Whatever illusions the opportunist left is keen to peddle about the trade unions, they are not going to lead resistance: far from it, they are going to be a major obstacle. They all called for a Labour vote, and they are all going to defend the Labour government on the promise of minor amelioration of anti-trade union laws and workers’ rights. Hence when The Communist (formerly Socialist Appeal) declares that ‘the trade union leaders should get off their knees and prepare for action across the board, rather than spouting hot air’, it is fantasising. British trade unions are not fighting organisations for the working class and have not been for decades. The job of trade union leaders is not to organise resistance, but to prevent it from ever happening, and if and when their efforts fail, to hobble and frustrate any resultant action. The so-called ‘summer of discontent’ in 2022 which morphed into an autumn and then a winter of discontent, as trade union leaders spun out days of strike action interspersed with weeks of inaction, wore down the membership into accepting below-inflation wage settlements. There was little organised opposition: most trade unionists are in the public sector and have incremental pay structures which at an individual level have compensated for real-term falls in salary bands. As a whole, they are a privileged layer of the working class, most being degree-educated professionals or managers. 40% are aged over 50 and 45% have more than 10 years’ length of service. They are not the material out of which a militant anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist movement will be made.
Nevertheless, the opportunist left dreams of capturing the trade unions. In fact it is the other way around: trade unions have captured the left, keeping it busy in all sorts of ways at meetings, committees, conferences and so on which only ever involve a tiny fraction of trade union members. The reward for members of the SWP or Socialist Party (or any other left organisation which likes to present trade unions as a putative vanguard of the working class) is that they can masquerade as someone important because they have some kind of official trade union position. This enables them to get preferential speaking rights at demonstrations and conferences. Despite their claims that trade union members are the most politically conscious sections of the working class, unions have played no part in the massive mobilisations over Palestine and they are not going to consider for a moment taking action in support of precarious workers or those subject to the two-child benefit cap.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
