Prospects for the National Shop Stewards Network
BILL MULLINS, one of the co-organisers of the
National Shop Stewards Network, looks at how the network can develop in
the new economic and political conditions that are unfolding.
THE NATIONAL Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) came about
as a result of an initiative of the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers
union (RMT) who, at their annual general meeting in 2005, called for a
conference to discuss the crisis of political representation for the
trade unions. When this conference took place in January 2006 Bob Crow,
the general secretary of the RMT, said from the platform that "before we
can build a new party (for the trade unions) then we need to rebuild the
trade unions". As a consequence a further RMT conference was organised
for October 2006 to discuss the rebuilding of the unions, which led to
the formation of NSSN.
The Socialist Party welcomed this initiative and has
fully participated in the building of the NSSN. However, we do not
accept the argument about ‘rebuilding the unions first’ and said so at
the January conference. The building of a new mass party for the working
class, based above all on the trade unions, does not absolutely require
the rebuilding of the unions, though of course it goes without saying
that a stronger trade union movement would enormously aid the
development of a new mass workers party. And what does ‘rebuilding the
unions first’ mean anyway? Bob did not make this clear at the conference
– does it mean, for example, that the unions should not move in the
direction of establishing political representation until they are as
strong as they were in the 1970s and 1980s, or some other historical
period?
The very struggle for an organised political arm for
the unions (and thereby a big section of the working class), with its
own programme and democratic structure, would give the trade union
movement an opportunity to develop its political voice. Not just in the
institutions of the capitalist state (parliament and, at local level,
the council chambers) but also in the wider community, whereby workers
could participate in its deliberations and decide on its policies
through democratic debate and discussion, which even at this limited
level they can not do at the moment given the collapse of the Labour
Party into the arms of big business.
Genuine Marxists would see the coming into being of
this type of party not as a Labour Party ‘mark two’, which would be
forced to go through a similar hundred-year long development. Instead,
in the modern era, such a party would rapidly become a forum where the
most advanced workers would be able to develop socialist policies to
answer the developing global crisis of capitalism. In such a forum the
revolutionary party would fight for its programme and policies to become
the programme of the working class.
The very building of this political working class
organisation would in turn act to give a political direction to the
struggle to rebuild the trade unions. Without a political direction then
the rebuilding of the trade unions will be that much harder. It will
mean that the trade unions will be fighting the bosses with one arm tied
behind their backs.
Nevertheless, despite these genuine differences with
the leadership of the RMT, the Socialist Party enthusiastically
participated in the further conference organised by the RMT to discuss
the rebuilding of the trade unions, that took place in October 2006.
NSSN launched
AT THE October conference the RMT executive proposed
a number of important initiatives including the election of a committee
to build support for a national shop stewards network. The RMT executive
also put forward the basic guidelines for the NSSN which included the
following:
"The NSSN would:
1. Offer support to TUC-affiliated unions in their
campaigns and industrial disputes.
2. Offer support to existing workplace committees
and trades councils".
Establishing a steering committee was an important
step forward and a number of Socialist Party members were elected who
held positions as shop stewards and workplace reps. The steering
committee then organised a founding conference to formally launch the
NSSN. This took place in July 2007 and was attended by over 300 shop
stewards and workplace reps as delegates, with another 50-100 visitors.
The RMT financed much of the early work of the NSSN
including the cost of the founding conference. The NSSN has now been
able to finance its own activities since then, which is an important
consideration given that the NSSN should be seen as an independent
rank-and-file organisation and not tied to any particular union.
After its formal launch, the NSSN began to build at
a local level, with a number of regions organising conferences at which
local shops stewards were brought together to discuss common problems
they faced on a day-to-day basis.
Lessons from past movements
FOLLOWING THE SECOND national conference in June
2008 it has become clear that the NSSN, whilst relatively successful in
what it set out to do, nevertheless has come up against the very
difficulties which we foresaw, given its lack of a political analysis of
the way forward, in other words, the need for the trade unions to have
their own political voice and party.
The idea of bringing together at local, regional and
national level shop stewards and workplace reps to discuss and give
practical support to workers entering struggle against the bosses is
good in and of itself but to have a real programme for rebuilding the
trade union movement requires more than just this.
The history of the British trade unions demonstrates
again and again that this is the case. Probably the most successful
example, historically speaking, of the type of rank-and-file
organisation which the NSSN aspires to be was the National Minority
Movement (NMM) in the 1920s.
The Minority Movement represented at its height some
of the most combative elements of the British working class. It was
responsible, for example, for organising the election of Arthur J Cook
to the leadership of the then million-strong National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM) in 1924. Cook, who called himself a follower of Lenin,
led the NUM when the miners came under vicious attacks by the mine
owners which, in turn, led to mass strikes that culminated in the 1926
general strike.
At its height the Minority Movement represented at
least a quarter of the membership of the unions but it went into decline
after the defeat of the general strike, with the complete capitulation
of the TUC leaders, who ended the general strike without any gains
whatsoever. The Communist Party compounded the difficulties the NMM
faced in the post-strike period when, at the end of the 1920s, it
adopted an ultra-left position of declaring that workers should leave
their trade unions and set up ‘red unions’ instead, a policy which
inevitably led many of the most militant shop stewards and workplace
reps being marginalized in the workplace.
But the point is that the Minority Movement did not
just develop spontaneously. It came about as a direct result of the
intervention of the Third International under the leadership of Lenin
and Trotsky and the young Communist Party of Britain at the time.
The history of the British unions is littered with
attempts to establish rank-and-file organisations, when the official
trade unions are under the grip of the dead hand of the right wing trade
union bureaucracy, to be effective in the fight to defend workers
against the attacks of the employers. And the most successful examples
of rank-and-file organisations in the unions have been those that were
linked to a perspective for generalised struggle, which includes its
political prospects as well.
In the modern era it has been the work of the broad
lefts in certain unions which has led to gains for the left. Probably
the best example of this (but not the only one) is the Left Unity
organisation in the PCS civil service union, which won back control of
the union in 2003 from a seemingly entrenched right-wing leadership. Now
the PCS is held up as an example for others to follow. But the caveat
here is that it was the role of the Socialist Party (and Militant, its
predecessor organisation) that gave a political outlook to this broad
left whilst other broad lefts disappeared from view in the political and
workplace climate of the 1990s.
The existence of the ‘shop stewards movement’ (which
strictly speaking is a semi-official movement) has waxed and waned
according to the periods that it passes through.
The height of the movement was undoubtedly the
1970s, which came at a time of the beginnings of a generalized struggle
against the bosses’ attacks, both in Britain and internationally. The
British trade unions by the 1970s had never been stronger. This was a
result of the whole previous period when the unions grew to a membership
of 13 million (compared to today’s 6.7 million).
The workers in manufacturing were to the forefront
of the battles to defend the post-war gains of the trade unions on jobs,
hours, wages and conditions, which the employers were desperately
seeking to take back when the economy went into recession at the
beginning of that decade. In the end the employers turned to Margaret
Thatcher who led a generalized offensive against the power of the trade
union movement.
This was done by the brutal carrying through of the
de-industrialisation of Britain, with a massive growth in unemployment
and a glut of anti-union laws. This coupled with the defeat of the
miners in 1984-85, put the trade unions back to almost pre-war levels of
membership.
A new period
WE NOW HAVE a situation where the capitalist
economies across the globe are entering a new period of crisis, which in
turn is leading to more and more attacks on workers’ jobs and living
standards. To resist these attacks will require a determined leadership
of the trade unions and that is the crunch issue.
Too many trade union leaders throughout the past 15
years have been prepared to accept the logic of ‘the market economy’ and
so had no answer when the bosses said, ‘we have to cut back because of
the fall in the market’, ‘we need to raise our profits to safeguard
investment’ and so on.
The role of the NSSN will be to demonstrate and show
that this is not the only road to go down. It will increasingly be able
to bring together the best shop stewards, to give them the confidence to
fight back and show how to resist the demands of big business to accept
cut backs and compromises.
The NSSN and its regional affiliates can also play a
role in organising solidarity support and action with workers entering
struggle. It could even from time to time be in a position of taking
these localised struggles forward in more militant ways, especially
where it becomes clear that there is support for this amongst those
workers most involved, even if this means coming into conflict with the
union leadership.
But just as important in all these activities will
be the need to give a political lead as well, particularly the key
question of the need for workers to have their own political party as
well as the need for militant industrial action.
Inevitably there will be differences about the role
of the NSSN from time to time – even complete opposition to the idea of
linking the political and industrial struggles together. This has
already surfaced in the NSSN in the arguments of those who believe in a
syndicalist approach to these problems, in other words, that we should
keep the struggle limited to a purely industrial basis and avoid
politics altogether (or at least ‘party politics’).
But differences like this should not stop – and have
not stopped – the urgent need to build the NSSN on as wide a basis as
possible, including involving workers who might not agree with linking
together the political and the industrial at this stage
The key question for all those who genuinely want to
build the NSSN is that it is a democratic body built from below but that
it also allows all organised political and non-political voices to be
heard in its meetings and activities.
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