A week, Prime Minister Harold Wilson once cynically declared, is a long time in politics. It took little more than a week for TUC leaders to prepare the ground for selling out over public sector pensions following the huge strike on 30 November. Trade union leaders first agreed to postpone any further discussion of action until 10 December, and then agreed to a TUC drive to hold separate negotiations on the different NHS, local government employee, teacher and civil service pension schemes.
By 19 December, all unions bar Unite had signed up to a TUC-brokered outline agreement on the NHS pension scheme; both the GMB and Unison had also accepted the principles of an accord on the local government scheme, again with Unite holding out. While the NUT and NASUWT have reserved their positions on the teachers’ scheme, they have not rejected the government’s proposals and remain committed to further negotiations; the third largest union, ATL, has accepted. The only union to explicitly reject an agreement is the PCS, which has formally dismissed the government offer in relation to the civil service scheme, although the other major civil service union, Prospect, will continue to negotiate.
In accepting the government’s deal, Unison health leader Christina McAnea claimed progress with concessions for those approaching retirement, and described the negotiations as a ‘damage limitation exercise’ while the Royal College of Nursing called the government’s offer ‘the best that can be achieved through negotiations.’ Unison general secretary Dave Prentis told local government members that ‘I believe that – if agreed – the principles under discussion will provide a very positive framework for negotiations and potentially could lead to no change until 2014.’ TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said that there was a ‘new atmosphere’ in the negotiations and that unions were now placing their emphasis on giving active consideration to the new proposals, rather than considering the prospect of further industrial action.
The reality is first, that the trade union leaders have gone along with the government strategy of splitting the negotiations and second, that most of them had never had the slightest intention of organising further action. Consistent with this, Unison head of local government Heather Wakefield said: ‘We have always argued that as the local government scheme has funds worth more than £140 billion, it should be dealt with in a different way to the other Treasury-backed schemes.’ Although the PCS is for the moment holding out, PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka has refrained from criticising the TUC and has conceded that ‘it would be irresponsible of us to announce now that there will be strikes when we have not fully assessed where we are.’
Will there be serious opposition to this capitulation? The ConDem Coalition has calculated there will not, which is why it did not improve its offer after 30 November, merely re-packaging some parts of its proposed deals in order to help trade union leaders sell them to their memberships. 35% of public sector trade union members are aged over 50 and will therefore not have to pay more in the years before they retire nor work longer under government concessions made before 30 November; the government will hope that such workers will be unlikely to challenge any deal made by the trade union leadership. As many of them will also have over 20 years of service (a quarter of all public sector union members) there will be little immediate incentive for them to take further action.
In assessing the outcome of the strike, the Financial Times said (21 December 2011) described the concessions extracted from 30 November as ‘meagre’ and that the proposed deals ‘will achieve all the government targeted cost savings. Over the next three years, employees’ contributions will have to rise, on average, by 3.2 percentage points. There will also be a switch from final-salary to career-average pensions. The retirement age will rise in line with the state pension age. Public servants will have to work longer and pay more for pensions that will pay out less.’
Left organisations like the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) seem to be on a different planet. ‘Millions declare war on the Tories’ was the Socialist Worker headline after 30 November; it was a ‘historic day’ which ‘saw the rebirth of trade unions as a united mass movement’ (10 December 2011); The Socialist concurred: the strike in its view ‘terrified the government’. In truth, the strike was a mere gesture and was not intended by the leadership to be anything else. The left has been caught flat-footed: it really believed its own rhetoric that 30 November would be a stepping stone to greater actions. Now their various front organisations like the Right to Work campaign or the national Shop Stewards’ Committee are desperately organising lobbies of TUC and trade union meetings that are taking place in January in the forlorn hope that they can change what is happening.
The unfolding debacle demonstrates the bankruptcy of a strategy to resist the ruling class onslaught which places the trade unions at its centre. Time and again they have proved that they are not fighting organisations of the working class. Those groups on the left which have argued the contrary such as the SWP and the SP now look ridiculous. Their members have dedicated themselves to securing lay positions on trade union national and regional executives, in Unison, Unite, the teachers’ and lecturers’ unions, the PCS and so on. They have been neither capable of initiating serious movement nor of stopping the sell-out when it was so clearly signalled.
Because of all the threads that tie organisations like the SWP and SP to the trade union leadership they are unable to offer any real revolutionary criticism of its role. The Socialist complains that the TUC are making a ‘mistake’, while Socialist Worker says it was ‘wrong’. They refuse to pinpoint the role of Brendan Barber and Dave Prentis as ‘labour lieutenants of capital’, as allies of capitalism ensuring that the trade unions remain entirely harmless to the interests of imperialism. Some trade union leaders will mask their real role by talking a left game like Unite’s Len McCluskey with his repeated calls for campaigns of civil disobedience. But these are never followed by concrete action: the purpose of such talk is to raise the illusion that progress can only be made through the trade unions. It is an illusion which the SWP and SP endlessly propagate, and which will cost public sector workers dear.
Robert Clough
