Posted by: John Phoenix
The first issue of our industrial news sheet examines recent cases of trade union leaderships failing their members and the wider working class.
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Read the December 2025 issue of our industrial matters free sheet as a pdf.
Index
- Dockers: don’t work for war!
- Underground strike collapses into defeat
- Birmingham bin strike: agency workers and blacklisting
- British Library strike
- Striking doctors are being sent on a suicide mission
Dockers: don’t work for war!
For many months now, dockworkers in France, Greece, Italy and other countries have been organising strikes, protests and blockades to prevent arms and military equipment destined for Israel being loaded onto container ships.
These dockworkers are responding to the actions of their own governments, which have been complicit not only in the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but in brutal imperialist warmongering all over the world.
Dockers from across the continent met in Genoa in September to coordinate action in European ports, with the aim of maintaining and escalating their blockade of arms and equipment intended to unleash genocidal slaughter on the people of Gaza.
The actions of these brave and principled workers show that militancy does still endure in the wider trade union movement, and should serve as an inspiration to all of us.
But what about here in Britain? We have many large ports all around the coast, yet the trade union Unite, instead of organising its members to resist the government’s ceaseless complicity with the imperialist war machine, has called on the government to spend more money on weapons!
According to Unite general secretary Sharon Graham: “Government defence spending must be used to secure UK jobs and skills. This country has world-class aerospace and shipbuilding capabilities. Buying British is crucial if we are going to retain them, for the sake of our national security as well as our future economic growth.”
Unite has been absolutely clear – its British members deserve food on their tables more than the peoples targeted by our ruling class deserve to live in peace from imperialist aggression.
The implications of this position are chilling.
The actions of European dockers remind us that the first and best defence against the machinations of our savage, bloodthirsty ruling class is an organised and militant working class.
If our union leaders choose to defend our class enemies, then we have no choice but to organise ourselves to take action from the grassroots up.
We call on our members and supporters to visit ports across the country and reach out to dockworkers, letting them know what their colleagues elsewhere have been able to achieve and helping to spread the understanding of the vital place they hold in the national (and global) economy.
Productive workers in general, and dockworkers in particular, have their hands on real levers of economic power. In the epoch of ‘just in time’ logistics, those who work in the supply chain can inflict great damage on the capitalist warmongers and their profits.
We say to workers running ports across the nation, from Felixstowe and Tilbury to Grangemouth, Teesport, Immingham, Southampton, Avonmouth and Liverpool:
Don’t be part of the imperialist war machine! Individually, we may feel impotent, but together the real power of the land is in our hands.
We must learn to use that power in the interests of our class and of humanity.
Underground strike collapses into defeat
On 4 November, the RMT sent an email bulletin to its members informing them that they had accepted a multi-year pay deal on London Underground, bringing to an end a dispute that has rumbled on since April but will leave many RMT members with a bitter taste in their mouths.
The multi-year deal, which will run until April 2028, leaves workers in receipt of above-inflation settlements only twice in nine years: in 2019 and, under the terms of the new deal, in 2027.
Given that September’s successful strike action will have lost them two days’ pay (subtracting around 0.5 percent of any pay rise), those who struck will now receive a ‘rise’ of just 2.4 percent this year, although inflation (officially) stands at 3.8 percent (and rising). (The agreed ‘rise’ for this year being 3.4 percent, which is already below inflation.)
Despite the offer not meeting members’ expectations, and with fatigue not having featured prominently in the RMT’s pay claim, the later stages of pay talks centred not on pay but on rosters and fatigue.
It would seem that the Tube’s management seized an opportunity to divert the union representatives into timewasting discussions on this subject, the outcome of which was a promise for more ‘discussions’ (ie, a talking shop) on how to make shift patterns more ‘fatigue friendly’.
While the addition of a £400 bonus for Boxing Day working will be welcome for many Tube workers (drivers have been paid this bonus since 2013), the deal falls well short of members’ expectations and has kicked other long-term demands – like a 32-hour, four-day week – into the long grass until 2028 at the earliest.
Puzzlingly, the RMT decided not to ballot the wider membership on this paltry pay offer – the decision to accept a deal the members would very likely have rejected was taken after a single meeting of reps and senior paid officials.
RMT leaders clearly made an error of judgement in not convening grassroots reps and activists as soon as the September strike had ended – to review the action, agree dates for further strikes, and maintain its grip on negotiations.
Internal communications between members and activists suggest that leadership inaction is leading to disharmony between members across the Underground’s varied functions, from train drivers to service control and station staff, with different groups now pointing the finger of blame at each other for the defeat.
The RMT has cultivated a reputation as a militant trade union, but since the death of Bob Crow it has only occasionally flirted with genuine militancy, reverting in the main to bureaucratic trade union type when faced with a real battle.
The failure of the Underground dispute demonstrates the need for a concerted effort to rebuild class consciousness – an awareness of the working class’s economic interests, its social position and, most crucially, how this brings workers into conflict with their employers and the ruling class.
Until this is achieved, then defeats like the one on London Underground will only repeat themselves.
Birmingham bin strike: agency workers and blacklisting
On 27 October, Unite the Union announced that it would be balloting its members working for an agency called Job & Talent for industrial action – specifically, those members who are acting as strike cover for the Birmingham bin strikers.
According to Unite’s website, these agency binworkers are being balloted for strike action over reports of “bullying, harassment and the threat of blacklisting”.
A manager at Job & Talent has been caught on camera claiming that council apparatchiks will ban agency workers from eligibility for permanent jobs with the council if they refuse to cross bin strikers’ picket lines.
This is the latest in a raft of anti-worker strategies deployed by Birmingham city council, its government paymasters and its agents, including Job & Talent, aimed at crushing the binworkers’ strike.
The council has pleaded penury and called in the commissioners, yet has had no qualms in spending millions with Job & Talent for the supply of scab labour to break the binworkers’ strike, which has been ongoing since the beginning of the year.
Birmingham council has also spent hundreds of thousands of pounds taking Unite the Union to court to ban bin strikers from taking any action to prevent agency workers from doing their jobs and thus undermining their strike.
But why has Unite allowed the use of agency staff in waste management and elsewhere to proliferate?
Standing idly by while agency workers are primed to step in when permanent council workers walk out, Unite has not only failed to stop the sell-off of permanent jobs within councils to agencies, but has also fataly undermined the industrial power of its own members.
Paradoxically, with the strike in a state of complete deadlock, the decision to ballot the agency workers might just give the council waste workers the leverage that they badly need to bring this dispute to a successful conclusion.
If Job & Talent members walk out, then public anger at the piles of rubbish growing in the streets, with all the ensuing public health problems, could finally force the hand of the council and the government.
But Unite has needlessly undermined its own industrial strength and prolonged the strike by allowing the agency system to proliferate.
‘Organising agency workers’ is no substitute for the real work of organising to prevent the rise of precarious anti-worker agency work in the first place!
The union must learn the lessons from the Birmingham bin strike and lead a concerted campaign to end agency work across council services.
And workers everywhere must demand an end to parasitic profiteering from our public services.
Only the complete renationalisation of all our public services can provide both decent jobs for the workforce and high quality services for residents.
British Library strike
On 9 November, a two-week strike by members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) working at the British Library in London came to an end.
Over 300 workers had walked out in protest against a miserly 2.4 percent pay award – the second year in a row in which the workers have had a below-inflation ‘award’ stuffed down their throats by management.
The long-running dispute has caused caused serious collateral damage. On 3 November, after less than a year in the post, library chief executive Rebecca Lawrence resigned as speakers refused to cross picket lines and events had to be cancelled at short notice.
Nine of the library’s 11 reading rooms were forced to close by the strike action.
Meanwhile, the great and the good of the bourgeois left, including such luminaries as Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Green party leader Zack Polanski (the new darling of British social democracy) joined striking workers on the picket line to offer the strikers the usual tired platitudes about ‘solidarity’ and ‘unity’.
Facilitator-in-chief of Your Party Jeremy Corbyn told workers they should “be proud of what you’re doing, winning decent pay and decent conditions” and pledged to raise the dispute in Parliament.
While the strike should indeed be fully supported, the truth is that these workers will find victory difficult to win without their hands on the levers of economic power and without wide public awareness.
Unhelpfully, while PCS has concluded ballots of members at Tate art galleries in London, Liverpool and Cornwall, it has kept them purely consultative.
If the leadership chooses to disregard the ballot results, it will have wasted an important opportunity to organise and publicise a far larger action by cultural workers with shared grievances.
Striking doctors are being sent on a suicide mission
On Friday 14 November, junior doctors began a five-day walk-out in England.
They are striking over pay, which remains far behind 2008 levels, despite recent rises, and over the steady disappearance of speciality training positions in NHS hospitals.
Despite massive and growing undercapacity and huge waiting lists, the NHS is training fewer doctors every year.
With applicants hugely outstripping training places, before long there will be too few gynaecologists, urologists, surgeons, psychiatrists and others to fill the consultant and senior registrar posts needed to keep the NHS functioning as a universal, nationwide healthcare provider.
In response to the announcement that junior doctors would be striking, health minister Wes Streeting told the Sunday Times: “My message to resident doctors is: the fewer doctors who go on strike, the more jobs I can create.”
With these words, Streeting demonstrated that he is a loyal servant of the City of London financial elite.
Streeting has assiduously used his role as health minister to promote the interests of the private health lobby in Britain, forcing through £7bn in cuts to the budget of an NHS already on its knees.
Ninety percent of hospital trusts anticipate they will need to cut yet more services and clinical posts as a result, even as waiting lists are screaming as a result of the chronic under-capacity that has been deliberately cultivated and sustained over decades.
The idea that the Labour party ‘created’ the NHS (and therefore has an interest in preserving it) is a myth that has been heavily promoted to working people for decades.
The truth, however, is somewhat different. The NHS was created as part of a raft of measures aimed at buying off the British working class in the wake of two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of the socialist Soviet Union, the anticolonial national-liberation movements and the socialist bloc of countries in eastern Europe and east Asia.
When the balance of class forces shifted in favour of the working and oppressed masses, the ruling classes in Britain and across the world were forced to take measures, like the foundation of the NHS.
The Labour government of 1945 was tasked with overseeing the implementation of healthcare, social housing and other consessions that formed what is known as the ‘welfare state’.
The establishment of this ‘welfare capitalism’ won consensus amongst all bourgeois political parties because it was essential to give a weakened British imperialism some much-needed breathing space.
Workers benefited greatly from the measures, but the Labour government of 1945 was motivated not by their interests but by the need to save the monopoly-capitalists from expropriation and dethronement.
Subsequent Tory administrations enthusiastically protected the welfare state for as long as it remained necessary to the ruling class.
This explains why the pursuit of so-called ‘neoliberalism’ (by all parties) began as the economic crisis of capitalism was reasserting itself in the 1970s, and why it accelerated after the fall of the USSR and east European socialist states in 1991.
With a changed economic situation and the balance of class forces tipped back in the ruling class’s favour, the capitalists went on the offensive.
They no longer feared the working class, whose class consciousness and organisation had been much diminished.
They no longer feared the example of the European socialist countries – indeed, they optimistically predicted that it would not be long before they had reconquered every remaining liberated territory and brought all the world’s peoples back under their control.
While the attack on social services and workers’ rights began under a Tory administration, it was the Labour regimes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that moved towards the comprehensive disbanding of the NHS.
And today, it is Labour ministers such as Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting who are putting the final nails into its coffin.
The enormous sums of money that the Treasury (or rather British working people) pour into the funding stream still known as “the NHS” is siphoned into 43 separate quangos, known as ‘integrated care boards’.
This year, ICBs will use our money to buy six million private appointments for NHS patients: One million more than last year.
The NHS is being abolished in front of our eyes. Fewer people are being trained by it and for it. In future, fewer appointments will be available in its hospitals, surgeries and clinics.
The ICBs are being given ‘NHS’ money and will continue to spend a growing proportion of it in the private sector, which will continue to grow (and to profit from taxpayers’ money) as the public sector shrinks.
Our money is being given away. The number of trained, available staff able to deliver genuinely public health services are being steadily whittled away.
And if striking staff and their unions keep failing to point this out, then we will be left with only the faintest shadow of a national health service – and very few medics left capable of striking in defence either of their own pay and conditions or of the NHS itself.
Without an urgent mass campaign of coordinated action, involving medical staff and the wider working class, who need a decent NHS as much as anyone, there will be precious few NHS staff left.
Services formerly planned at a national level will instead be run via ICBs with their links to private firms.
Care once delivered by NHS staff will be provided (only if a profit can be made) by medics working directly or indirectly for the health and insurance monopolies that are steadily taking over all but the most costly of NHS activities.
While corporate media commentators lament the doctors’ strikes, we lament the fragmented and broken manner in which industrial action is routinely carried out in this country.
Our unions’ unwillingness/inability to put up a real fight is enabling the destruction of our health service.
The revival of the NHS will need all staff, patients and unions to cooperate in organising a mass campaign for the ending and reversing of all privatisation – a campaign capable of forcing the government to its knees.
The working class collectively has the power to do this, but no one in the trade union bureaucracy is even trying to organise them to use it.
Instead of organising such a campaign, one isolated detachment of workers after another is sent out to wage a suicide attack, destined for defeat from the outset, with the government and corporate media given a free hand to pick them off, one by one.
These strikers are fighting with both arms tied behind their backs, unable to harness the popular support that would surely be theirs if the wider working class truly understood what was at stake.
It’s no accident that the realities of NHS privatisation and dismantlement are not even raised. Often, those in the lower and middle ranks of our unions don’t understand what is happening themselves.
Those who try to bring them the knowledge they need (Dr Bob Gill, for example) are ostracised, leaving union members rudderless and turning their officials into hapless tools of the very capitalist class they are supposed to oppose.
Moreover, the link between the battle to save the NHS and the wider global economic crisis, with rising poverty, the drive to war and the endless onslaught on workers’ wages and conditions, is not being convincingly made.
The fight for decent pay and services is not just a struggle for NHS workers; it is the struggle of every worker in Britain against an exploiting class that is determined to put the burden of its economic crisis on our shoulders.
How do we create unions that are willing and able to fight for workers’ interests?
- Break all links with Labour and Labour-lite parliamentarism.
- Dismantle the Labour-aligned, capitalist-friendly union bureaucracies; get rid of all those who loyally serve imperialism and promote imperialist wars.
- Defy the anti-trade-union laws and make them unworkable. Bring back genuine democracy to the unions and refuse to allow the state to oversee the running of working-class organisations.
- Build up strike funds so workers can use their collective power in earnest.
- No special perks for union reps: all officials to be paid the average wage of their members and be subject to recall by the members who voted them into office.
- Organise and lead mass campaigns to defend and restore pay, pensions, working conditions, housing, education, healthcare, utilities and community facilities.
- Organise a mass campaign of non-cooperation to obstruct and sabotage the British/Nato/Israeli genocide and war machine.
United we bargain, divided we beg!
Don’t wait for change – organise it!