Trade Unions in the Nineties: A Strategy for Socialists, Socialist Outlook pamphlet SO FAR, Tony Blair has had little time available to help Britain's trade unions. He has been far too busy with the really important political tasks - consulting Mrs Thatcher, appointing businessmen to his government, attacking teachers and single mothers and lecturing EU leaders on the need for more deregulation and greater competitivity.
Thatcher's anti-union laws are now Blair's anti-union laws and if the government has its way they will remain on the statute book forever.
The speedy restoration of union rights to GCHO workers shows what could be done. Yet on the minimum wage front the Low Pay Commission has not even commenced its deliberations - which will, of course, be subject to an employer veto. A White Paper on Union Recognition will be published in the autumn, with legislation promised by ... summer 1999.
The core of the Tories' legislation, including bans on solidarity action condemned by the International Labour Organisation will remain.
Public sector wage restraint will continue. The proposals in the document "Labour into Power", which will marginalise the unions' influence in the Labour Party they spent so much to bring into government, will be pursued at this. year's Party conference.
Those who oppose government policy in the unions must urgently get together to exchange ideas, disROYAL MAIL over decisions in the hands of the Parliamentary leadership, turning conference into a Tory style rally and diluting union strength on the executive. They silence the voice of the organised working class.
The unions still have 50% of the vote: we have to mobilise to turn back these measures.
Finally, the legislation. Recent TUC Congresses have supported resolutions committing the TUC to repeal the Tory employment laws - at least one of these resolutions was supported by the General Council. We have to uphold TUC policy and ensure its implementation.
But we have to be specific. Going round sloganising "Repeal the anti-union legislation" is insufficient. The best way is to prioritise the implementation of the Manifesto promises on the minimum wage and recognition.
The way they are implemented - the detail - will be important. We can use the fight for a minimum wage and recognition to launch recruitment drives and to rebuild workplace organisation.
We should try to mobilise alliances across the unions and on the Labour Left. We should highlight specific aspects of the Tory laws -the bans on solidarity action, the scabs' charter which prohibits unions from disciplining those who violate ballot decisions - in the context of seeking to replace the Conservative laws with a positive code of rights to organise strikes, take solidarity action, and so on.
In all this, the new pamphlet Trade Unions in the Nineties will be of great help. It provides valuable context, advice and ammunition for what will continue to be an uphill struggle.
It documents the depressing state of the unions after the long years of Tory rule. This highlights what we have to work with. TUC membership down 5 million since 1979, only a third of workers in unions, shop stewards in less than 40 per cent of workplaces, strikes running at their lowest levels this century.
The authors vividly depict what we are up against - changes in the world economy and European Labour markets hostile to trade unionism, barbarous new management techniques, and a debilitating web of anti-union laws. We face union leaderships whose only answer is to trumpet partnership with the employers - a partnership the employers just don't want.
Yet if things look grim they are far from fatal. These changes create the classical conditions for the growth of fighting trade unionism in a casualised insecure exploited working class whose leaders deny it the legal protection to defend itself.
There are useful sections on' women in the unions, black workers and anti-racism and the vital question of the youth. Union membership amongst young people, the well-spring of our future, are dangerously low.
The framework is international, the authors repeatedly stressing the need for solutions at a European level. A renewal of union democracy is seen as central to any strategy to revive trade unionism.
There is cogent criticism of rank and fileist approaches whilst starting from a separation of the struggle in the workplace and the struggle in the unions and Labour Party ends up in sectarian virtual reality on the borders of our movement. The short cut turns into a dead-end.
There is also a powerful emphasis on the need for broad working class alliances. The pamphlet contains material important to educating young people in the history and method of militant trade unionism as well as discussion of more immediate demands.
All trade unionists should read it and take to heart its key message. "The way forward for the trade unions is not in the gift of Blair, Brown or Brussels. it is in the hands of the working class itself. Amen. * John Mellroy is the author of a number of books including The Permanent Revolution? Conservative Law and the Trade Unions Today and Trade Unions in Britain Today. He is a member of the AUT. *The pamphlet Trade Unions in the Nineties is available (E1.50 inc postage) from us at Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU
ATTACKS Postal workers last year ran up against Tory laws - now Labour's anti-union laws cuss alternatives and organise for them.
We must do all we can to support the struggles already taking place. There are small disputes -the dockers, Hillingdon Hospital and Magnet workers - but also the redundancies in Sheffield and the education cuts promised by John Prescott capping council budgets.
Secondly, we must build real living rank and file links between trade unionists in Britain, Europe and beyond. The activities around the dockers' dispute and the Euro-marches are exemplary. We can all learn lessons from the militancy which has spread across Europe since 1995.
Thirdly, we need to take up these issues not only in the unions but in the Labour Party - and here the proposals for weakening the unions role are of vital significance.
They don't break the link. They commit the unions to a new link, which by concentrating power