AS THE Burnsalls strike approaches its first anniversary on June 15 the GMB hide behind fears of seques. tration of union funds as an excuse for inaction.
The 19 strikers, have called for local suppliers and customers to boycott Bumsalls. This appeal has not been backed by will be construed as secondary action.
Certainly the anti-trade union laws make it difficult 10 organise solidarity with the strike, but nearly every attempt is met with the same excuse.
The GMB are now demobilising the labour movement picket line delegations for the same reason. Hopefully they will support the strikers' call GMB winding down solidarity pickets Since January, employer Jimmy O'Neill has regularly threatened pickets with lengths of wood, twice attacking them. Amazingly, pickets have been arrested and charged with Public Order Act on May 25.
The only successful soltdarity action has been organised by the support groups. All the GMB appears to be doing is supporting the 53 Industrial Tribunals. If successful these could cost O'Neill a vast amount of money, but this is hardly a viable strategy to win an industrial dispute of this nature. CONTACT: Birmingham Support Group (021) 551 2258. failure of its official leadership. leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis. its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers. has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal classwar Tory high command. and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time. using the full powers of the state. defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialis allernative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of capitalist rule.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reformism.
Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms. but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full employment, decent living standards. a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes