Posted by: John Phoenix
Union bureaucrats always manage to aim low and still miss their target, all while presenting weakness as strength and failure as success.
A TUC email doing the rounds recently, promoting to union reps a TUC video that paints in bright colours the benefits to be gained by joining a union, claimed that “the bulk of the Trade Union Act 2016 has been repealed”. The Labour government’s tinkering around the edges of employment law is being hailed by these shameless hucksters as a veritable New Jerusalem that will signal a brave new world for workers’ rights in Britain.
The truth is more mundane. The Starmer regime’s joke ‘employment protection’ bill, which passed into law last December amid great fanfare, will do nothing to protect the scapegoated working class from suffering the future of slump and war to which the greed of monopoly capitalism and the cowardice of social democracy have jointly condemned them.
So far from shielding workers from the worst effects of a crisis for which they bear no responsibility and have (under capitalism) no power to redress, the new legislation just rubs workers’ noses even further into the stinking collusion that unites the imperialist Labour government with the no less imperialist trade union bureaucrats.
Any temporary random benefit which union members might conceivably garner from the new law will rapidly be set to naught by the disorganising and demoralising consequence of being taught that the way to defend workers’ rights is to keep voting Labour, keep voting for imperialism and keep praying for better days.
The promises v the reality
The TUC is making a great song and dance about how the new Employment Protections Act will transform the entire employment landscape, with general secretary Paul Nowak waxing lyrical, claiming: “Whether it’s tackling the scourge of zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire, improving access to sick pay and parental leave, or clamping down on exploitation – this bill highlights the government’s commitment to upgrading rights and protections for millions.”
What is less trumpeted is the fact that most of the 28 reforms are still under consideration pending further consultation with big business, with many of the supposed protections not slated for delivery before January 2027 (if they arrive at all). Promises about ending fire and rehire practices and zero-hour contracts are currently being watered down to suit employers.
The TUC’s senior policy officer for employment rights, Tim Sharp, let the cat out of the bag when he admitted: “Employers will only be able to fire and rehire workers on worse terms when the alternative is going bust.”
Surely every HR department in the country knows this form of blackmail by heart! “Sorry chaps, but if you don’t agree to this change in your conditions/wage cut/migration to another part of the country, you will be forcing us into bankruptcy and yourself out of a job.”
In all the ducking and weaving, big business has constantly had the ear of government, and the progress of this already weak bill from election manifesto to Commons has been accompanied by the unmistakable and incessant sound of goalposts being moved.
For example, what started off as a promise to restore the right of the employee to open a case of unfair dismissal from the moment of employment commencing, is now being discussed in light of a proposal to introduce a so-called ‘probationary period’ of six months, during which time the employer will be able to sack the employee by simply dropping him a letter.
All such ‘reforms’ as the new act have but one goal in mind: to tighten the bonds that bind the trade union bureaucrats to the imperialist Labour party, in or out of government. In this case, the hope is that by slapping a Labour brand on ‘new rules’ the workers will be fooled into thinking that this is all being done for their benefit, and that decades of unjust anti-trade-union laws and anti-worker legislation are really being overturned.
All of this chicanery and much more will doubtless emerge between now and January 2027.
Treacherous role of Britain’s capture trade union bureaucracies
But the real scandal is not that the Labour government follows meekly behind imperialism. After all, from its very inception the Labour party has been imperialist to the core.
No, the real scandal lies in the fact that our trade unions, the very organisations that wage slaves struggled to found and build in order to counter the violence and oppression of the capitalist class, should have been turned into a mockery of themselves, bound hand and foot to the imperialist Labour party and, via Labour, to the very exploiters they were supposed to be struggling against.
That is why the most crucial task of the organised working class right now is to break the link with Labour and rebuild the unions as genuine fighting organs of class struggle. Unless this is achieved and the stifling influence of social democracy is uprooted, no amount of busy-work, online petitions or other varieties of virtue-signalling will move the dial an inch nearer the goal either of achieving better rights for workers under capitalism, or for emancipating them entirely from capitalist exploitation and servitude.
The TUC email mentioned that this “isn’t the last you’ll hear of the Employment Rights Act”, warning that “over the next year, new parts of the act will come into effect”, but that “many of the details still need to be finalised through consultations and secondary legislation”. From this, the email drew the moral that “to make sure that everyone gets the protections at work they deserve, we need a strong movement that can support the government to deliver”.
So this is a call to arms … of sorts. The task of the organised working class, it seems, is to act as a kind of chorus, keeping a friendly eye the Labour government as new instalments of the ‘employment act’ dog’s dinner come to light and helping to render them more palatable to the baffled membership. There is nothing that would gladden the heart of these TUC bureaucrats more than to see workers drawn away from any genuine struggle for emancipation and back into the Sisyphean labour of trying to build “a strong movement that can support the government to deliver”.
This is no more than a rehash of the old mantra: ‘Vote Labour, then push the Labour government towards socialism’ – which continues to be the guiding star for every Trotskyite and revisionist ‘communist’, despite its having been refuted by history so many times (see Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn et al).
Not choosing to delve any deeper than the Tory misdeeds of 2016, the TUC missive talks exclusively of the last ten years, during which, they say, David Cameron’s (!) union-bashing laws have ‘held us back’. But workers have been held back a lot longer than that, and Labour both in and out of office has played a crucial role in keeping the workers weakened, divided and at the mercy of their exploiters.
The escalating pace of Britain’s deindustrialisation that defined the Thatcher years, as one major industry after another was slain on the altar of monopoly capitalism, was nailed down by the passage of numerous union-bashing laws. The miners, the most militant section of the working class, put up a heroic resistance against the trashing of the British coal industry, but were undermined by the imperialist Labour party and sold out by opportunist trade union bureaucrats who betrayed the struggle.
Subsequent campaigns to overturn Thatcher’s repressive laws were sabotaged by the refusal of union leaders to break the law, fearful of seeing their massive funds (milked from union subs and poured into Labour coffers) put at risk.
Despite talking a good fight, the wealthiest and most powerful unions were content to operate well within the bounds of legality, happy enough to have an alibi for their own betrayal of workers’ rights. Meanwhile, Conservative and Labour governments alike found it convenient to let the union-bashing laws remain on the statute book.
When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, telling the TUC: “We will not go back to the days of industrial warfare, strikes without ballots, mass and flying pickets, secondary action and all the rest,” he was really pushing at an open door.
Whilst the union bureaucrats may sometimes find it necessary to lodge a polite remonstrance in defence of workers’ rights, they all gave a collective sigh of relief when it became clear that they were not really expected to actually do anything. With very few exceptions, it only took the threat of legal action and of the sequestration of union funds for the unions to throw in the towel, relieved to be given this alibi to excuse their inertia.
The fact that the union bureaucrats are able to tell their members such bare-faced nonsense about what is really going down, and get away with it scot-free, testifies to the appallingly low level of class consciousness that is now hamstringing the working class, thanks to the pernicious influence of social democracy.
It is only possible to get away with this blithe disregard for the lessons of history – and very recent lessons at that – by assuming that your members were only born yesterday. True friends of the working class must be doing everything in their power to bring home these lessons, rebuild class consciousness and confidence, rebuild our unions as genuinely fighting organisations, and send these careerist charlatans packing.