workers' refined tactics show the way forward By Pat Sikorski
have sacked and locked out. This will take weeks to organise, and is certain to get bogged down in legal challenges under the Tory anti-union laws. But while the companies can break every safety law and regulation in the book, union officials insist their members stick by the Tory laws. This of course has been the pattem of defeat after defeat during the Thatcher years. Rather than persuading the union leaders to police their rank and file through seeking a consensus between govemment and TUC chiefs (as happened under Wilson and Callaghan's Labour govemment) Thatcher has utilised the civil courts - to threaten the privileged life-style of the bureaucracy if they don't play ball, by imposing punitive fines and sequestration on the unions. When the union officials met the unofficial Oil Industry Liaison Committee, and agreed to hold the ballot, some urged that the unofficial one-day strikes be suspended. The OILC rightly refused, and said it would continue to call action. In the meantime the companies have gained injunctions against OIL supporters occupying the oil rigs. These militants are the indispensible, highly active and visible core of the dispute. Their presence on the rigs is an essential symbol of the continuing fight. The danger is that the union head offices will hold off or delay the ballot unless the unofficial sitins are called off. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
TUC: more cabbage-like
The other thing about this dispute has been the spread of solidarity strike action. For the first time for a long time other workers have taken supportive strike action. This is also unlawful, and will be opposed by the officials.
The North Sea strikes follow a patter of unofficial rebellions that have included last year's construction (steel erectors) strike in London; the London Underground workers" strike; and strikes this year by teachers and local goverment workers against the effects of the Poll Tax.
But there have been strict limits to these struggles, imposed by three factors:
* The gathering pace of the conomic slowdown has been compounded by the government's policy of high interest rates: this has meant an inexorable rise in unemployment figures, record numbers of firms applying for receivership, and an explosion of mortgage fore-closures. The number of job losses being announced has started to accumulate rapidly -50,000 in building by the end of the year: 5,000 at Ravenscraig Steel; 5,000 at National Power, 2,000 at ICT's agri-chemical division; many thousands in retail and catering, and so on.
* The union bureaucrats insist that all the Tory anti-union laws be adhered to (and this will now continue even under a Labour government!). This has been coupled with union leaders exploiting the restructuring of manufacturing industry and resultant recom position of the workforce as a pretext to attack militancy and class struggle methods as "outdated" and extol the supposed (as yet unproven) virtues of "new realism'.
* This has helped create the cumulative effect of one defeat or sell-out after another, impeding struggles from moving from the defensive to the offensive, and severely limited the levels of solidarity action.
Even where this does not lead to outright defeat it can produce some unhappy compromises: in engineering for example, although industrial action, including some extremely long, isolated strikes, has now secured deals at 650 factories for a 37-hour week -covering 300,000 workers - there are very valid doubts about self-financing deals that involve speed-up, "bell to bell' working.
All this underlines the extent to which the crucial balance of forces between the shop stewards and their full-time officials remains tilted firmly in favour of the latter - to the disadvantage of workers at the sharp end of the fight.
The work of socialists - such as the Trade Union committee of the Socialist Movement -who are fighting to regroup and organise class struggle forces in the trade unions and combat the pernicious influence of new realism becomes even more vital as new struggles break out. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
UNIONS IN STRUGGLE than green By Pat Sikorski
One cabbage succeeds another: Willis and Monk at the TUC If the TUC had been at all serious about its recent call for the shop stewards" movement to go 'green", taking up issues of the environment and safety at work, then it would have placed the oil workers" fight for unionisation at the centre of its debates in Blackpool this year.
To establish a strong union presence at the centre of the oil industry, one of the major polTuters of the environment, would be a major achievement in the fight for "green" policies.
In reality, as everyone really knew, the ob ject of the TUC proposal was to further neutralise the most active of the estimated 250,000 shop stewards, and limit the degree of independence which they still retain from union head offices and the structures of management.
The TUC says it wants these stewards to have more 'negotiating power": but they clearly see a 'green steward' as no more than a souped-up Health and Safety rep. The stewards, given little or no influence over the day-to-day issues affecting their members, would become increasingly irrelevant, kept busy monitoring the environmental needs of the workforce, factory and community. Meanwhile the full-time union official would sit down with management to negotiate away hard-won conditions and long-cherished (if limited) elements of trade union control over the work process through "self-financing' pay deals.
In this way the TUC leaders aim cynically to exploit the new environmental awareness which all socialists must welcome, and tum it
into a means to weaken the only guarantee of en- vironmental or workplace improvements - strongly- organised unions, led by a network of workplace- based activists willing and able to lead strike action to win and protect those standards. For their part, the TUC leaders demand the employers cooperate with these new "watchdogs", or face the threat of ... legis- ohn