The 30 November TUC “day of action”
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West London branch will be going to this meeting in Kingston on Wednesday 23 November.
As someone says on the facebook page, some sort of strike action is the only way of testing the balance of forces before coming to a negotiated settlement which limits the damage as much as possible. Under present circumstances the public service trade unions can do no more than wage a rearguard action.
Sometimes the boot is on the other foot and workers and their trade unions can recover some lost ground, as this item from The Times of 1 November shows:
Quote:Organised labour in global mining is flexing its muscles. The world’s second-biggest copper mine at Grasberg, in Indonesia, has been paralysed by a seven-week strike over pay that has led its owner, Freeport-McMoRan, to declare force majeure. The world’s third-biggest Coppermine, Chile’s Collahuasi, owned by Anglo American and Xstrata, was hit by a stoppage earlier this week over bonus payments. Xstrata has also had to settle a dispute in South Africa, over an employee share-ownership scheme, that halted coal and alloy operations.It shows the commodities boom has moved into a stage in the cycle where the power is with the workers. At current prices, every day of lost production is hugely expensive, giving the miners added bargaining power.
Here’s the wording of the leaflet that Socialist Party members, including those who will be on strike themselves, will be handing out on 30 November:
Quote:Beyond CapitalismIt’s simple really.Your pension is a part of your wage or salary that is deferred until you retire. Political concerns over increasing life expectancy – described sometimes as a ‘burden’ on society – are smoke screens designed to obscure this fact. In reality, lowering pension levels and raising the retirement age are pay cuts.Pensions are money returned to us from the wealth that we ourselves have collectively created. Yet public sector workers are being told that they must pay more, work longer and get less, that there is a ‘problem’, pensions must be curbed, a claim which demonstrates that the market economy cannot provide for the needs of the people who produce and distribute all of society’s wealth.Fight back is necessary – the gains made by wage and salary workers on pay, pensions and other related issues have not, after all, been granted by benevolent governments or employers – they had to be fought for. And the only way for working people to defend those gains is through democratic and unified action. If governments and employers win on pensions and wages they will try it again with something else. As important and necessary as trade union actions are, they do not go to the heart of the matter. We strike because we are forced as workers to sell our lives by the week or by the month to our employers. No matter how many workplace battles we fight, we will always have to fight more. So, trade union action like this, even at their best, cannot bring us permanent security or end poverty. Trade unions are necessary but they can’t work miracles. They cannot defeat the underlying logic of capitalism. Austerity and insecurity in a world of potential plenty will always exist for members of the working class while capitalism continues. For a solution, we have to look beyond our immediate situation. Besides trade union action, political action is needed founded on a clear understanding and awareness of our class interests. Without that understanding, militancy can mean little.It is down to us. Only we, the working class as a whole, can remove, through democratic political action, the system that constantly requires us to fight off attacks upon our livelihood.We do not, like conventional political parties, ask for your blind support. Nor do we put ourselves forward as leaders. Instead, we ask you to consider the realities of our lives as workers and take action with us not to reform the capitalist system but to remove it entirely. Over the past century we have seen reform movements rise and fall; we have seen slogans fade; we have encountered scores of “solutions” acclaimed by governments and campaigning groups only to be discarded once they have been seen to fail. We have seen them fail, time and time again.Reforming capitalism is not an answerThe single fact we urge working people to consider is that capitalism generates problems it is incapable of solving. And the remedy – the only remedy – is to consciously put an end to the property system that divides and oppresses us.If you are interested in discussing the alternative society, get in touch with us.Two members of West London branch attended the pre-strike rally in Kingston last night along with about 30 others. In view of the number of unions involved there is going to be a one-day public sector general strike next Wednesday.The official TUC position, as set out in one of the leaflets at the meeting, is:
Quote:It’s wrong to make public sector workers pay an unfair contribution to reducing a deficit they did nothing to cause. Unions want proper negotiations. We have done fair deals before. That is why the TUC has called a day of action for pensions justice on 30 November. It’s a chance to stand up for decent pensions and tell ministers to start negotiating.In other words, A Fair Pension for a Life’s Fair Work. Of course Socialists who will be affected by the brutal changes will be on strike too, even if we wouldn’t employ the language of justice and fairness, but rather that of class struggle over the division of material wealth.The mood of the meeting was rather different. Most there felt, rightly, that trade union action needed to be supplemented by political action, but saw this as reformist political action (some even defended the Labour Party) to impose an alternative economy policy. A PCSU pamphlet on this merely advocated a return to Keynesian policies (to try to spend a way out of the crisis) which have failed in the past.Even so, the strike will hopefully be a signal for a revival of the defensive class consciousness that trade union consciousness represents; which will make it easier for us to urge the next step: political class consciousness to win political control to end capitalism and bring in socialism as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use not for the market or profit and distribution on the principle “from each their ability, to each their needs” not according to ability to pay.
Members will be covering the rally in Maidstone next Wednesday (30th) http://falseeconomy.org.uk/nov30/event/maidstone-march-and-rallyMeet near The Muggleton Inn (venue of K&SRB) in the High Street at 12 noon.
I’ve suggested to north London branch that we meet at Lincoln’s Inn for the SERTUC March to the embankment. Hope to see others there. Bill M.
Leaflets arrived from the printers today and have been sent out.It won’t just be rallies in Kingston, Maidstone and Hertford that will be leafletted but also Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Cambridge, Canterbury, Norwich, Manchester, Lancaster, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, central London and Brixton. List not complete yet.
The government has calculated that the strike will cost “the economy” £500 million. That will be the value of what would have been produced if there wasn’t a strike. Nice to see the government recognise for once that it is workers who are the real wealth producers. Not so nice but predictable that they have also chosen to play the anti “illegal immigrant” card.
I think Dover is being done and I am trying to get some to Brighton. Seems like the SPGB is alive and kicking after all……
To announce on the day before a public service general strike that the wages of public service workers are to be restricted to an increase of 1% a year for two further years when the current wage freeze ends and on top of the cut in take-home pay that increased pensions contributions represent, while prices are rising at 4-5% a year, the government must be either overconfident or stupid, if not provocative. To resist such cuts in living standards is what trade unions and strikes are for.Who said that there was no such thing as the class struggle.
Members of Kent and Sussex Regional branch attended the Maidstone rally. About 500 workers from Unison, GMB and NASUWT marched from the High Street to County Hall shouting “save our pensions”. Comrades gave out around 400 leaflets and a number of back issues of the SS. The ‘left’, surprisingly or not, were highly conspicuous by their total absence.Reports have also come in from the Central London, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester rallies. 1) There were, according to one count, nine members present at the Central London rally, and around a thousand leaflets were cleared. The march was enormous, and comrades had to keep shifting pitch to avoid being at the static end of the march. 2) The Luton rally was smaller than expected. One of the stewards said there were 2000 marchers but it was probably nearer 1200. More leaflets should have been collected from HO as the one comrade present quickly ran out. People were stopping to read them on the spot, nodding in agreement with the contents and putting them in their pockets. Like the Maidstone rally the SWP and other assorted lefties were nowhere to be seen.3) Members were present at a march in Birmingham. They subsequently went into the National Indoor Arena for the rally and heard talks by Brendan Barber, the top man at the TUC, Dave Prentis of Unison and a young teacher from Dudley. Outside they were accused by a group called Socialist Resistance of ‘Abstaining from the Class Struggle’. Then one of them said… “I really like the SPGB. I used to admire one of your members – a fellow called Wally Preston from Manchester.” They then handed out leaflets to a surprising number of very eager and interested young people, many of whom were from non-white British backgrounds. 4) At least five comrades were present at the march and rally in Manchester who distributed 600 leaflets and sold a few Standards. The BBC website claims ‘up to 20,000’ took part in the march, but that would seem to be a considerable exaggeration according to the members present.
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