THE LAST year has seen major challenges affecting Britain's trade unionists, each of which the TUC has monumentally failed.
These include the miners' struggle, vital local struggles like the Timex dispute and Burnsalls, the 1.5 per cent pay freeze in the public sector, rising unemployment and closures, rail privatisa.
and more attacks on the NHS, the question of the Labourunion link and the ettects of the 1992 anti-union law.
By any yardstick this was a full agenda for the TUC to get its teeth into, and one full of opportunities for deliverin blows against the Tories.
But where there were victoMonks: behind Willis res, as over senol (csund. was entirely because the TUC não nomine to do wl tnent.
At the same time major structural changes are taking place in movement. the NALGO-NUPE-COHSE merger has taken place to form UNISON and the TGWU and GMB are discussing merger.
These changes are in the process of rendering the TUC semi-redundant as three or four major union federations dominate the movement.
The most gigantic failure of TUC has been the miners' struggle, a fitting epitaph to Norman Willis' period of office.
The days when the TUC brokered relations between the unions and the state. unions and the Labour Party are finished. Thus the Congress more and more to a research, education and information role.
Illusions that the TUC's problem was Norman Willis will be shattered by the experience of a few months of John Monks as general secretary.
The fact is that the TUC had a experience of a few months of John Monks as general secretary" role when it could deliver deals with government; since the advent of Thatcher such a role has been excluded. it could, on rare occasions, act as the 'general staff" of the labour movement (and that only because of irresistible pressure The threat of a general strike over the imprisoned Pentonville Five in 1972 was the last occasion it played this role.
In the epoch of new realism and mega-federations, relations bour Party will directly via individual union leader and not the TUC. Bill Morris, John Edmonds and Bill Jordan don't give a me wna te l tks.
In this new order of the labour movement, debate on the left about how to respond is very underdeveloped. The creation of new super- ederations is a maior challenge, and this is highlighted by developments in UNISON.
The new federations are potentially extremely powerful weapons of struggle. But the gap between potential and reality is
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