UNISON has called on the government to promote dialogue to foster a peaceful solution to the Venezuelan crisis, instead of stoking tensions.
The UK has joined a number of countries, including Germany, France, Spain, the US, Canada and several Latin American countries, in endorsing Juan Guaidó, Venezuelan opposition leader and president of the national assembly, who has declared himself interim president of Venezuela.
UNISON is concerned at the escalation of international interference, including the possibility of military intervention, in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.
The union vehemently rejects a militarised solution to this crisis; the people of Latin America have not forgotten the history of US-backed military rule in the region.
UNISON believes that Venezuelans need to resolve their differences through constructive dialogue and democratic processes, without resorting to violence.
International intervention risks intensifying existing political divisions and inflaming tensions that are the consequence of the severe social and economic crisis facing the country.
UNISON calls on the government to abstain from seeking regime change and intervening in the sovereign affairs of Venezuela. Instead, the UK should promote stability through constructive dialogue with the international community.Read more...
The strike on Wednesday 30th November in Britain in defence of pensions for public sector workers was the largest seen for a generation. Over 29 unions were involved including the three biggest,UNISON, UNITE, and the GMB. All together, over 2.5 million workers were on strike across the National Health Service, local councils and throughout national government departments.
Demonstrations were held in many places, including in small towns which had never seen a protest since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. Over 50,000 took to the streets in London and 15,000 in Belfast, but there were also 100 in Lerwick in Shetland! For the overwhelming majority of those who took action on 30th November, it was the first time that they were on strike. Two out of three schools were closed, museums and tribunals were closed, and non-emergency operations in many hospitals were cancelled.
The strike was a tremendous success not just because of its size, but because everybody knew that it was not just about pensions, but also about the defence of public services and ultimately, who pays for the crisis. It put the issue of fair pensions for all on the agenda.
The Tory-led government has been arguing that it is not fair that public sector workers get a better pension than those working in the private sector. However, they say nothing about the multi-million yearly earnings that bankers get such as the £7million pocketed by the heads of Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland. There are over 2.5 million pensioners living below the poverty level of £178 a week. Pensioner poverty in Britain is among the worst in Europe – there are only three countries in Europe that have worse pension provision that those in Britain, that is Cyprus, Latvia and Estonia ! France spends twice as much on pensions than does the UK.
The strike was a long time in coming. The Tory led coalition government announced as soon as it was elected that it would unleash war on public services, and the pay and conditions of workers in general. Although the TUC agreed in September 2010 to organise co-ordinated national industrial action against these attacks, it took six months to organise a national demonstration on 26th March of 500,000. Despite this tremendous success, the leadership of the three big unions and the TUC were reluctant to organise action. It was only because of a hugely successful strike on 30th June by the teaching unions UCU, NASWUT and NUT and the PCS civil servants union, that all the other unions and the TUC decided to call on their members to strike.
The leadership of most unions were pushed into organising for the strike because of pressure from their members wanting action and because they had no longer any choice but to do something. The government had been dragging out negotiations since the beginning of the year without any concessions, and had even imposed some unilateral changes to the pension schemes including pushing back the retirement age to 67 for younger workers.
The Tory government is now increasing the attacks on the working class as the recession is now on the verge of turning into a depression: public sector workers already suffering from a two-year pay freeze will see any increase “capped” at 1 per cent. With inflation running at 5.4 per cent, this is effectively a 20 per cent pay cut over four years. The government announced that 710,000 will go, up from the 400,000 announced last year! Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he would do “whatever it takes” to cut the deficit. This means tax breaks for the rich and corporations funded by taking money from the rest of us.
The strike on 30th November can only be a beginning in the resistance against the Tory-led coalition government. The action needs to be escalated with dates for action set for early next year involving private sector workers. Youth and students need to involved as stopping pushing back the retirement age would immediately deal with youth unemployment now at a record level of over 1 million or 20% of those under 25.
This is not just a crisis of the British economy. It is a crisis of the capitalist system which is attempting to make the working class pay for it. The action in Britain on Wednesday 30th November was followed on Thursday by a one-day general strike in Greece and on Friday by joint-union action in Belgium. The need for a European-wide solidarity and joint action is now more necessary than ever to roll back the neo-liberal assault on all of the post-war gains.
Fred Leplat is a leading member of Socialist Resistance, British section of the Fourth International.
by Sean Vernell, UCU national executive Socialist Worker
10 December 2011
N30 was a historic day for the trade union movement. It could be a turning point in the fight to defend our pensions and stop the government’s austerity measures.
We are constantly told trade unions are in decline and don’t hold the power they once had. But the 30 November strike gave the lie to this.
It saw the rebirth of trade unions as a united mass movement. Working people saw a glimpse of their power and their ability to change things.
Every mass strike lights up the way forward and shows how change can be won.
Workers often have to put up with bullying managers and stress over workloads. But on the day of the strike these concerns seemed a million miles away.
At work the next day, employers faced workers who are more confident, less compliant and more determined to take control of their lives.
This is what every government and boss fears. And their only response is to whip up fear and division.
The government paraded around the media reminding public– sector workers how lucky they were to have pensions at all because many private workers don’t.
It offered a deal to buy off older workers with a promise that the “reforms” would not affect them. Recognise
But this attempt to divide workers failed miserably. That’s because ordinary workers recognise that this is not simply a fight for themselves. It is also, crucially, about younger workers’ futures.
The strike was a great success. And it had a deeper impact than protesting or letting off steam.
Public sector workers are in this fight to win. There was a clear consensus among strikers that a one-day strike would not be enough to win.
It is important to push a strategy for all-out action. But the key issue facing us now is how to escalate as soon as possible.
The speed at which we move is important for two reasons.
First, another five month gap before the next strike will allow the government time to get better organised.
Second, any delay in action will send a message that the unions aren’t serious about this fight.
The strategy put forward must match the seriousness of the task. Otherwise workers will simply ask why they are losing pay for a strategy that will not win.
Coordinated
Some unions have already passed motions calling for further nationally coordinated action as soon as possible, including the NUT and the PCS.
Local joint union mobilising committees that were set up for N30 should meet and be part of coordinating the next step.
This should include winning unions that weren’t part of N30 to join future action.
The UCU national executive met on Friday last week. We unanimously passed a motion outlining a possible strategy as a way forward to be proposed to the other unions.
The motion called for another day of nationally coordinated action as early as possible in the spring term.
This would mean from January onwards. This would be followed immediately with coordinated regional action.
The motion calls for “this action to be rolled out across the country creating a Mexican wave effect acting as a bridge to the next day of nationally coordinated strike action” and “this action to end with a 48 hour nationally coordinated strike.”
We need to ensure that this debate is had in every workplace. Don’t delay—hold branch meetings right away to discuss the next steps and pass motions calling for escalation.
Some union leaders are looking for a way out. They need to feel the pressure from below to stop them making a shoddy deal.
A victory on pensions will pave the way for a wider challenge to the brutal austerity programme of this government.
PCS civil service workers’ union secretary Mark Serwotka spoke to Socialist Worker after the demonstration last Saturday
‘Saturday was extraordinarily uplifting and inspirational. I marched with the PCS contingent and took two hours to get from Waterloo Bridge to Big Ben.
We think we had about 20,000 PCS members on the march. What was clear to me from the response to my speech at the final rally was that calls for joint action and taxing the rich caught the mood.
Just seeing hundreds of thousands of people cheering action and an alternative to cuts was invigorating.
It took an awful lot of arguing to even get this march, and many of us wanted it earlier. Saturday was proof that people are looking for a lead.
I hope it goes some way to tackling the caution that exists among many on the TUC general council about how far and how quickly you can go.
If the momentum is lost there’s always the fear that the mood can dissipate and that we’ll miss our moment.
We’ve got to move quickly. There will be a meeting of all the public sector unions at the TUC on Wednesday, which in part has been called to discuss coordinated industrial action over pensions.
The PCS will go to that meeting arguing strongly that we need to move to ballots as soon as we can. We are hoping to convince as many unions as possible to go along with that.
But we are also having discussions with some of the teaching unions.
We think that the UCU and the NUT unions especially are up for action along the lines of the timetable we’re envisaging.
That is to get conference mandates in April and May and balloting for action in June.
We have a PCS executive meeting in early April and the recommendations that will go to that are being finalised now.
They will ensure the ballot we propose allows for a variety of different types of action, including national strikes with other unions.
They will also allow us to respond quickly in all of the places our members work.
The ballot we’re planning should combine the questions of pay, pensions and cuts in jobs to get us the maximum flexibility to take action where members support it.
The big picture is that we move swiftly from Saturday to try and engage on major national action.
I believe we should work with all those who want to oppose the cuts but we’ve got to say we oppose them all.
People seem to understand that if you don’t do this then the question becomes: which cuts do you accept.
It was very good that Ed Miliband came to the rally.
But we can’t be sucked into saying that some cuts are acceptable and others aren’t.
I’m hoping in May that the Tories and the Lib Dems get annihilated in the elections.
However, elections are not going to stop the onslaught of cuts.
We’ve got to build an alliance of trade unionists and campaigners that is going to defend all our services.’
In 1968, the world was transfixed by global student unrest. Less attention was paid to factory uprisings that occurred at the same time and overlapped with campus protests in places like France. In one small corner of the Ford Motor Company's huge production complex in Dagenham, England, several hundred women did their part in the "year of revolt." Toiling in their own-sex-segregated department, the only females in a plant of 55,000 had walked out many times in the past, over strike issues dear to their male co-workers. Now, it was their turn to shut down sewing machines, stop production of seat covers, and picket Ford over a pay dispute with broader social implications.
Made in Dagenham is the story of their strike -- born of working-class feminist consciousness in a labor movement even more dominated by "the lads" forty years ago than it is today. Schmaltzy, upbeat, and out of synch with our current workplace gestalt of hopelessness and defeat, this filmis just what the head doctor ordered for holiday entertainment. It is, by far, the best popular depiction of union activist creation since Ken Loach's Bread and Roses and Martin Ritt's Norma Rae. If unions don't use it to train shop stewards and bargaining committee members, that failure of labor education imagination will be understandable because Made in Dagenham captures the frequent tension between labor's full-time officialdom and its working members, particularly during strikes.
The strike leader played by Sally Hawkins in Nigel Cole's new movie is a very British version of the Southern textile worker portrayed so famously by Sally Fields in 1979. Rita O'Grady is not even a union steward in the film's early scenes of shop-floor life and work. She steps into that role only because her older co-worker, Connie, is dealing with the suicidal depression of her husband, a damaged survivor of wartime duty in the RAF. Unlike the mill where Norma Rae toiled, the Dagenham plant is completely organized. Unfortunately, with the exception of Albert, a loveable chief steward ally (wonderfully played by Bob Hoskins), the union, which is a composite of several actually involved, seems to function as an arm of Ford's HR department, a labor-management relationship not unknown to autoworkers in this country.
The political traditions of British trade unions give this arrangement humorous left cover. In one memorable scene, a clutch of worried officials, in jackets and ties, are trying to talk Rita out of strike action that might upend some murky, big-picture strategy the leadership is pursuing. While condescending to the only worker in the room, they address each other as "comrade" and invoke Marx as the final authority on what should and should not be done!
Rita's first bargaining session is a face-to-face meeting with Ford officials about their misclassification of the sewing machine operators as un-skilled labor. Both Rita and Connie (Geraldine James) get a day off from work and overdress for the occasion. Monty, their full-time union representative (played by Kenneth Cranham), first takes them out for a well-lubricated lunch, a perk designed to put Rita and Connie (Geraldine James) in his debt. Monty has obviously been off the job and out of the plant for years; his main preoccupation now seems to be eating and drinking at dues-payer expense, dressing nicely, and seeing the company's side of things. When the union delegation finally sits down with management, Monty does all the talking and fails to give Ford a firm deadline for fixing the problem.
Shocked by the incompetence of her own union negotiator, and his coziness with employer representatives, Rita commandeers the meeting. She interrupts Monty and pulls out samples of the seat covers stitched by the workers in her department. She explains the complexity of the labor process involved and insists that Ford properly reward the skill and experience necessary to do the job. The scene is a great tutorial in how to make effective job upgrade presentations -- and, believe me, they're always done best by those who do the actual work. The bosses are so taken aback that one can only respond with a threat of discipline for Rita's lifting of the material used in her demonstration.
The radicalization of Rita that follows is a sight to be seen. Hawkins' character in this film is no Poppy, the loopy Cockney in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky that won her a Golden Globe and a slew of other awards in 2008. She is a mother with two children, working the proverbial "double shift" in a traditional marriage to a fellow Dagenham worker (played by Daniel Mays) who is sweet but weak-willed. She's a woman previously lacking in personal self-confidence, a stranger to public speaking, and bereft of "political experience" (as Ford officials discover when they scour her file expecting to find evidence of left-wing party connections).
Under the tutelage of Albert (a far more appealing version of the union mentors played by Ron Leibman in Norma Rae and Adrien Brody in Bread and Roses), Rita finds her own voice, a streak of determination, and the capacity to move others. As in many strikes, rank-and-file unity is stronger at the beginning. Then, as the job action spreads, thousands are thrown out of work and the recriminations begin to fly. For some workers, organizing strike relief, attending rallies, maintaining picket-lines, and meeting other union members is a learning experience, liberating and even euphoric. Others -- in this case, mainly fearful or disgruntled guys -- slink away to the pub. There, they watch strike coverage on the telly and grouse about the economic hardship inflicted on the real breadwinners in the community by a handful of unreasonable women.
Rita's own Norma Rae moment occurs at a union conference, not standing on the picket-line or a work bench in the plant. Monty and the other "comrades" have scheduled a vote, among the entirely male conference delegates, that will end this costly "industrial action" at Ford, without a favorable resolution of the job grading issue. Rita and her roving pickets are the only women at the meeting. Rita takes the stage and delivers a moving, but simple, speech recalling the wartime courage of her co-worker's husband, the now deceased RAF veteran. "Men and women, we are in this together," she tells the stone-faced crowd. "We are not divided by sex. Only by those willing to accept injustice." Moved, shamed, and/or inspired by her message, the delegates vote to continue union backing for the Dagenham strike, which, by then, was creating widespread disruption of Ford production.
The company responds by sending a hard-nosed executive from Detroit to read the riot act to Britain's then-Labour Government. If the strike is not ended, Ford strongly hints, it might shift Cortina production to a land where the blokes and birds aren't so strike-happy. The prime minister at the time was the wishy-washy Harold Wilson. His First Secretary of State was Barbara Castle, a longtime member of parliament (played with flair by Miranda Richardson) who takes charge of the situation when Wilson doesn't. In the film, with a little waving of Castle's magic wand, a dispute over pay-grading in a particular auto plant job classification gets transformed, for PR purposes, into a broader demand for "equal pay." Two years after the walkout was finally settled with an increase for the sewing machine operators (that still left them earning less than men in the same job grade), Parliament did enact legislation against pay discrimination, based on gender. The measure was not fully implemented until 1975.
But the social reality, in the meantime, was a bit more complex, as several British commentators, including Sheila Cohen, have noted (see Cohen's critique of the film at thecommune.co.uk.) The real-life Labour Party feminist shown negotiating with Rita and her friends in London triggered a trade union revolt in 1969 with a white paper entitled "In Place of Strife." Castle (who would later become Baroness Castle of Blackburn) created a backlash against Wilson's government and contributed to Labour's electoral defeat in 1970, when she tried to curb union rights and quell the broader strike wave that the women of Dagenham surfed so impressively.
The finer points of British left and labor history aside, if you liked Brassed Off, The Full Monty, or Billy Elliot, Made in Dagenham is the film for you. The lyrics for its theme song, performed by former Dagenham worker Sandie Shaw, were written by the British protest rocker, Billy Bragg (who has a street in Dagenham named after him). It's not coal miners or steelworkers who take center stage this time, but sewing machine operators who were no less skilled in the hard work of union solidarity.
Steve Early was involved in telecom and manufacturing strikes and bargaining for 27 years as a New England representative of the Communications Workers of America. He is the author of Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home. His new book, due out February 1 from Haymarket Books, is called The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor. He can be reached at . For speaking event information, visit: .
New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a public institution. Postal workers deserve our solidarity
The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.
And now the Brown government is to mount a "fire sale" of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret Thatcher's transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way.
The common thread is adherence to the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and of the City of London, now rescued with hundreds of billions in public money and still unregulated with a single stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the Prime Minister, is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000. The Financial Times now offers a service called How to Spend It. Best of Britain
None of this is accountable to the public, whose view was expressed at the last election in 2005: New Labour won with the support of barely a fifth of the British adult population. For every five people who voted Labour, eight did not vote at all. This was not apathy, as the media pretend, but a strike by the public - like the postal workers are today on strike. The issues are broadly the same: the bullying and hypocrisy of contagious, undemocratic power.
Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. Not long ago, you posted a letter anywhere in the country and it reached its destination the following morning. There were two deliveries a day, and collections on Sundays. The best of Britain, which is ordinary life premised on a sense of community, could be found at a local post office, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, where pensions, income support, child benefit and incapacity benefit were drawn, and the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate and the harried were treated humanely.
At my local post office in south London, if an elderly person failed to turn up on pension day, he or she would get a visit from the postmistress, Smita Patel, often with groceries. She did this for almost 20 years until the government closed down this "lifeline of human contact", as the local Labour MP called it, along with more than 150 other local London branches. The Post Office executives who faced the anger of our community at a local church - unknown to us, the decision had already been taken - were not even aware that the Patels made a profit. What mattered was ideology; the branch had to go. Mention of public service brought puzzlement to their faces.
The postal workers, having this year doubled annual profits to £321m, have had to listen to specious lectures from Peter Mandelson, a twice-disgraced figure risen from the murk of New Labour, about "urgent modernisation". The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. In dealing with new technology, postal workers have sought only consultation about their working lives and the right not to be abused - like the postal worker who was spat upon by her manager, then sacked while he was promoted; and the postman with 17 years' service and not a single complaint to his name who was sacked on the spot for failing to wear his cycle helmet. Watch the near frenzy with which your postie now delivers. A middle-aged man has to run much of his route in order to keep to a preordained and unrealistic time. If he fails, he is disciplined and kept in his place by the fear that thousands of jobs are at the whim of managers. Subversive forces
Communication Workers Union negotiators describe intransigent executives with a hidden agenda - just as the National Coal Board masked Thatcher's strictly political goal of destroying the miners' union. The collaborative journalists' role is unchanged, too. Mark Lawson, who pontificates about middlebrow cultural matters for the BBC and the Guardian and receives many times the remuneration of a postal worker, dispensed a Sun-style diatribe on 10 October. Waffling about the triumph of email and how the postal service was a "bystander" to the internet when, in fact, it has proven itself a commercial beneficiary, Lawson wrote: "The outcome [of the strike] will decide whether Billy Hayes of the CWU will, like [Arthur] Scargill, be remembered as someone who presided over the destruction of the industry he was meant to represent."
The record is clear that Scargill and the miners were fighting against the wholesale destruction of an industry that was long planned for ideological reasons. The miners' enemies included the most subversive, brutal and sinister forces of the British state, aided by journalists - as Lawson's Guardian colleague Seumas Milne documents in his landmark work, The Enemy Within. Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent.
August 22, 2009 -- Socialist Resistance -- Today, the twin drivers of economic recession and the possibility of catastrophic climate change are beginning to push working people towards action. A series of small-scale but high-profile occupations of threatened factories, not just at Vestas wind turbine plant but also at Visteon car plant, where 600 workers took on the might of Ford and won a greatly enhanced redundancy package, show what is possible. In the 1970s workers at Britain's Lucas Aerospace went even further. We look back at the lessons of Lucas Aerospace.
It is clear that if we are to avert catastrophic climate change by moving rapidly to a low-carbon economy, certain industries will have to be wound down or drastically scaled back, for example, the power generation, aviation and car industries. However, rather than this leading to a net loss of jobs, efforts must be put into creating new green jobs or ``converting'' old jobs.
Whereas the priorities of global capitalism dictate the closure of the Isle of Wight’s Vestas wind turbine factory, we ought to be opening or converting hundreds of factories to produce the hardware for harnessing renewable wind and solar energy, and employing tens of thousands of skilled engineers from other industries and training new engineers for the future.
Socially useful production
We had a brief glimpse of how such a transformation might be achieved at Lucas Aerospace in the 1970s, when workers, faced with job losses, drew up their own alternative plan for how they could run the company and turn it over to producing socially useful and environmentally friendly products. Whilst the Lucas Plan never came to fruition, it has important lessons for future struggles to place the working class and the trades unions at the heart of the fight to save the planet.
The Lucas Aerospace conglomerate was one of Europe’s largest designers and manufacturers of military aircraft systems and hardware, with more than 18,000 workers and 15 factories across the UK, centred on Birmingham. Half of its business was in the production of combat aircraft and missile systems for NATO.
Formed in the early 1970s, through a series of takeovers and mergers, it enjoyed government sponsorship to create a strong and efficient aerospace company.
When Lucas management put forward plans to ``rationalise'' the company by sacking up to 20 per cent of the workforce and closing a number of factories, in order to compete on the European market for lucrative NATO contracts, the principal opposition came from the powerful Shop Stewards Combine Committee (SSCC).
The SSCC had grown in importance through the rank and file wage militancy of the early 1970s. Crucial to its success was its ability to call solidarity actions across the whole of Lucas in support of local disputes, such as in 1972 when a three-month strike over pay by workers at the Burnley plant was supported by workplace collections and stoppages across the combine. Management capitulated with a greatly increased wage settlement for the Burnley engineers sparking a round of action for increased pay across the whole of Lucas Aerospace.
Beyond militant unionism
The response of the SSCC to the proposed job losses was to go far beyond the norms of militant trades unionism as, in 1976, it put forward an alternative corporate plan for production across the company. The plan, which had been drawn up by workers on the shopfloor, argued that Lucas should shift from a concentration on military hardware production to the making of socially useful goods. It was two years in the making and drew on the technical expertise and detailed knowledge of the production process of the workforce.
Altogether it contained more than 150 ideas with detailed plans, filling more than 1000 pages. Lucas Aerospace already had a small stake in high-tech medical equipment and the plan sought to develop this as an alternative to weapons systems.
Some of the key elements of the alternative plan in the medical field were:
•Expanded production of kidney dialysis machines, which Lucas already built, together with research into more portable models. •Manufacture of a life-support system for use in ambulances, based on a design by a former Lucas engineer turned medical doctor. •Development of a mobility aid for children with Spina Bifida. The ``Hobcart'', as it was called, was actually designed and built by Lucas workers and advance orders for several thousand units were received. Mike Cooley, a senior designer at Lucas Aerospace and local chair of the technical union TASS, wrote:
“Lucas would not agree to manufacture [the Hobcart] because, they said, it was incompatible with their product range… Mike Parry Evans, its designer, said that it was one of the most enriching experiences of his life when he delivered the Hobcart to a child and saw the pleasure on the child’s face. For the first time in his career he saw the person who was going to benefit from the product he had designed, and he was intimately in contact with a social human problem.” [1]
While the issue of climate change and environmental degradation did not occupy nearly so importance a place in the popular consciousness as it does today, the problem of oil supply was a live issue (following the so-called “oil-crisis” of 1973) and the Lucas workers' plan focused extensively on the development of alternative, renewable energy.
Plans included:
•Efficient wind turbines, drawing on existing expertise in aerodynamics. •Solar cells and heat pumps. •The “Power Pack”, which coupled a small internal combustion engine to a stack of batteries to create cars with 80% less emissions and 50% greater fuel economy. •An efficient method for small-scale electricity generation for use in the developing world. •A vehicle like a train but with pneumatic tyres allowing it also to travel on roads. Such a vehicle could navigate inclines of 1 in 6, compared with 1 in 80 for a conventional train, offering a huge potential saving against the need to build tunnels or make deep cuttings to lay rails. A prototype was successfully tested on a railway line in East Kent. Bosses reject needs before profits
However, the importance of the Lucas Plan is not just in the specific technologies and products it proposed but in the questions it raised about production under capitalism and the vision it offered of a new society in which human needs come before the blind pursuit of profit.
Predictably, Lucas Aerospace management opposed the plan. The new product ranges did not fit with the company's existing portfolio. Furthermore, the very idea of the workers collectively articulating their views about company policy in this way, challenging management’s right to manage at a fundamental level, was anathema to the Lucas' bosses.
Whilst significant sections of the labour movement paid lip-service to the concept, the Lucas Plan was to remain a dead letter. The Labour government lauded the plan in public -- indeed, the initial idea for the plan had arisen from a meeting between the Lucas shop stewards and industry minister Tony Benn [2] --- but Labour failed to put its money where its mouth was. It had its own priorities which did not include socially useful production but did require strong military and aerospace industries as part of its fulfilment of NATO obligations.
Long months of negotiations over the plan, meetings with ministers and union officials to win concrete backing for it, gradually sapped the militancy of the Lucas workers. SSCC leaders became increasingly detached from the workforce and workplace organisation began to wither.
With the plan effectively kicked into the long grass, and the influence of the SSCC on the shopfloor in decline, management was determined to break its influence. Lucas Aerospace pushed forward with the job cuts, and activists, including many of the most prominent members of the SSCC and those most associated with the alternative plan, were victimised and sacked.
Climate change
Today, the twin drivers of economic recession and the possibility of catastrophic climate change are beginning to push working people towards action. A series of small-scale but high-profile occupations of threatened factories, not just at Vestas but also at Visteon where 600 workers took on the might of Ford and won a greatly enhanced redundancy package, show what is possible.
It is the role of socialists to participate in these movements, drawing the links between the economic crisis of capitalism and the environmental crisis, and using the lessons of past struggles to offer ideas and leadership to take the struggle forward.
[This article first appeared at the website of Socialist Resistance, a British socialist group and newspaper.]
References
1. Cooley, Michael: Architect or Bee? The Human/Technology Relationship, South End Press, 1982.
The British Fire Brigades Union (FBU), which represents 85% of firefighters and support staff in Britain, plans to move motions at the Trade Union Congress’s (TUC) annual congress in September for the British trade union to work to increase Israel’s international isolation.
The FBU’s motions reflect growing support for the Palestinian struggle among unions internationally, resulting in Israel and its supporters in the labour movement becoming increasingly isolated.
The FBU has submitted a range of motions, including that the general council of the TUC pressure the British government to place trade sanctions on Israel, including ending arms sales; that the TUC developed an effective boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign; that the TUC review its ties with Israel’s racist Histadrut union federation and seek to build solidarity with Palestinian General Confederation of Labour; and that the TUC affiliate to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
It reflects growing support among British unions for the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. This began with the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) voting to support the BDS campaign in March. This was followed by motions being passed in support of the BDS campaign at the congress of the University and College Union.
In addition, unions such as public sector union Unison, the National Union of Teachers, the Union of Shop Distribution and Allied Workers and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have recently passed softer motions supporting elements of the BDS campaign.
Significantly, the FBU’s motions were put forward despite attempts by the Labour government to pressure unions to stop supporting the BDS campaign.
On June 23, foreign secretary David Miliband said “the government is dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at trade union congresses and conferences this summer”.
Miliband appointed Ivan Lewis, an outspoken supporter of Israel’s December-January war on Gaza that killed more than 1300 Palestinian civilians, to dissuade unionists from supporting the BDS campaign.
Support in British unions for the boycott campaign has resulted from both revulsion at the Israel’s war on Gaza as well as increasing investigation of the reality faced by Palestinians. STUC Assistant Secretary Mary Senior told Electronicintifada.net on August 16: “It was very important we carefully considered the issue.”
At the STUC’s 2007 congress, a motion was passed calling on the leadership to “explore the merits of the calls” for a BDS campaign. The STUC organised a delegation that visited Palestine in February and March. This led to a report at the STUC congress recommending support for the BDS campaign.
Critics of the BDS campaign, many of them organised in the recently established pro-Israel Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP), have argued the BDS campaign breaks down the capacity to build links between Israeli and Palestinian workers that could end the conflict.
However, the basis on which such collaboration occurs is important.
The Israeli union federation Histadrut has a long history of supporting unjust policies against Palestinians. The report from the STUC delegation criticised the federation: “At no time did Histadrut acknowledge that the West Bank is occupied.”
FBU President Mark Shaw outlined an alternative approach to building solidarity between Israeli and Palestinian workers to the August 16 Jerusalem Post: “In line with a resolution passed at our 2005 annual conference, we recognize ‘…that there are progressive elements within Israeli society, both within the working class and trade union movement, and political parties who strive for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state’, he continued.
‘We would seek to positively engage with such elements’.”
[A copy of the Scottish Trade Union Congress Palestine delegation’s report is available at www.stuc.org.uk/palestine]
Revitalising Labour attempts to reflect on efforts to rebuild the labour movement internationally, emphasising the role that left-wing political currents can play in this process. It welcomes contributions on union struggles, internal renewal processes within the labour movement and the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
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