All bark and no bite

There was dismay and anger amongst the several thousand trade union members who crowded Westminster Central Hall; some including a large number from the prison officers union, couldn’t get in to the TUC’s anti-cuts rally. People had travelled from Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall, Northamptonshire and around London to take part in the protest meeting and lobby of MPs.

As well as the Prison Officers Association, there were big delegations from Unison, actors’ union Equity, rail and transport workers, public services unions UNITE and GMB, the National Union of Teachers and the Right to Work Campaign. Screen actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Lloyd Pack said they opposed cuts in the arts which will privilege the rich. They all shared a deep anxiety as it emerged that around half a million jobs are to go by 2015.

Tony Woodley, joint secretary of the UNITE trade union, pointed out that for every four public sector jobs scrapped by the cuts, three more would follow in the private sector. He pointed out that the Lib-Con coalition has no mandate for the cuts, and that people “did not vote for the dismantling of their schools, hospitals and communities.”

“Cuts on this scale make no sense,” he said – but they make sense to the coalition, the bankers and the IMF. It’s the survival of the capitalist system that is at stake for them.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber continued the myth that the cuts are just a political choice, not an economic necessity for the ruling class: "They want us to believe....this is economic necessity. Yet economic experts across the spectrum warn us that the cuts are too deep and too rapid.”

Dave Prentis of Unison warned that if the government doesn’t listen, “we will be back. For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We’ll march in our thousands and we’ll vote in our millions,” he said in a fit of demagogy. But vote for what? For New Labour Mark 2?

None of the trade union leaders have any answers. In fact they are determined to hold back any serious movement by workers in the face of the re-shaping of the entire British state. Asked why the British workers were not angry as those in France, Woodley cited the anti-trade union laws making striking difficult. But if they were serious about halting the cuts, trade union leaders would bring every member out and let the law go hang. By directing all their fire towards parliament and the next election nearly four years hence, they hope to act as a lightning rod to defuse and disarm any movement.

And where was Milliband? He was in hiding from the trade union leaders who got him the Labour leadership. The reality is a New Labour government would be doing the same – and it may not be too long before they too are co-opted into this government of desperate decline.

Today’s spending review is not the result of a nasty bunch of old-style Thatcherite Tories. It is a response to the most serious economic and financial crisis of the capitalist profit-based system. As Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, speaking in the Midlands, made plain. Deep tensions underlay discussions at the International Monetary Fund meeting last week, he said.

Global currency conflicts, particularly between the US and China, are evidence of profound disagreements about the way to deal with the crisis. A 1930s-style collapse of business activity and international trade is possible. So much for the cuts being an “ideological exercise”! They are the ruling class’ response to an uncontrollable crisis of the system.

Fighting against the cuts agenda means challenging the ruling class by working for a transfer of power, property and control to a democratically elected and accountable network of peoples’ assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html. Come to the Beyond Resistance conference on December 11 to make this come alive.

Corinna Lotz and Peter Arkell
A World to Win

Time to defy anti-union laws

The High Court ruling against the planned British Airways cabin crew strike is not simply the outcome of a clearly partisan decision by Mr Justice McCombe. It is also the result of more than two decades of fearful inaction on the part of the trade union leaders.

Strike action did not become illegal only with yesterday’s ruling that a ballot of BA cabin crew was invalid because of failure to notify members about 13 spoiled ballot papers in an 81% vote in favour of action. For the abolition of the right to strike you have to go back to a series of anti-union laws passed by the 1979-1997 Tory government.

The law that was cited by the judge to block 20 days of planned strike action in defence of jobs and against victimisation was actually passed in 1992. And the union leaders have done nothing to challenge this or any other aspect of the anti-union legislation ever since. This is especially the case in relation to laws banning solidarity action as well as the requirement to hold a postal ballot.

As a result, strikes have often been ineffective and isolated with the union bureaucracy running scared of massive compensation claims by the employers. As it is, the Unite union could still face a £250,000 bill for strikes against BA in March as a result of yesterday’s judgement.

We mustn’t forget the legacy of the last 13 years of New Labour government either. Tony Blair once boasted that the laws restricting strike action were the toughest in Europe. So they were and that’s how they remained until Brown left Downing Street last week. And yet union leaders, especially Unite’s, continued to send the cheques through even though campaigns for the repeal of Tory anti-union laws fell on deaf ears.

There were, naturally, lots of fine words from the joint general secretaries of Unite, Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson outside the High Court. They said: "This judgment is an absolute disgrace and will rank as a landmark attack on free trade unionism and the right to take industrial action. Its implication is that it is now all but impossible to take legally protected strike action against any employer who wishes to seek an injunction on even the most trivial grounds."

Leaving aside the concessions Unite has offered BA in terms of reducing its wages bill and accepting a two-tier workforce, this statement would mean something more if it were a call to action to ignore a law that clearly denies cabin crew their human rights. Instead, Unite is relying on the Court of Appeal to find in their favour.

Even if the appeal is won, the employers will be back time and time again to frustrate workers (this is the second time BA alone has won in the courts). The technicalities of the postal ballot were largely ignored for a long period. But the recession has brought the employers out of the woodwork. Just before Christmas, the RMT rail union was prevented from going ahead with strikes over jobs.

After the BA ruling, Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, said: "We warned after the [Easter] judgment that it bent the anti-trade union laws even further in favour of the employers and so it has proved. There is no doubt that this new Con-Dem government wants to effectively outlaw strikes in publicly used services before they swing the axe at our hospitals, schools and fire stations, and the courts are the battering ram to make that happen."

The trade unions were built in the face of laws that banned combinations, sent workers to prison, deported them to Australia and victimised activists. Protecting the funds of the unions such as they were was of secondary concern. Crow is right about what’s to come as the massive cuts programme bites. Workers cannot resist with one hand tied behind their backs by laws that prevent effective action. It’s time for union leaders to put up or shut up, to defy the anti-union laws or go meekly to the slaughter.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Don't let BA cabin crew fight alone

As New Labour ministers lined up with the right-wing press over the weekend to condemn the strike by British Airways cabin crew, you had to ask yourself what had the national leaders of the Unite trade union done to prepare for a confrontation that the company had clearly planned for some time. The answer is not very much.

While BA management implemented a systematic policy of bullying and harassment – suspending or disciplining 38 crew members, nearly half of them union reps – Unite joint leaders Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley were shocked by the turn of events. So much so that at a recent Unite national committee, they apparently turned on Len McCluskey, the assistant general secretary who was then in charge of the dispute.

Under marching orders from Gordon Brown to get the dispute settled, Woodley took over the talks and tried to broker a deal based on offering up more than £60 million in “savings” at the expense of the workforce. Finally, the penny dropped. Woodley announced that BA chief executive Willie Walsh was leading a war against Unite with the intention of undermining the union within the airlne.

Writing to striking cabin crew – who have defied vilification and slander to sustain their three-day strike against job and pay cuts – Woodley said: “I pledge that your union Unite is putting all its resources and strength into supporting your dispute and securing a decent agreement.”

If that were truly the case, then the cabin crew would not be left to fight alone. For it is clear that the strike-breaking operation mounted by BA can only be countered by solidarity action by other Unite members working for the airline. The future of the whole union is at stake and that is what the membership needs to be told.

That would require the union to defy the anti-union laws that ban solidarity action, legislation that was introduced by the Tories in the 1980s and retained by the present government. Cabin crew should demand that Unite’s leaders stop pussy-footing around and get serious if the union is to have a future.

It will be an uphill battle. Unite has given £11 million to keep New Labour afloat and is diverting huge resources in a bid to get Brown back into Downing Street. This is the same Brown whose foreign secretary David Miliband said yesterday: "We deplore the strike...the way to resolve these disputes is through negotiation. It's damaging for the company, it's damaging obviously for the crews and it's damaging for the country." From a strictly business point of view, you could say that Unite’s return on investment in New Labour is well below the bottom line.

BA’s problems are just one indication of the way the economic and financial system is taking its toll. The market for all sorts of goods and services, including flights, has plummeted in the recession. Capitalism has but one answer – cut wages, shed jobs and destroy capacity. And what does this do? It deepens the crisis and makes a full-blown recession a certainty. That’s how mad and bad this system is.

The assault on BA cabin crew is part of a general offensive by the employers – public as well as private – to destroy hard-won conditions like pensions and decent wages. Network Rail is doing the same to signal workers and the universities are planning large-scale sackings. And this is before the savage cuts in public spending that will follow the general election, whoever comes out on top.

Resistance to paying for the crisis is clearly building up. We urgently need a strategy that turns defensive action into an offensive that highlights the capitalist economic and political system itself as the problem. A good first step would be to “hang on to your vote” at the election and take part in building People’s Assemblies throughout the country.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

GM wields the big stick

Nick Reilly, head of General Motor's international operations, is touring Europe on a mission. He's been to Poland and Belgium. Yesterday in England he met New Labour's august Lord Mandelson, the UK's First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, and Tony Woodley, deputy leader of trade union Unite. Today Reilly is in Spain.

Reilly is using the big stick of closure to threaten governments and unions. With massive overcapacity globally and car scrappage schemes ending, production cannot continue without huge additional bail-outs, reduction of capacity equivalent to three of the eight plants in Europe, and up to 10,000 job losses.

Reilly's mission is to extract the best deal he can as part of the restructuring of one of the now bankrupt behemoths of capitalist system of production and finance. GM was one of the biggest and most powerful of the global corporations that grew to dominate the world economy during the credit-induced boom of the second half of the 20^th century.

Together their power grew to the extent that it changed the role of government. To keep itself afloat, the sales of GM the vehicle producer, became increasingly dependent on the success of its own finance company GMAC – a hugely complicated operation providing insurance and mortgage services in around 40 countries as well as loans for vehicles purchased via its network of dealers.

As the 2008 financial crisis swept the world, sending banks into a spiral of decline, GMAC was given permission to join their ranks as a bank holding company so that it could access funds from the US government's Troubled Assets Relief Programme, which it promptly did. In May this year GMAC was rebranded as the Ally Bank, because according to Sanjay Gupta, GMAC's chief marketing officer “it gives the sense of a trusted partner, the attributes we are trying to convey".

Really? Operating in Britain as mortgage lender GMAC-RFC, the company was fined £2.8m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) last month for mistreating customers who fell into arrears. It has also been told to repay £7.7m, plus interest, to 46,000 of its borrowers.

After setting up as a mortgage business in the UK in 1998, GMAC-RFC grew rapidly to become one of the UK's largest mortgage lenders, but it stopped making new loans last year. The FSA's investigation of the company's lending practices between October 2004 and October 2008 found that charges for dealing with people in arrears were "excessive and unfair"; repossession proceedings were started before all other alternatives had been considered; GMAC staff were not properly trained in dealing with arrears cases and repossessions.

Workers in plants throughout Europe and the rest of the world should not be reassured by the failure of the deal to sell Opel and Vauxhall to the consortium of Canadian parts dealer Magna and Russian finance interests. Neither should they place any faith in the ability of union leaders like Woodley to secure their future.

The logic of capital is ruthless. The downward spiral into recession and slump cannot be reversed by low interest rates or injections of invented cash. GM's 25% production cuts will soon look small. GM workers should be preparing their own plans. They should discuss how to take over their industry, and convert their workplaces to production of zero-carbon vehicles as part of a massive expansion of public transport.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor