our lives our right to decide Our bodies Branch) and Eve Turner (Ealing) sum up the key issues before this year's conference services union at bas survived better than most the battering that trade unions have taken in recent years. Its equivalent figure for NUPE is about 100,00.
Central to this survival is not just NALGO's huge financial and publicity resources which boost recruitment, but the fact that its 490,000 local government membership has held up Since rate capping most jobs losses in local government have been among the NUPE and GMB manual workers. But this is starting to change.
NALGO's future depends on the following key factors. First, can it fight off the flood of redundancies threatened in low- paid members? Third, can proposed merger with NUPE and the health union COHSE?
This year, up to 50,000 redundancies are threatened in the local government membership. Hundreds have already taken place in authorities as far flung as Haringey, Harrow, North Tyneside, Liverpool, Hammersmith, Lambeth and Kent County. NALGO's local government committee has no strategy to fight this jobs massacre. Time and time again, redundancy and redeployment agree ments have been negotiated, usually not involving immediate compulsory redundancies, for want of a national-led fight.
Capitulation
Local activists have a hard job winning the argument for resistanco when branch members know that everyone else is capitulating al cases, like Liverpool, does a real struggle take place.
Next vear the jobs carnage will be much worse. As the government through privatisation and charge capping, NALGO stands to lose up to a quarter of its local government membership.
Local government employers are this year hanging tough on pay negotiations, refusing yet to make an offer, despite the 1 July settlement date.
strikes and ot in the 1989 pay Still smarting from the bloody nose they concessions made last year, they are waiting for the official inflation rate to come down to impose a low-level deal.
Low-paid ditched
Once again, NALCO's negotiating team, led by lay-officials Jim White and Jean Geldart, and local government of ficer Dennis Reed, are preparing to ditch the claim for the low paid - a minimum of £9330 a year.
Tob losses are also threatening the public utilities privatised under Thatcher - water, gas and electricity. Privatised electricity firm National Power has just announced 2000 jobs losses which NALGO does not intend to fight.
This sector is leading the way in breaking ир national negotiating structures. The water industry, privatised into 12 private authorities, now has negotiations authority-byauthority. Several have severely restricted union negotiating Withdrawal from national negotiations also hangs over local government. Around 40 authorities, mainly in the south east have already withdrawn from national negotiations.
Union merger
Dominating this year's conference agenda is merger with NUPE and COHSE, scheduled to be completed by February 1993. The merger has wide sup port throughout the union. It will create the largest union in the country, with 1.5 million members of whom more than a million will be women. The new union will be dominant in the NHS and local government.
For the three leaderships merger matter of bureaucratic self-defence in hard times. NUPE and COHSE are financially strapped, and thousands of members. NALGO's leadership knows that if it does not complete the merger then NUPE will look to the GMB.
The NALGO left rightly supports merger. But what matters is whose agenda wins out in the new unor.
New realism NUPE's leadership havebeen much more directly under the sway of new realism and linked, through deputy general secretary Tom Sawyer, to Neil Kinnock than NALGO. NALGO has often sided with the TGWU and MSF against the AEU and GMB in TUC committees, over issues like anti-union laws and pay restraint.
Sawyer and the NALGOright wing will want to use the merger to back the troublesome NALGO left. Merger will create a stronger bureaucracy and a tough battleground for NALGO left wingers.
But the militants in NALGO face a broader problem - that of a renewal of their forces, and of organisation. Local government and the public services have been a meat-grinding arena of struggle in the 1980s.
Many local leaderships have been worn out and retreated. The endless round of battles over the cuts, job losses and pay are taking their toll.
Minority
The left is powerful minority, especially at national conference. But the Broad Left has never been stabilised be cause of the factional rivalry be tween the SWP and Militant, both of which have used it as a front.
Last November the SWP flooded the national Broad Left meeting to seize control and then effectively close it down.
If the challenge of mass redundancies and merger is to ganisation andpermanent or- be confronted, the left needs a minimum of co-ordination, organised on a democratic basis.
Only the forces organised around NALGO Action are putting forward this perspective. Without it, the left will suffer serious defeats in the next period. No. 3 June 8, 1991
Rajiv Gandhi presides at Congress leadership meeting International News dI
local government? Second, will it put up a serious fight for its