Build resistance from below to beat bosses

What We Think

Teachers are set to kick off action on Thursday

It’s inspiring that this week hundreds of thousands of workers are set to strike again. Teachers, government workers, nurses, ambulance workers and others are all ready to hit picket lines. But, following the unfortunate tradition of the British trade union leaders, the strikes will mostly be at different times.

Spreading and hardening the strikes can beat the Tories and the bosses. The upcoming actions are a chance for everyone to show their support and to join rallies and pickets. 

Every strike matters. But the government is still determined to ram through pay deals well below inflation, and that means pay cuts in real terms.

The Tories showed they want to break strikes and keep nurses’ pay and conditions down when they ran to the courts in an effort to block upcoming strikes by the Royal College of Nursing union (RCN). And the new anti-union laws are poised to go through parliament next month.

The bosses, the Tories and their media friends are the main enemy. But far too often union leaders are prepared to do rotten deals with them rather than confront them. The appalling offer in Royal Mail is the latest example where union leaders are ready to accept surrender.

Faced with the need to escalate and unify the strikes, workers have to organise. If union leaders recommend hard-hitting action or to chuck out bad deals, that’s good. But when they don’t, or actively hold down struggle and urge retreats, then there have to be networks of resistance to overcome them.

That happened in the RCN when activists made the difference between a bad deal being accepted or rejected. It happened in the UCU union where university workers have repeatedly headed off efforts to stop action.

In this new phase of the strike surge, victory is inseparable from creating rank and file pressure from below. That applies most directly to those on the front line of struggle, but it applies to every worker. 

We need strike committees to build the pickets, widen participation and to act as a focus for resistance to the union leaders when they fail. When votes are in the balance, strikers who don’t want to lose have to coordinate their action to demand the rejection of bad deals and more action to win.

The strikes cannot be allowed to dwindle with results that are far less than could be achieved. There’s plenty of money for the rich and the big corporations. 

Profit margins at Britain’s biggest companies listed on the stock exchange were 89 percent higher for the first half of 2022 than for the same period in 2019. It’s time to organise from below, and to fight to win.