Response: An amazing day

By striking if we have to, by negotiation if we can. Heather Wakefield responds that working this way is not a ‘weakness’
Midnight, N30. Unison’s president, Eleanor Smith – a nurse – leads workers at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital out on strike. So began a day that saw more than a million public service workers on strike for pension justice.
N30 wasn’t just the biggest strike since 1926 and the biggest public sector strike ever, it was also the UK’s biggest women’s strike. An amazing day, with substantial public support, union recruitment at high levels and a mushrooming of new activists, many young, giving the lie to the view that public sector unionism is being dismantled, like the services our members represent.
Those who did not take part also merit a mention, not least because their absence was felt on N30 and because their abstention from any future action would leave big holes in any strategy underpinned solely by strike action. In the NHS, the BMA, the Royal Colleges of Nursing and Midwives were noticeable for not having balloted, as were some smaller ‘professional’ unions in the NHS. That left the lowest paid and vulnerable fighting for the highest paid with power. The firefighters’ FBU also decided not to ballot, in the light of evident progress in negotiations.
So far, so good. But did the strike achieve its objectives? What happens next? Why has there been no further action? And where does it leave public sector trade unionism?
It’s easy to forget that the government’s initial objective was to do away altogether with defined benefit schemes and replace them with defined contribution schemes – in which your retirement income is only as good as your investments and the market at the time you retire.
The ‘independent’ Hutton report made it clear that he wanted to reduce the level of pensions to the low ‘income replacement’ levels of the earlier Turner report, and the rate at which pensions accrue – generally from 1/60 of salary each year to 1/100. Hutton also wanted to keep workers outsourced from the public sector to private companies and voluntary organisations out of public sector pension schemes altogether.
Dogged negotiation
Dogged negotiation by the TUC team representing all the unions had begun to knock the rough edges off some of the coalition’s plans for these ‘big ticket’ items before the threat of N30 – let alone the actuality. But there is no doubt that the strike threat focused the minds of Francis Maude and Danny Alexander – Cabinet Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury – who have led for the government on overall pension policy and negotiations.
Shortly after the announcement of Unison’s ballot results – and before some of the more surprising ‘yes’ votes – they produced a new ‘offer’, which included full protection for those within ten years of retirement and beyond, retention of the 1/60 accrual rate and ‘cost ceilings’ that provide scope for serious negotiation. Most workers transferred to the private or voluntary sectors will retain their right to stay in public sector pension schemes.
Those who retort that workers will still have to work longer and receive less are in some senses correct, in others not.
The switch from RPI to CPI indexation was imposed earlier on and the offer includes linkage to the rising state pension age. The former is currently the subject of legal appeal by a number of unions and the nature of the link to state pension age remains an issue in the negotiations.
What also needs to be said is that each scheme currently under review is different and it was inevitable that negotiation within sectoral bargaining groups would follow action – as it would also have to follow any further action, unless HM Government keeled over completely. This is an unlikely scenario, given the low density in many workplaces, lack of organisation in outsourced providers and the non-participation of some big-hitting unions.
The agreements currently under further negotiation and consideration by most unions in the NHS, civil service and schools are detailed ‘heads of agreement’, dealing with contribution increases alongside proposals for new schemes from 2015. The situation in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), which also covers support staff in police, probation, schools, further and higher education, the Environment Agency, transport and the voluntary sector, is different.
The LGPS, uniquely, is ‘funded’ to the tune of more than £140 billion, and has a membership that is much lower paid than other schemes – 70 per cent earn less than £21,000 per year. Here we have agreed some principles for negotiation, which provide the potential for no change until 2014, no contribution increases for most members, retention of ‘admitted body status’ for transferees to the private or voluntary sectors and choice over retirement age and contributions. The retirement age has been 65 for some time.
Get to grips
Those who argue that unions wanting to negotiate – the majority – have ‘sold out’ and undermined trade union solidarity need to get to grips with the complexities of public sector pensions, serious areas of weakness in membership density and organisation, sectoral bargaining arrangements in the public sector. Only when they have done that should they decide whether there is a route to getting everything we want through industrial action.
They need also to consider the other issues facing our members and the public – cuts in services, privatisation, reorganisations, redundancies, casualisation and cuts to pay and conditions. Unions need to strike, campaign and negotiate on these issues too – placing ourselves firmly alongside service users and communities – as well as fighting on our unique industrial challenges like pensions.
In the meantime, our dispute with the coalition remains, our ballot is ‘live’ and we will consult our members over further action if negotiations fail to deliver. In that event, industrial action will need to last longer and include unions hitherto not participating. That will be a challenge. But it’s worth looking for a resolution through negotiation first.
Heather Wakefield is the head of local government at Unison.

For too long the TUC has played only one string on its bow – that of behind-the-scenes lobbyist in government circles on behalf of union interests. Of course this is necessary and vital work, for no amount of mass mobilisations will bring about change on their own. Once the protesters have gone home, somebody has to sit down and conduct the detailed negotiations with ministers and the like to secure the necessary advances. This is all the more the case when you consider that the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has had undue influence over the Department of Trade and Industry and its successor, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

But the ‘old cart horse’, as the TUC has long been portrayed by cartoonists and commentators alike, seems to almost invariably put the proverbial cart before the horse. The result is that it lacks firepower when it goes into negotiations with the government in the first place. This either means that it takes a very long time to get a deal and/or the deal is not a particularly favourable one. And then, on top of this, the TUC often finds that any deals it has brokered with the government are subsequently unpicked and watered down by the business lobby.

Since 1997, when ‘new’ Labour first came to office under Tony Blair, the list of such missed opportunities is a fairly long one, even taking into account that Labour has been no great friend of the union movement during this period. Probably the best example of this process concerns the statutory right to union representation in the form of union recognition. After lobbying by the TUC and work by the affiliated unions, Labour won office in 1997 with a manifesto pledge to legislate for union recognition where a majority of workers wanted it.

Then came the Fairness at Work white paper, followed by the bill and the Employment Relations Act 1999 itself. All along the way the pledge became more and more bastardised, so that when the union recognition law came into force on 6 June 2000, it was as much as product of CBI lobbying as it was of TUC policy.

If the TUC had remembered some of its own history, this would not necessarily have happened. In the period when the TUC was at the height of its power, the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, told the engineering union to ‘get its tanks off my [Downing Street] lawn’. This kind of trade union assertiveness, with a few metaphorical tanks turning their gun turrets towards Downing Street, would have come in very handy under a Labour Party in government that has been captured by neoliberals, with social democracy resigned to the rubbish bin.

Now any veteran of the union movement will be familiar with the slogans on the placards of various left groups demanding that the ‘TUC call a general strike’ over this and that issue. The point being made here is not that the TUC should have called strikes and mobilisations willy-nilly. There is no virtue in re-running the glorious defeat of the 1926 general strike when the TUC did that very thing.

But if the TUC had taken just one leaf out of the book of its fellow union federations on the continent, then it would have at least have tried to occasionally mobilise the millions of its members and their families on the streets and in the constituencies of their MPs. The evidence of the results of such mobilisations in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain is that the various attacks on workers and public services may not have been stopped, but at least they were slowed and watered down.

Before simply dismissing the TUC as a group of bureaucrats who have moderation and appeasement written through them like a stick of rock, however, it needs to be clearly pointed out the organisation is pretty much the sum of its parts. That is to say that the TUC’s policy is the result of its annual congress, and its direction is dictated democratically by its general council, which is elected every year by its affiliated trade unions.
So part of the conundrum of the TUC is that it is only as strong as its affiliates allow it to be and – more widely – it is only as strong as they are collectively. For example, TUC policy for the past few years has been to have a united and robust fight on public sector pay. But the PCS union – the mover of such passed motions – has been left fighting on its own after other unions changed their minds and acted unilaterally.

But what is even more apparent is that shining the spotlight on the affiliates as the real movers and shakers reveals that just three mega-unions (Unite, Unison and the GMB) are the actual prime movers. With some 60 per cent of affiliated members in these three unions, one could well argue that the TUC is their creature and nobody else’s. When you factor in that these unions are also loyal Labour affiliates, then a picture begins to emerge to explain why the TUC has not been nearly as robust as it might otherwise have been.
For some observers, the domination of the TUC by the big three calls into question why there is even a need for a TUC or an annual congress. This is wide of the mark because there is still a need for a coordinating body – and one that can take the lead in spreading messages when the affiliates are a bit lethargic.

Indeed, its organising academy and wider work on organising are the best examples of the TUC providing value for affiliates’ money. Some unions are too small to do this work on their own and some needed pushing along this road.

That said, this does not detract from the problem of the aforementioned bigger-picture politics. Even for the Scottish Trades Union Congress, which has traditionally played a more radical and collective role, the challenges are the same. The TUC quickly and desperately needs to do some blue-sky thinking about how it can rebuild its muscle by collectively mobilising its troops and providing them with a social vision of what unions are about.

Gregor Gall is professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire

These unions have raised the question of alternatives to New Labour’s public sector reform and its insistence that ‘there is no alternative’ to introducing market mechanisms. Unions are increasingly pressing alternatives based on principles of democratisation.

The importance of these strikes is that they have been high profile, actively involved the membership and have had some successes. They have begun to break the pattern of large-scale defeats experienced by unions – like those of the miners and printers – in the 1980s.

Wider challenge

It is also significant that the unions have framed their demands not merely in terms of economistic, ‘bread and butter’ issues but as part of a wider challenge to government policy. They have begun to move beyond simply campaigning against the effects of neoliberalism to challenge this economic orthodoxy itself.

The CWU leader, Billy Hayes, lambasted the government for being willing to intervene to bankroll hand-over-fist the failing private financial organisation, Northern Rock, while remaining unwilling to intervene to settle the postal workers’ dispute and safeguard a valued public sector service like the Royal Mail.

The POA leader, Brian Caton, used the occasion of his union’s illegal national lightning strike to condemn the government’s policy of locking more and more people up in prisons while running down the restorative justice system. He made it clear that ‘prison does not work’ on its own and that the POA does not support the ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ brigade.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS leader, made the connection between deteriorating working conditions and the declining quality of service provision. Thus, job cuts leading to work intensification, pay cuts leading to falling morale and outsourcing leading to cutbacks have been convincingly put forward to explain why service standards are falling.

In these broadsides against government policy, market-defined notions of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity have increasingly come under scrutiny and the importance of a public service ethos is being explicitly asserted. Such a process is essential to creating receptiveness to ideas about how public services can be genuinely ‘public’ and fulfil the aspirations that most people have for them. It is a process that can take hold in practical, lived ways in local communities.

Here, the public sector unions need to do more imaginative thinking. It’s no use just repeating the demand to renationalise. It was people’s dissatisfaction with their experience of nationalisation that opened the way for support for actual and de facto privatisation. The unions need to develop further positive solutions based on popular participation and control. In this way these public service unions could spearhead a political form of trade unionism, effectively providing the backbone of a progressive opposition to a government that only has credible opponents to its right.

The opportunities to do so will be present again in 2008. Teachers, lecturers, local government and health workers, as well as civil servants and police and prison officers, will all have disputes with the government this year over pay and jobs.

Private and public sector unionism

Is all this just the preserve of public sector unionism and not applicable to the private sector? Sure, in the public sector unions are stronger, line management more supportive and bargaining units larger and more coherent than in the private sector. Consequently, unions have more facility-time and can organise more easily.

Indeed, union density in 2006 in the public sector was 59 per cent, compared with only 17 per cent in the private sector, while 83 per cent of working days ‘lost’ due to strikes were accounted for by public sector action.

But the public sector only looks good in comparison with the private and when we look at the overall picture we get a measure of the difficulties afflicting unions in general.

The overall density of union membership was 28 per cent in 2006 and the pattern of recent decades – falling overall in both sectors, albeit with a big gap between private and public – continues. While public sector strikes have dominated since the late 1990s, overall action has fallen and strike days ‘lost’ have only exceeded one million once in the past decade.

We need to recall that although private sector density is abysmally low, it still accounts for just over 40 per cent of all members because the private sector dwarfs the public sector by numbers employed. Moreover, the growth of numbers employed in the public sector since 1997 has now come to an end and the public sector continues to fragment as more services are contracted out or given over to the voluntary sector. Organised labour cannot keep to its comfort zone of a small and shrinking public sector.

Political trade unionism

But can the idea of political trade unionism be applied to the private sector? There are some obvious pointers.

In the cases of air, rail and bus transport, as well as food production, childcare and pensioners’ homes, unions could easily set themselves up as the honest and true defenders of quality provision. By robustly establishing that investment in staffing levels, pay, working conditions and training are essential to providing the high quality goods and services that people demand and expect, unions can replicate the kind of producer-user alliances that are emerging in the public sector.

Whether public or private sector based, working with communities outside the workplace is crucial if these alliances are to grow popular roots. Most towns and cities have trades councils, which exist to coordinate campaigns across unions. They are starting points to approach the various organisations in their localities for these alliances.

The campaigns by the London and Birmingham Citizens groups involving unions, faith groups, community and voluntary organisations over ‘living wages’ and social provisions offer one model of how to construct local alliances (see Red Pepper, Aug/Sept 2007). Another is the way in which the PCS union has worked together with the National Pensioners’ Convention over issues of benefits provision; from this, mutual support against job losses and real cuts in the level of pensions has followed. A final example can be found in the various short-lived campaigns against ward and hospital closures, which generate new networks among local communities but usually have unions at their hearts.

There is a rider to establishing such producer-user alliances, however. Unions must work to become much more visible and credible partners.

So unions must interpret the nostrums that ‘unity is strength’ and ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ widely. In 2008 this would involve taking coordinated industrial action to beat the next three years of public sector pay restraint. The success of the joint action on pensions in March 2006 should be a salutary lesson here.

Just as importantly, and particularly for affiliated unions, when unions criticise Labour they must be prepared to follow through on their criticisms. This means not just the criticisms on Radio 4 but popular mobilisations to back up the criticisms, especially when those criticisms are invariably ignored. Otherwise, unions fall into the trap of identifying Labour as the problem but then appealing to the self-same Labour to be the solution through the rationale of reason alone. Interestingly, the leading left Labour MP, John McDonnell, has recently argued that this means understanding that the levers of power open to the unions now lie outside Labour and parliament.

Continuing financial difficulties, poor results in the general election and three by-elections, the public backlash over its MSPs’ direct action protest at the G8 summit, together with party infighting, all seemed to have consigned the SSP to the dustbin of history. So is the party really over for the SSP?

Even the most faithful SSP members admit there have been recent troubles, but there’s no consensus over the causes. Some argue it’s merely the establishment response to the 2003 parliamentary breakthrough (when the SSP went from one MSP to six). Others stress the diversion of energies resulting from the party’s enlarged parliamentary presence; or the result of relying too much on one high-profile, charismatic individual. Among some of the organised internal platforms (a distinctive feature of the party, and no doubt one of the reasons that it has been able to unite so much of the left, is that members have the right to form political tendencies), the woes are the result of becoming a ‘nationalist’ and ‘reformist’ party.

What has happened, and does happen, to the SSP matters to the left far beyond Scotland. This is because the SSP has achieved five critical steps towards the renewal of the socialist project in Britain.

First, it has united the far left in Scotland – with the exception of the 200 members of the Communist Party and its Labour left co-thinkers such as the Campaign for Socialism.

Second, it has attracted into membership hundreds of disillusioned activists from Labour and the SNP, as well as many people never before involved in left-wing politics.

Third, it has established an organic relationship with a milieu of radical thought in Scottish society, the size of which varies from 40,000 (in the 2005 general election) to 130,000 (in the 2003 Scottish elections).

Fourth, the SSP has gained a national platform from which to agitate and organise around its agenda and support various non-SSP campaigns.

And fifth, the party has learnt from the failures of the radical left in many important respects. It has been able to move from general socialist argument to practical proposals on bringing the railways back into public ownership; introducing free prescriptions and free school meals; and replacing the council tax with a local income tax based on the ability to pay – around all of which the SSP built both parliamentary alliances and street-level campaigns. It has created a party culture founded on a deeply rooted belief in democratic debate and the value of diversity.

All of this has enabled the SSP to establish a national presence throughout Scotland, with 3,000 members organised in 86 branches; a national and local media presence; and its own weekly 12-page newspaper with a staff of four, as well as 20 other party and parliamentary workers. The number of regular activists is probably around 400-500 members. To imagine what this means in English terms, what the SSP has achieved needs to be multiplied by a factor of ten to get some idea of how embedded it has become throughout Scotland.

Of course, many will say that most of the SSP’s success has been the gift of proportional representation – to which there is some truth. But the ability to take advantage of PR is something else and goes back to a careful process of building trust across a diverse spectrum of the left – political organisations and social movements – and working together both on specific campaigns and on building a common organisation. New thinking was combined with joint work resisting privatisation and cuts, building on the legacy of the anti-poll tax work that went before.

The SSP emerged out of two predecessors: Scottish Militant Labour (SML) and the Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA). Militant in Scotland took its ‘Scottish turn’ after many of its members were expelled from Labour; it also understood that it needed to operate as an independent organisation and break from vanguardist notions of a political party. This, in turn, involved standing in elections and relating to the desire of a long-established current of thought in Scotland for devolution. .

When the SSA proved relatively successful in terms of campaigning activity, growth and profile, and with the Scottish Parliament elections looming in 1999, the SSP was established in 1998 to take the project further. This was rewarded with Tommy Sheridan’s election as a list MSP for Glasgow. His tireless and high profile work between 1999 and 2003, in the context of rising social struggles, gave the SSP a good platform for the 2003 breakthrough.

The crux of the SSP’s current problems is its credibility and the goodwill towards it, both of which have been eroded since 2004. The leadership debacle provided opposition parties and the media with an open season. But the reason why this onslaught has been so effective is that the SSP was not in a good state to withstand it. The dynamics of its own enlarged internal organisation, the shifting of its centre of gravity towards the Scottish Parliament, the considerable resources required to operate there, and members withdrawing from activity after the successes of 2003 (there was something of an attitude of ‘We’ve made it, now its up to the MSP’s’) have all demobilised the SSP.

On top of this, the absence of the same social struggles as previously has exposed the susceptibility of the SSP to the underlying political conditions. The 2007 Scottish election is widely seen as ‘make or break’ for it. Standing still would represent a triumph, while losing its MSPs would set the SSP back many years by dint of the ensuing demoralisation and disorientation. Some success in the council elections, where the SSP will benefit from the newly introduced proportional representation, may offset this.

Politically the SSP is not adrift. Its 2006 conference showed a mature and considered approach to grappling with the issues it faces over electoral strategy, Scottish independence, crime and justice and pensions, among others. The detailed nature of the debates, drawing on the daily experiences of working class communities, was impressive.

On electoral strategy, the SSP will focus more heavily on list, and not constituency, seats. Inside the Independence Convention, the SSP will work with others to promote its commitment to Scottish independence, but without diluting its socialist and republican politics. All this was achieved with the national executive being defeated on several occasions, indicating a healthy, thinking party membership.

This is reflected more widely in the SSP’s internal structures and culture of democratic accountability. It has not just the organised political platforms but also self-organised networks of women, black and Asian, lesbian and gay and disabled members. Similarly, it has a number of working parties on various specific issues and an education network that encourages branches to move towards more inclusive and participatory ways of running their meetings and committees.

With its politics and democratic structures remaining healthy, the SSP’s prospects revolve around whether it can re-energise and re-motivate its wider membership to tap into the considerable possibilities that still exist for it. Next year, the Liberal Democrats will find it less easy to pose as the party of opposition given that they are part of the ruling coalition; and since late 2005, the SSP has had a better run in the media by virtue of grassroots campaigning for its parliamentary bills to abolish prescription charges and the council tax. In the unions, it has agitated around the attack on public sector pensions. Through these campaigns, it has begun recruiting substantially again and has established, and further built upon, relationships with an array of progressive pressure groups and campaigning organisations.

At its annual conference, the SSP also launched its ‘People not Profit’ initiative for the 2007 elections. ‘People not Profit’ seeks to relate the SSP’s work over everyday concerns on the NHS, free school meals, education, the environment, imperialism and the council tax to socialist ideals. It provides a unifying theme to all the SSP’s various activities. In the year left, if SSP members can get out into the communities, schools, colleges, workplaces and streets in sufficient numbers and do this work successfully, it will boost not only its own fortunes but also those of the left south of the border.Gregor Gall is author of The Political Economy of Scotland – Red Scotland? Radical Scotland? (University of Wales Press, 2005).