Why Labour does not deserve support

High court judge forbids BA strike, based on Thatcher-era[1] laws designed to fuck up the unions:

The airline won on a technical point, arguing that Unite failed to carry out its statutory duties by making sure that everyone balloted was told the result.

When balloting for strikes, unions should give those who took part a detailed breakdown of the result, as required by section 231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.

The union’s barrister, John Hendy QC, said the airline had not been able to find even one employee who did not know the result of the ballot, which voted overwhelmingly for strike action.

Labour had thirteen years to withdraw or weaken these laws, but never did, despite the fact it was the unions that kept the party going at various times. This was perhaps New Labour’s greatest betrayal of the working classes, taking away most of its rights of self defence.

[1] Technically, Major-era…

BA gets deeper in trouble with the unions

Unions in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are going to take action in support of the BA strike:

ITF General Secretary David Cockroft said: “BA is a world organisation and conflict within it has world repercussions. Our member unions have watched the failure of negotiations between management and union and they have been unanimous in recognising the risk of a downward spiral across the aviation sector and the potential for damage to the company, its image, passengers and workers that failure represents.”

He continued, “We and our members intend to resist what has come to look very much like an attempt to break the union, and resist the drop in standards across the industry – probably starting in Spain after any BA/Iberia tie-up – that it would usher in if allowed to happen.”

Having the strike spread outside of the UK will do a lot to make BA hurt. One of the ways BA has been able to limit damages so far is because it partners with other airlines and can depend on their crews for those flights. If union involvement from outside the UK can stop this, BA will have a lot less flights departing as planned. See the below video for a handy explanation.



It’s good to see that unions in other countries recognise the danger of letting BA win and are prepared to make sacrifises to stop them. Unions have long realised that with globalised capital, labour needs to be globalised as well, but it has been much harder to put in practise. One of the few succesful multinational union campaigns I can think off of the top of my head is that of the harbour workers fighting the deregulation of European ports — hopefully the BA campaign will be another one.

Where is the US left?

The American left doesn’t understand political power as anything other than that held by the state:

This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

Richard of The Existence Machine says, went even further:

But even that’s a bit strong–we don’t force concessions, we ask, we beg, we beseech. Witness the spectacle of liberals, prominent or otherwise, writing open letters, or blog posts, addressed to Obama–please close Guantanamo, please end the occupation of Iraq, please take time to consider single payer healthcare, please keep your promises, please fulfill our hopes and dreams, please please listen to us!

Part of that –conscious or unconscious– rejection of power and its attending responsibility probably has to do with the peculiar history of the American left, the socialist part of which was always much smaller than in other countries, — and whatever you can say about socialists and communists, they always have a keen grasp of power (if not how to get it or use it). And then this weak communitarian tradition was thoroughly rejected by the sixties New Left as well, making its influence even weaker.

But there’s more going on, I think. I think part of this difficulty with the concept of power as something that can be used by people themselves, directly, as opposed through putting pressure on the state, lies in the influence libertarianism has had on political debate in the States. This after all is a philosophy that in its vulgar form — in which it had has its most influence– denies the existence of any form of power other than that wielded by the state. It may be marginal in its direct influence, but libertarian concepts have seeped through the entire political spectrum in the past three-four decades and with it this ignorance of non-state power.

Which is of course very convenient to the powers that be, as a left that voluntarily rejects its own ability to organise alternative centres of powers, is much easier to control. Interestingly, if there’s one group that still (or again) understands the need to depend on itself, rather than on the benevolence of the political classes, it might just be the teabaggers, attempting to reshape the Republican Party into their own image.

Total victory

As the Independent reports:

Construction contractors at Total’s Lindsey oil refinery have settled their labour dispute by agreeing to reinstate 700 sacked workers, amid concerns that the sackings had led to wildcat sympathy strikes across the country.

The deal – brokered at a meeting between the managing contractor, Jacobs, the Engineering and Construction Industry Association (ECIA) and the GMB and Unite trade unions in the early hours of yesterday – will be put to staff working on Lindsey’s hydro-desulphurisation unit building site on Monday. The proposal is expected to be accepted.

[…]

However, the redundancy programme is not over at Lindsey. The dispute started because 51 workers were laid off by one of Jacobs’ subcontractors on the site, at the same time as another was hiring. But the project is nearly finished, so staff will still have to be cut. Once all workers, including the original 51 redundancies, are back at work on Monday a new formal redundancy programme will start.

The reinstatement deal includes an assurance of a minimum of four weeks employment, and guarantees both efforts to co-ordinate new work and normal severance payments in the event of redundancy.

There were disruptions at nine engineering building sites in response to the problems at Lindsey, including the South Hook liquefied natural gas terminal and the Sellafield nuclear plant.

The Lindsey deal is a stark volte-face from the employers’ earlier hardball tactics of immediate dismissal. Sources close to the dispute credit the change in attitude to demands from Total that the completion of its building project take priority over subcontractors’ industrial relations issues. Pressure from other companies affected by the problems was also a factor.

That’s twice now that socalled wildcat strike action forced Total and its contractors into a retreat at Lindsey. Sympathy strikes elsewhere helped put pressure on the bosses, who might have been able to ignore the strike at Lindsey on its own. It also showed that the Thatcherite laws forbidding such wildcat action need to be repealed and until they are, to be ignored by the workers, if not by the unions.

Victory for the Visteon workers

Socialist Worker reports that the factory occupations by Visteon workers who were sacked in March without redundancy pay or pensions have been succesful:

Visteon workers have won a major victory against one of the biggest and most powerful multinational companies in the world – Ford.

The workers used to be employed by Ford until 2000 and were sacked at the end of last month. Ford tried to avoid its responsibilities, claiming that it owed the workers nothing.

But workers’ action has forced Ford to offer hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy packages. Many workers will get £40,000 or more. It is one of the biggest payouts that Ford has ever offered.

[…]

“The threat of taking action to Ford was the turning point. This offer sets a new benchmark too – if Ford try to sack workers elsewhere they won’t be able to just do it and give people nothing.

“People can see now that if you put up a strong enough fight you can win. This is a victory for workers and it’s about time we won something.”

Around 600 workers across plants in Enfield, north London, Basildon in Essex and Belfast have been fighting back since the end of March, when they were sacked with no notice, no redundancy pay or pensions.

Socialist Worker also managed to find out that shutting down those factories was not due to the economic crisis so much as something the Visteon management had already planned to do eight years ago !

The fightback against the Visteon sackings shows workers’ self defence is possible, that strike and other action doesn’t need to be just a meaningless ritual on the part of the unions to get a slightly bigger scrap from the bosses’ table but can actually force them to meaningful concessions, that you can actually win the fight. With redundancy threats and bankruptcies looming in many other companies, this is good news. If only the union leadership was as militant.