SOCIALIST UNITY

by Gregor Gall 

According to the popular pop song of the 1970s by the Strawbs, it used to be the case that “You don’t get me I’m part of the union“. Today, union members or not, workers are taking a pounding on the jobs front and unions seem unable or unwilling to do much about this.

So day after day and week after week, thousands of jobs are being destroyed in the current recession. The list of the most recent redundancies and firm collapses comprise a majority of companies where the workers are unionised.

It would be naive to expect union resistance on behalf of non-union workers when they have enough to worry about with regard to their own members. But it would not be naive to expect resistance from unionised workers when they are faced with the axe.

Since the recession began, there has been only one occupation so far – at Calcast in Derry, Northern Ireland – and that was over the terms of the redundancies and the way they were implemented. Compared to the 1980s, this sole example stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The one innovation from unions has been to discuss giving concessions to employers to protect jobs – either pay-cuts or reduced hours. According to the BBC, a large number of companies in manufacturing are now on short-time working (see video clip here).

But the example of JCB suggests this does not work. Members of the GMB union there voted in late October 2008 to accept short-time working to reduce the number of redundancies but this did not prevent two subsequent rounds of further redundancies. The experience of workers in the United States suggests that such concession bargaining puts workers onto a hiding to nothing.

So the normal – and lacklustre – response from the unions has been two-fold. First, to regret and condemn the losses and seek meetings to limit losses and get better severance terms. It does not really matter whether we are speaking about Unite, the GMB or the RMT here – right across the militant-moderate divide, there is union paralysis on this issue. And, second, to call on the government to step in and “do something”.

To be fair to the unions, when the redundancies are voluntary, it is harder to encourage workers to collectively oppose them because individuals make their own isolated decisions about how much the pay-off is worth, the state of their own finances and their chances of getting another job.

But the danger is that the tide of voluntary job cuts becomes an enormous tsunami where waiting for the opportunity to be able to oppose compulsory redundancies – the line in the sand according to most unions – is like King Canute trying to turn back the incoming tide.

This “do nothing” attitude reflects a fatalism on the part of the unions. Ironically, at a time when free-market capitalism is most on the defensive, the unions seem to believe there is still no alternative to the market. No major union has called for public ownership of any private company going down the tubes because they believe that the market cannot be bucked. So an opportunity is being wasted.

Quite apart from watching jobs go without resistance, the unions are also becoming weaker as their memberships fall – because unemployed workers seldom pay their dues to keep their union cards. This is a case of unions facing double jeopardy.

And this makes their increasingly frequent but shrill calls on the government to intervene to protect jobs look even feebler, because they do so from a position of weakness, not strength. If they were to stand up and be counted by organising resistance to some job losses, then at least the government might recognise them as being serious players when they make these calls.

If the unions want to have a future, protect workers’ interests and use the opportunity of being needed to rebuild their strength to protect their members, now is the time to step up to the plate. So the message that needs to go out loud and clear to the unions is “Your members need you now more than ever! Educate, agitate, organise – as the old saying goes – and show them some effective