French lessons!
British nurses: abandoned by union leaderships FRENCH nurses, inspired by the example of the British nurses' strikes earlier this year, are now showing British health workers how it should be done.
While Tory health secretary Kenneth Clarke was still giving unions the run-around on the funding and implementation of last spring's pay award and regrading exercise, 240,000 French nurses were hitting the streets in a massive one-day strike on September 29.
And as leaders of COHSE and NUPE were publicly snubbed and refused even a meeting with Clarke to discuss unresolved grading issues - and the government insisted gradings would be unilaterally imposed on nursing staff - French nurses stepped up the pressure with a huge 100,000strong national demonstration and a programme of rolling 24-hour strikes.
One obvious difference is that while the British nurses who have taken action are largely organised in unions (mostly the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE), with the National Union of Public Employees Page 6
U D (NUPE) more reluctant to sanction strikes), only five per cent of French nurses are unionised. Their mushrooming strike movement has not therefore had to contend with indifference or outright sabotage from national union officials, and has been led instead by an unofficial nurses coordinating committee including trotskyists from the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire.
This rank and file body began meeting in Paris to formulate pay demands last April, and was at first attended by 100 nurses from 22 hospitals. By mid-September it had grown to 500 nurses from 108 Paris hospitals and 12 in the provinces.
Such has been the success of this coordination in expressing the anger of nurses at their low wages and worsening conditions that they have even forced the reluctant bureaucrats of the Communist Party-dominaied CGT union confederation into action, creating links with other groups of public sector workers pursuing their own pay demands against the Rocard government.
This patter - partly reflecting
the extremely low level of union organisation in France - is very different from events in Britain, where the January and February explosion of militancy has been ground down by months of inaction and indecision from national officials. The Tory government's shrewdly 'generous' pay award with its intricate regrading proposals has also bogged down many activists for months on end.
The result has been the irony of French nurses marching under the slogan 'British nurses beat Thatcher, we can beat Rocard', while British nurses themselves have in many areas run into stonewalling managers refusing to concede them the grading (and therefore the pay) to which they are entitled.
Kenneth Clarke's well-trumpeted concession of an extra £138m towards funding the nurses' pay award still leaves a gap of at least £60m, on top of shortfalls on other pay settlements in the NHS, and a widening gap caused by rising inflation. The National Association of Health Authorities has warned that 94 per centof health districts are planning
LOSIN cutbacks to balance their books: this will make them even more stubborn in resisting union appeals over grading claims.
However, it now seems that COSHE's key base of psychiatric nurses are emerging on the scene, and may push the unions into a national "work to grading' policy, beginning with some large London Hospitals.
Meanwhile, flummoxed by Clarke's tactics, union leaders have again handed the initiative back to the anti-strike Royal College of Nursing, making no call for industrial action (either strikes or "work to grading") to enforce the pay deal and prevent further attacks.
As a new winter of crisis approaches, the lack of a rank and file movement remotely comparable to the French nurses' movement underlines the real problem - a resounding silence from national leaders and a feeling of local isolation. Socialists in health unions and elsewhere should be redoubling their efforts to break this isolation and build support for a new round of struggle.
Harry Sloan SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
The Housing Act: The Tories go to market
The market leaves thousands in sub-standards hostels. THE TORIES plan to do away with council housing. The timescale is ten years and there are still four and a half million council homes left to go. The successful right to buy' policy of Thatcher's first term has already put them a fifth of the way there; but it is running out of steam.
The Housing Act which will become law next month aims to take the Tories nearer their goal by establishing a free market in rented housing. The mechanisms for doing this contained in the Act are four fold:
• decontrolling rents to produce 'market rents'
• creating new, less secure tenancies.
• imposing Housing Action Trusts (HATs) which will compulsorily purchase certain estates, do them up, and sell them off to private landlords.
• catalysing the privatisation of estates (the misnamed 'tenants' choice proposal) by a combination of undemocratic procedures, squeezing council spending options and tax enticements to SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
UP. D prospective landlords.
In sum, the act is a developer's charter. But it is not without contradictions. While the Tories will certainly be able to continue undermining local authority housing by forcing changes in its financing which will cause rents to double, it is not clear yet whether developers will risk capital on a large scale on buying council estates who can't afford the rents. Simply, there's more money to be made elsewhere - not least, while the boom lasts, in buying homes for owner-occupation. So far, the Tories won't commit themselves to paying housing benefit at whatever level is demanded by the landlord or "market'. On the contrary, they're committed to paying less.
One obvious consequence of all this will be a dramatic increase in homelessness. Already there are a quarter of a million people officially classed as homeless (double the 1979 figure) and this doesn't include many categories of people (youth, single people and so on) with nowhere to call home. You will see the numbers will double but the figures will halve as the Tories will almost certainly intro-
A duce legislation to redefine homelessness. Just as 16-18 year olds are no longer unemployed, anyone not actually sleeping under the arches of Charing Cross will be deemed to be housed.
And overturning the Homeless Persons Act is not the only thing in the pipeline. Expect further bills soon to change the financing of council housing.
Can a fightback be built? Already the tenants movement is undergoing a significant revival. Meetings in the six areas due for the first HATs have drawn thousands of anxious tenants opposed to the private sector. Certainly at estate level some victories will be chalked up. The onus is on the Labour Party, local authority trade unions and Labour councils to co-ordinate these struggles and lead an attack on the government's policy. Is ittoo late to point outthat a sustained campaign of non-implementation of the poll-tax would be the best basis on which to build it?
Now that barbarism has become an obvious basic plank of government policy it it time for Labour's
A. MOORE/REFLEX leadership to act. Yet, bedazzled by the apparent success of the Tories, the Labour Party has frozen in the middle of the road like a small animal transfixed by the headlights of the Tory juggernaut.
Rather than wait to be run over a socialist policy for housing needs to be developed. The starting point for such a policy is the reform of the owner occupied sector - now 65 per cent of all homes in Britain. Ending mortgage interest tax relief, imposing a capital gains tax on sales and taking second homes into public ownership would slow things down. That should be followed by the nationalisation of the land to make rational planning possible. In addition there is an obvious immediate need for an emergency building programme to house the homeless, cater for new household formations, and to replace the crumbling Victorian terraces against which DIY enthusiasts wage their weekend losing battles. The time to start it is now.
Mick Cattlin Page 7
A new