IT IS AN OPEN secret that TUC general secretary Norman Willis is living on borrowed time.
Top union bosses have told him to commit suicide or be forced into a humiliating plank-walking exercise. He will be replaced by his deputy, John Monks.
This does not, of course, mean that the message of the need to fight Tory attacks has finally got through. Rather, Willis is too much 'out of tune' to the needs of a 'modern TUC.
Or in simple terms, he doesn't understand that, according to the new eme realists, the TUC is finished in its present form.
Workers in Britain are under sustained attack on all fronts. The Newham NALGO court decision is yet another major blow at the right to strike.
Unemployment is going thre ugh the roof, the welfare state being destroyed, and employme ghts are being crushed by the nanagement techniques. Against this, the TUC has done nothing.
At the same time, the union race for mergers, especially the formation of UNISON and the likely TGWU-GMB merger, means the union movement is going to be carved up by three or four super-unions.
Their bureaucratic leaders want to squeeze the remaining smaller unions, to minimise any kind of political debate, and to maximise their elbow room in doing deals with the employers at the expense of their rivals.
This has already reduced the TUC to near impotence in its objective of preventing single-union deals and poaching of members.
The trend in the new world of trade unionism is clear. New realism is turning into simple business unionism, involving giant organisations progressively crushing internal democracy.
Labour is putting the union link into question. In the face of all this, who needs the TUC? To the union tops it Gives me the Willis looks like an historical anachronism, a vestige of general strike days when wild leftists had delusions about a 'general staff of the working class.
The TUC will survive, but with a much cut-down role, mainly of training, education, and as last resort for inter-union disputes.
Every change so far implemented -as the falling membership of affiliated unions has created a cash crisis - has in fact weakened the TUC's claim to play any useful role in the labour movement.
Even as the TUC staff were drastically cut back over the summer, Willis hired Kinnockite hack Charles Clarke on a short term contract for Parliamentary Liaison' - while Parliament was in recess!
From a socialist point of view the TUC has always been hand-in-glove with capitalism - its betrayals from the general strike to the miners - have been many and legendary.
It is hard to imagine a socialist campaign to defend the TUC - but the left has nothing to gain by assisting the right wing bureaucrats to ditch it.