In this special extended article, continuing on page 6, GREG TUCKER sums up the political challenge facing the left in the unions, and outlines some suggestions for the way forward
Lobby of Parliament In a New Year message, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber called for a national debate about top pay, bemoaning the fact that boardroom pay has more than doubled since 2000, whilst it has barely risen for the rest of us.
It might have been better if he recalled the words oft repeated by James Larkin, "The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise."
For the sad fact is that the gap between top and bottom has widened as working class organisation has been allowed to wither. Instead of looking at "remuneration committee reform" as Barber does, the TUC would be better off getting its own act together.
Despite "rights to recruit" from New Labour and new "organising" drives by.the unions to exploit them, overall membership of unions has barely risen.
Historically, over 5 million union members have been lost, and the proportion of the workforce covered by collective agreements is woefully low (under one third of workers - less than half of previous figures). Official figures for industrial action are at their lowest for a century.
This is not due to some abstract change in society, nor can it be put down merely to the industrial defeats and law changes of the 1980s. It is a direct result of the path followed by the TUC.
For instead of confronting the challenges laid down by Margaret Thatcher, the TUC bowed down before them.
Whilst, in the political arena the Labour Party was moving ever rightward, first from social democracy to a form of social-liberalism under Neil Kinnock, and then into pure neo-liberalism under Blair, the TUC itself undertook an ideological metamorphosis, shying away from organising solidarity action, dropping even the token campaigning against unemployment it had taken up in the early eighties.
It adopted a three pronged approach - at the political level, accept the changes in the Labour Party and keep quiet in the hope that sooner or later a Labour government would be elected; at an industrial level, embrace the concept of partnership in the hope that stronger businesses might eventually reward their
SAVE OUR PENSIONS andous SAVE FOI Pensi OUR PENSIONS workers; and for individual members offer better personal "services" (credit cards, discount shopping etc.) in place of grass roots organisation.
The position that this bankrupt strategy has left us in demands a root and branch rebuilding of our movement. First responses
The election of a set of more militant General Secretaries in a series of unions over the last five years was the first expression of a general recognition of this need for change.
But it has become clear that, with only two or three exceptions, the 'awkward squad' is not even that gauche.
While one or two smaller unions have begun to build themselves on the basis of a more militant perspective, the larger unions have responded by proposing mergers and by investing in a recruitment strategy which seems to aim more at using their numerical strength to hegemonise existing organised sectors at the expense of other rather than strengthen their existing organisation or organise (or reorganise) unoramicus STOP DEFENDING AMICUS UNCHAN