s and 1990s. Union elections have to take
place every five years by law – this represented an attempt by the
capitalist state to control the inner life of these mass organisations.
Conducted by postal ballot in the isolation of the living room, they are
more easily influenced by the right-wing media, whereas elections held
in the workplace enable candidates to be examined by the ordinary
members.
The victories of the left over open Blairites came
as a shock to many capitalist pundits. They had convinced themselves
that the decline in union numbers and influence had ushered in a period
of ‘sensible’ trade unionism. It was felt that the only role for unions
in the ‘modern world’ was as providers of services to individual
members, such as discounts on car insurance and other goodies. The
argument was that workers were not prepared to act in a collective
fashion, an idea that had gone out with the ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s.
But the reality in the workplaces was that workers
had not accepted the ideology of everybody for themselves and the ‘devil
take the hindmost’. They were angry and frustrated with the inequities
they saw every day: from the ruthlessness of the way they were treated
by management to the growing inequalities in wages and salaries between
the bosses and themselves.
The reasons for the decline in trade union influence
and activity are clear. Firstly, industrial decline was deliberately
increased and speeded up by the Thatcher government’s fiscal policies to
weaken the organised working class. Then came the introduction of
anti-union laws – Blair would boast that Britain has the most
deregulated labour laws in the West. The collapse of the Stalinist
regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe also demoralised a layer
of trade union activists who thought of themselves as socialists. They
believed that, even with all their faults, the planned economies of the
East at least offered an alternative model to the capitalist market’s
‘winner-takes-all’ model.
All these factors, plus the defeat of major battles,
like the miners’ strike of 1984-85, and other attacks on union-organised
workplaces, added up to a collapse in the confidence of workers and an
increased offensive on workers’ rights by successive governments.
At least ten major pieces of legislation attacking
the trade unions were introduced by the Thatcher and Major governments.
The plans to introduce this legislation were prepared long before the
Tory government came to power in 1979, in the so-called ‘Ridley plan’.
(Nicholas Ridley was a leading Tory minister, part of the rightwing that
replaced the old grandees who had run the Tory Party for 150 years.) His
plan included new anti-union laws which would chip away at workers’
basic organising ability in the workplace. They included doing away with
the right to take solidarity action, the importance of which was
recently demonstrated by the baggage handlers of Heathrow airport when
they came out on strike in solidarity with Gate Gourmet workers.
This was accompanied by the splitting up of
companies on completely artificial lines, which had the effect of
outlawing joint action between groups of workers who previously worked
for the same employer. This is exactly what happened in the case of Gate
Gourmet. The supply of packaged meals to British Airways (BA) planes was
produced in-house from the same production lines by many of the same
workers in the same buildings which had been hived off to Texas Pacific,
the American conglomerate that had snapped up many similar companies
around the world. So, from a plan to weaken the power of the trade
unions to the battle over Gate Gourmet in the summer of 2005 there is an
unbroken line.
Gate Gourmet managers planned the assault upon its
own workforce for months. Yet they almost lost it when, completely
unexpectedly, the brutal sacking of the workforce led to a walk-out of
BA baggage handlers and others in Heathrow airport.
Strike action
THIS SPONTANEITY TOOK everyone by surprise except
the Gate Gourmet workers who, after being dismissed at three minutes’
notice by megaphone, contacted relatives and friends in the airport and
told them what had happened. The lesson is clear. The ordinary Gate
Gourmet workers, probably not even aware of the finer points of
employment law, took it for granted that they should approach their
fellow workers to ask them to take action in their support.
The fact that it was unofficial did not enter into
the equation for the baggage handlers. All they saw was a group of
people, who they worked with day after day on first name terms, loading
the same planes with food and baggage, who had been told all of a sudden
that they had been sacked. Not only that, but they would now have to
work with a new workforce that had been drafted in from Eastern Europe
(mainly Poland as it happens) who Gate Gourmet had been secretly
training as drivers for just this eventuality.
Is it any wonder that the airport workers downed
tools? Only the most obstreperous of the bourgeoisie were astonished.
Sir William Rees-Mogg, a reactionary throw-back from Victorian times,
fulminated in his column in The Times, after being stranded for three
hours on some foreign runway, that the strikers had violated his human
rights and were, along with their union, guilty of "wrongful
imprisonment". Even Polly Toynbee, not normally noted for her sympathy
with strikers, responded in The Guardian: "What did Rees-Mogg want, the
strikers to be horsewhipped perhaps?" She asked what further legislation
(short of bringing back flogging) did he want.
Toynbee was right, given that Britain's anti-union
laws are weighed completely on the side of the bosses. The defying of
these laws will, in the end, make them inoperable, as the baggage
handlers proved, for 36 hours at least. What an answer to all the
Jeremiahs who say that workers won’t fight back! BA was brought to its
knees as over 1,000 planes were grounded around the world and over
100,000 passengers (including the garrulous Rees-Mogg) were held up at
various airports.
BA could not use the anti-union laws to stop this;
it had to rely on the union leadership to bring its members to heel.
This, in a nutshell, is the crisis of the unions today. It is not that
workers are not willing to struggle, it is a lack of perspective by the
union leaders to take the fight for workers’ rights to its logical
conclusion.
Like any war, the class war requires far-sighted
leaders who can seize an opportunity when it arises. In Tony Woodley’s
case, his first instinct was to support the baggage handlers’ action. He
said on TV, when the interviewer asked him to repudiate the ‘unlawful’
solidarity action: "What about the unlawful action of the Gate Gourmet
management sacking my members at three minutes notice?" Unfortunately,
that attitude did not last long. TGWU national officer for the airport
workers, Brendan Gold, was soon on television saying that the union
repudiated the strikers and called on them to go back to work.
The Gate Gourmet struggle might be over for now –
though a campaign by around 150 workers who have been left out of the
settlement between the employers and the union is carrying on the fight
– but the lessons learned have not been in vain. The union leaders have
the authority to stop a struggle; how much more they have got to keep
one up is debatable. Some of the awkward squad have squandered their
image as a ‘new broom’ coming into the unions to lead struggles.
Union organisation
IN TONY WOODLEY’S case, his role in Gate Gourmet was
to allow Gold (and later, Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary), to
take control of the situation. His reasoning, no doubt, was that Gold
was the lead officer. But if this had happened, for example in the PCS,
then a national officer who was a leftover from another period and who
continued, as Gold did, with the policies of collaboration, would have
been removed from any responsibility for airport workers.
In fact, in the PCS, when Barry Reamsbottom
(right-wing general secretary prior to Mark Serwotka) was in charge, he
often moved people like John Macreadie and Terry Adams (national
officers and Socialist Party members) from their responsibilities for
major civil servants’ departments to less high-profile ones.
But wherever he shoved John and Terry, he could not
stop their influence in the union. Reamsbottom found this out when they
were part of the legal campaign to remove him. Even the judge was
shocked by Reamsbottom’s attempts to stop Mark Serwotka taking up his
elected post. Woodley’s mistake was not to be as ruthless with his
rightwing as Reamsbottom was with the left in the PCS.
Woodley also oversaw the final sad saga of the MG
Rover car factory in Longbridge, Birmingham. Here was another test of
his leadership and, unfortunately, he was again found wanting. There is
not the space to go into the mistakes of the TGWU at the time. (The
Socialist newspaper covered the issues at each stage of development.)
But suffice to say that his failure to call for the state to take over
the stricken factory, until it was too late, echoed his earlier failure
in 2000 when BMW had declared it wanted rid of the plant. His support
for the ‘Gang of Four’ (Phoenix Holdings) – the crooks who took over
Rover and then looted it over the subsequent five years – was a major
mistake and, as it turned out, completely hobbled him when Longbridge
eventually closed earlier this year.
Only the Socialist Party called for the company to
be brought back into public ownership but, by then, most workers (who,
by that time, had lost all confidence in the union) were more concerned
with the amount of redundancy pay (peanuts as it turned out), than
fighting the closure.
Other members of the awkward squad have abandoned
their left credentials and joined the right. Derek Simpson of AMICUS, in
the middle of merger negotiations with the TGWU and the GMB general
union, is a case in point. He has now turned on the very people he
depended on to get elected, with the suspension from office of three of
his main supporters. He wants to ensure that the idea of a democratic,
merged ‘super-union’, particularly on the vexed question of the election
of full-time officials, does not become a barrier to the merger.
Any merger has to be looked at on its own merits but
for socialists there are certain key principles that have to be brought
into the equation. The election of full-time officials, particularly
where they have negotiating responsibilities for the membership, is one
of those principles which determine whether or not we support a merger.
Socialists & the unions
THE ROLE OF left leaders is crucial to the struggle.
Marxists would argue that unless you have a perspective for the
transformation of society to socialism, inevitably, you will end up
compromising with the existing system. Throughout British trade union
history there has been a constant war between the different shades of
reformism, centrism and Marxism. It is almost a social law that it is in
periods of the greatest tensions between the capitalist and working
classes that the differences between left and right reformism disappear
and both wings end up on the side of the capitalists.
The most graphic example of this in Britain was the
1926 general strike when the lefts on the TUC General Council allowed
themselves to fall into line with the right-wing reformists. They voted
to call off the strike just at a time when even more sections of the
organised working class were coming out and the government was rocked to
its very foundations. In other less intense periods, however, the
leftwing of the trade union leaderships can seem more radical and pose
as an alternative to the rightwing.
It is not predetermined whether left union leaders
will ‘sell out’ or ‘win through’. The most important thing is to
recognise that they can only take the struggle forward if they have
activists below them who are gathered together in broad left-type
organisations. These must be open and democratic, and able to make the
leaders accountable to those who campaigned for their election in the
first place.
In such organisations the socialists will put
forward policies which we believe are applicable at each stage of the
struggle. A concrete example are the recent developments over the attack
by the government on public-sector pensions, where it was a question of
recognising, and taking account of, the period we are passing through,
the balance of class forces, and the possibilities of leading a
successful struggle.
The government had been forced to partially retreat
when it was faced with a united front of the public-sector unions
threatening strike action – the first time in March 2005, the second
time six months later. The government withdrew the threat to cut the
pension rights of the existing scheme members but insisted on new
arrangements for future staff. The agreement reached did not fully meet
the original demand of the unions, which was that existing pension
arrangements should apply to both the current workforce and new
entrants. A standstill in the pension rights of the existing workforce
was accepted. In the light of the retreats of the unions and the working
class over the last two decades this was an achievement. Unfortunately,
the unions did not manage to secure the same rights for new entrants.
If all the unions involved had the same fighting
national leadership as the PCS, with left NECs pledging a mass campaign
of strike action if all the demands were not met, then it may have been
possible to consider rejecting the deal. But that was not the case with
the other public-sector unions. In this situation, to have followed the
advice of the Socialist Workers’ Party to summarily reject the deal was
completely wrong. The government could have then withdrawn the offer to
the existing workforce who, undoubtedly, would have blamed the left for
this. The course advocated by Socialist Party members on the PCS NEC to
support Mark Serwotka’s recommendation of the deal, together with a firm
commitment to fight for the same conditions for new entrants, was a
principled and correct position. The denunciations of Mark Serwotka, the
Socialist Party and the PCS left are as noisy as they are impotent.
Under the circumstances, it became clear that asking
the existing workers to fight for the pension rights of future
generations would be extremely difficult; though, as we said, sometimes
you would have to advocate this even if you expected a majority of
members to reject your advice. A ballot defeat on action, however, would
have had repercussions in the PCS in particular, where the socialist
left majority on the NEC would have been under attack by the rightwing
for ‘being out of touch with the members’. On that basis, the left
decided to accept the government’s offer with the prospect that, in the
future, the new generation would be prepared to fight to win back what
was lost.
The awkward squad is somewhat reduced in numbers at
present. Up until recently its members met as a group before TUC General
Council meetings. This is no longer the case, either because of a lack
of will or, more likely, because people like Derek Simpson would not
come along anyway. That is not important. What is important is that
socialists in the unions campaign for fighting and democratic
leaderships which are ready to take the movement forward and resist the
employers’ attacks.
We are now in a new period for unions, a third term
of New Labour. One of the most important issues is the crying need for a
political voice for the trade unions and the working class. It is
becoming the core issue for socialists in the unions. More and more
workers realise that there is no point any longer trying to get
political change through the Labour Party but, instead, agree with the
Socialist Party that there is a need for a new trade union-based mass
workers’ party if things are to change for the better. This issue is a
litmus test for the awkward squad irrespective of any faltering they
have had on industrial issues.
The unions breaking from the Labour Party, which
they founded 100 years ago, would mark a fundamental shift in British
politics. Unfortunately, up to now only Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka have
supported, to one degree or another, the need for the unions to break
away.
The RMT is calling a conference in January 2006 to
discuss the crisis of political representation for the working class and
to call for a trade union freedom bill. Mark Serwotka, whilst agreeing
on the need for a new party, has not yet come out clearly for the unions
to build that party. No doubt the complication for Mark, at this stage,
is that his own union is going through (for the second time) a
membership ballot to set up a political fund. He has had to make it
clear to his members that the fund will not be used to finance any
political party. If in the future the leadership of the PCS felt that
this was necessary, a firm commitment has been given that a further
proposal would be put to a new ballot of the whole membership.
No doubt as things develop these issues will clarify
themselves. But timing is also vital. If the left union leaders like
Mark Serwotka gave a clear lead now then this would enormously speed up
the process.
The rest of the awkward squad, Tony Woodley, Billy
Hayes, Derek Simpson, Jeremy Dear and others, are firmly welded to
staying with the Labour Party. They think that, with Blair on the brink
of going, they will have more say with Gordon Brown in the leadership,
breeding dangerous illusions in the minds of their membership. When
Brown carries through, as he has promised, ruthless policies of further
privatisation and other neo-liberal measures, then people will rightly
say: ‘You said it would be different under Brown but it’s exactly the
same’. The awkward squad should act now and come out clearly for the
strategy of building a new workers’ party. There is no other road in the
medium and long term for working-class people in Britain.
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