by Rob Marsden

Starting out

It is 16 months since Staffordshire County Council announced its plans to restructure education in Tamworth and 14 months since we launched an active and vibrant campaign in opposition to this.

Hands Off Tamworth Schools was born after a wave of outrage swept the town at plans to turn one of our five High Schools into an Academy, close one school completely and remove all Sixth Form provision from the remaining four schools and concentrate it on a single site, entirely in the hands of the Academy.

Queen Elizabeth’s Mercian School (QEMS), the school earmarked for closure was not a bad or ‘failing’ school. It was a well respected, popular and successful one. However, its central location and extensive playing fields made it a prime target for the bulldozers as County, together with the mysterious Landau-Forte organisation, drew up plans to locate a Sixth Form College on the site.

A couple of us parents got together and decided that we needed to start a campaign.

Letters to the press and an article in the local paper, which plugged a hastily convened meeting, meant that 35 people crammed into a room provided by the local GMB union and Hands off Tamworth Schools (HOTS) was born in August 2008.

We had three strands to the campaign – opposition to school closures, opposition to Academies and other forms of privatisation-by-stealth and defence of the existing school-based Sixth Forms and, by extension, the specialisms on offer at each of those schools.

The campaign was parent-led from the outset and we drew in parents, as well as teachers and the wider community, from all the local High Schools. From the outset we enjoyed very good relations with the trades unions in education- not just the teachers’ organisations but those representing ancillary staff.

Political geography

Tamworth Borough Council is almost entirely Tory, with just a three Labour councillors after a near wipe-out a few years ago, but retains a Labour MP – the New Labour lapdog Brian Jenkins. Staffordshire County Council which was ramming through the BSF plans, was Labour controlled (until its own wipe-out by the Tories in last June’s County Elections).

Clearly, there were no local councillors or other elected representatives we could rely on to fight on our behalf so we had to do it ourselves. Of course, we did canvas all local and County councillors and ‘our’ MP- sending documents, inviting them to discuss the issues.

In addition to public meetings, petitioning, lobbying etc. we held regular open planning and information meetings to which all were welcome. Each week we would go back to scratch, rehearse old arguments with new people, discuss tactics and strategies. It felt like going round in circles but it did begin to pay off- we developed a layer of people, a cadre if you like, able to carry quite complex arguments back to their schools, their neighbourhoods and communities and to address and counter some of the nonsense coming from County through the media and through their official publications and communications.

I had some initial expectation that we would find at least some local activists with some campaigning experience, perhaps people like myself- ex-members of the SWP or other groups, maybe some Greens, but essentially there was no pre-existing Left, no networks to tap into.

We did enjoy support and advice from socialists in the Birmingham area – in Respect and Socialist Resistance, principally through Richard Hatcher and education researcher at BCU and also from the Anti-Academies Alliance and some SWP members.

In the course of campaigning, we did pull together a hard core of campaigners some of whom were former or current Labour Party members which did cause a few crises of conscience in the initial stages of the campaign and later as the County elections loomed.

The first phase – making local waves

Inevitably, the QEMS closure issue tended to dominate in the first phase of the campaign. This was the sharp end in terms of the effect it would have on our community, the forced uprooting and dispersal of our kids, the loss of teaching jobs and the increase in the size of the school roll at the remaining four.

As a campaign group we were able to ride a wave of anger and also put forward the need to oppose Academies and the other elements of the County plans as well.

We were attacked as being opposed to a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to bring £100 million of Building Schools for the Future investment into our schools and we counter-attacked by making it absolutely clear we welcomed the money- but we didn’t want to see it Building Schools for Forte! The money on offer was tax-payers money, our money, and it should come without strings, it should be allocated to the existing schools on the basis of need. And it should be spent according to plans drawn up by local people- teachers, heads, governors, pupils, parents and the wider community- the very ‘stakeholders’ who were being carved out of the sham consultation process which always accompanies moves to set up Academies.

These ideas were eventually to form the basis of our alternative submission to the BSF process- “Putting Communities First – Education At the Heart Of Tamworth”.

With the aid of funding from the teaching unions- NASUWT (the largest teachers union locally) and the NUT and the goodwill of the GMB and UNISON, we were able to pull off a public meeting of 100 people in a major town centre venue.

We used this as a launchpad to go into the ‘official’ consultation meetings to be held in the five schools.

The response to the consultation meetings was patchy and most schools saw a small meeting, albeit one where concerned parents articulated their deep concerns to a County Council team which continually repeated the mantra that investment in infrastructure was required and raising standards across the town was necessary- as if by saying these two things often enough people would be fooled into believing that the former is not only a pre-requisite, but a guarantor, of the latter!

QEMS was different. It was big – 450 parents, kids and teachers. And it was angry, as person after person got up to take apart County’s plans. I’ve never felt quite so proud of my 13 year old son as when he made the first contribution from the floor, standing on a chair so he could be seen, and took the panel to task over their lack of consultation with kids and their trampling of his rights under the UN Rights of the Child!

The panellists who had come to sell the Academy, the ‘re-modelling’ of our schools and the closure of QEMS, were lucky to escape without being lynched.

We organised a march of 200 through town just before Christmas, followed by a party where children were invited to make Christmas cards with a message to the Corporate Director of Children and Lifelong Learning, Peter ‘privatiser’ Traves.  We delivered 100 cards to Stafford on Christmas Eve.  We later organised another march and public meeting just before Easter, which were both attended by children’s author and education activist Alan Gibbons.

The second phase – hitting them where it hurts

In May, the Labour County Council withdrew proposals to axe QEMS-  a small victory for us but there were no concessions on the Sixth Form issue despite widespread opposition from all the schools heads and the Academy was set to go ahead, with no changes, in the face of bitter union opposition to the unaccountable anti-union sponsors, Landau-Forte.

At around this time, the two main teaching unions balloted for, and won, action in all the affected schools. There was a withdrawal of goodwill, with teachers no longer providing cover and out of hours activities along with a number of one-day strikes and rallies.

This dovetailed with the County Elections which Labour were widely expected to lose heavily and, after much internal discussion, the HOTS campaign eventually made the decision to stand a full slate of six candidates at the County Council elections.

The aim was to force education onto the agenda as an election issue – which it most certainly became. The Labour Party refused even to mention its flagship policy on its election literature – not a word about Academies and privatisation, just platitudes about raising standards and one concrete pledge- to replace plastic meal trays in schools with locally sourced china plates! Radical stuff and I still wonder if they would have had the bottle to try to impose this bold socialist policy on the Academy had they not been utterly annihilated at the Election!

All our candidates were active in the town centre, talking to local people on Saturday afternoons whilst the other parties made scarcely an appearance. We also visited the teachers picket lines and addressed their mass rallies and got 33,000 leaflets out to every house in town

The Tories, sensing we could make a big impact in this lacklustre election, came out with a policy of their own to retain the sixth form provision within local authority control and under the governance of the existing high schools.  Of course, they reneged on this as soon as they were elected, adopting wholesale the current Labour proposals.

HOTS gained 10% of the town’s entire vote (matching the proportion of eligible electorate who have children at Tamworth’s High Schools). In some areas our vote was as high as 18%.

The future?

After the elections, with the summer holidays approaching, the campaign and also the teachers’ industrial action lost momentum somewhat. However, County has lost its most ardent champions of this particular Academy plan, the New Labour government is floundering and has lost the clear direction it had when Lord Adonis was in charge of schools privatisation.

Lobbying continues, with the unions taking a more direct role, albeit not in the field of industrial action. The campaign continues and we are confident there will be future flashpoints as local people see the direct and immediate effects of the loss of Sixth Forms on their schools, the demoralisation of teaching staff and little in the way of improved facilities or raised standards to show for it.

The sixth issue of The Commune (July 2009) is now available

The paper is published online, but you can order a printed copy or multiple papers to sell (£1 + postage for one copy, or £4 per 5 issues) by emailing uncaptiveminds@gmail.com

Click the image to see PDF, or see articles as they are posted online below.

editorial – migrants are at the heart of our fightback

Adam Ford reports on the Linamar fight and the state of the car industry

Joe Thorne looks at resistance to primary school cuts in London and Glasgow

Dave Spencer argues that the left has much to learn from the local work of the Northampton Save Our Services campaign

Jack Staunton writes on call centre workers’ organising initiatives

Chris Kane counters the argument that we ought to go back to the Labour Party, and stresses that communists need to organise

Kofi Kyerewaa explains the flaws of calling for the banning of the BNP

Activists participating in the occupation to protest the SOAS immigration raid draw a balance-sheet of the struggle

The story of the victimisation and planned deportation of a Chilean woman who dared to stand up to her employer Fitness First

Alice Robson reports on the campaign against cuts in English classes in Tower Hamlets

Kieran Hunter examines the hostile media and public response to June’s strike on the London Underground

David Broder looks at reactions to the mass movement in Iran against the re-election of Ahmedinejad

Alberto Durango explains how Unite have abandoned cleaner organising

Gregor Gall looks at the victory of the Lindsey oil refinery strikers and its implications for the industry

by Gregor Gall, professor of industrial relations, University of Hertfordshire

It’s the dispute that just won’t go away. For the third time this year, thousands of engineering construction workers have gone on unofficial strike, fighting for the right to work. This time round the dispute escalated dramatically unlike before, with the mass sacking of some 647 strike workers by the two of contractors working for Total, the Lindsey refinery operator.

On June 11, some 1200 contractors at Lindsey walked out unofficially after a contractor gave notice of redundancies to 51 workers while another contractor on the same site was looking for 60 workers to fill vacancies. This broke the agreement that settled their earlier strike in February this year which compelled vacant work to be made available to those under threat from redundancy. The contractors and Total stated this was not the case.

And, the issue of the right to work, and the engineering construction workers’ willingness to fight for this, was again to the fore in May as a strike by 50 laggers at Milford Haven started to snowball across other sites in Britain.

During the June 2009 strike, a growing number of engineering construction workers took solidarity action in support of their colleagues at the Lindsey refinery. At its height of 22/23 June, the strike wave involved over 4,000 workers on just over 20 sites at power stations, chemical plants and oil refineries. The solidarity action spread by flying pickets going out from Lindsey, through using mobile phones, the networks between different sites established in the previous strikes and decisions taken at mass meetings. Picketing and mass picketing was in evidence.

The June 2009 dispute had two foremost dimensions. One was that the workers concerned were capable and willing, unlike many other workers (unionised or not), to take robust collective action to defend their right to work in the midst of a recession. This came down not just to being unionised but being well organised at the workplace level with shop stewards, mass meetings and a collective confidence to act. Underlying this is the nature of the labour market in the industry where job security is absent with building projects beginning and ending when completed, with employment contracts based on this.

The second was that the employers were militant and hardnosed. During the first strike in January-February this year, Total and its concerned contractor (IREM) said they would not negotiate with the strikers’ unions unless the workers went back to work. Shortly after they relented and a deal was eventually struck before the workers’ returned to work. This time round, the situation has gone one step further for the nuclear button was pressed with the sackings: reapply for your job by June 22 5pm on the condition of ending the strike or consider that you’ve dismissed yourself. The nuclear option has been backed up by refusing to allow the conciliation service, ACAS, to get involved to resolve the dispute.

It is difficult not to read this as the employers wanting to take on, face down and defeat an assertive workforce once and for all. The reasons for this? The managerial prerogative – the right of management to manage as they see fit – is an obvious one. But behind this is surely the pressure to pursue profitability in a deteriorating economic environment. Common to all three disputes has been the keenness of the employers to undermine the national agreement for the industry that sets wage rates. In the first two disputes, the spark was the use of non-domiciled workers to do this. In the third, it was the more old-fashioned tool of aggressive management threatening job security to undermine the workers’ demands.

This assessment is supported by the revelation that Total managers acted in a deliberate way to provoke an unofficial strike by stopping the transfer of soon-to-be made redundant workers to another contractor who was taking on exactly the same type of skilled workers. According to the GMB, Total managers went out of their way to make sure that what they (the managers) described as an ‘unruly workforce’ (i.e., those employed by the Shaws contractor) did not get further work. Provoking an unofficial strike means that workers can be sacked with impunity – unlike strikers on official lawful strike who cannot be sacked for the first eight weeks of a strike. This looked suspiciously like trying to lure workers into a trap.

One of the significant features of the strikes (again) was that the strikers threw caution to the wind by defying the anti-union laws: no ballots, no notification to the employer and so on. Instead, they voted with their feet. The strikes are unlawful on another account. The walkout at Lindsey in support of the 51 workers was solidarity action as was that by all the workers outside Lindsey, and by law, the workers erred here and because they had no ‘trade dispute’ with their own employer. On top of that, the laws on picketing and obstruction have been broken continually.

What then stands out is that no injunctions were threatened or applied for by any of the concerned employers, especially those affected by solidarity action outside Lindsey (as has their unwillingness to sack anyone either – although there was an unconfirmed report that some at Staythorpe had been sacked). This must have bene for the fear of even further escalation producing a minor political crisis. Again, Unite and the GMB repudiated the action but in the same way as in January-February (with several inherent tensions), they still acted as negotiators for their striking members. What was different this time round was that both unions make the dispute (or a part of it) official when their members were sacked.  Moreover, the GMB has launched a £100,000 hardship fund and said the dispute was official from the point that the sackings were made.

The mood of the Lindsey strikers showed no willingness to back down. The majority did not re-apply for the jobs by the deadline set by the company. Some went further and burnt their dismissal notices in a public display of protest.

In a time of general recession and with unemployment of some 25-30% in the engineering construction industry, this is serious stuff. Conventional wisdom say workers don’t do this in these situations. Here the threat of unemployment and undercutting by non-domiciled workers has led these workers to do the opposite of what is the norm today.

Towards the end of the strike, both the GMB and Unite also pledged to organise a national, official ballot for industrial action on the issues of issue on pay and job security throughout the industry. This is likely to see a national strike by between 20,000-30,000 engineering construction workers.

A sign of the pressure on Total was that it changed its position on holding talks while the strike continued on 23 June 2009. Previously, it had insisted that these could only take place was the strikers returned (and on its terms). Delay to its desulphurization construction project had some bite and the contractors may well have been penalized for this by Total through the terms of the building contract.

Talks between the unions, Total, the two contractors and the employers’ federation led to a climbdown by the employers and a victory for the strikers: re-instatement of the 647 sacked workers, employment for the 51 redundant workers and no victimisation for those taking part in solidarity action. But this was not a ‘Total’ victory for the issues that gave rise to the strike have not been settled. In other words, this is just one battle in a much longer war.

Thus, the 51 Lindsey contractor workers at the centre of the dispute were offered just four weeks work, representing the ‘natural’ end to the project they were working on. Rather, what is needed is an agreement that leads to any ‘at risk’ workers being transferred to any new work available on the Lindsey site so that job security is manifest. Then, a national agreement along these lines is needed so that domiciled labour, British or otherwise, is employed and not spurned through the use of labour specifically brought in from abroad and paid on lower terms and conditions. Thus, an explicit and binding industry agreement that is not only watertight on this issue of job security but also has an independent body to monitor and enforce it is needed. This is what the unions mean when they talk about labour audits (but they have made no progress on this so far other than at Lindsey where the agreement was broken). Furthermore, the legal basis of the right of employers through the Posted Worker Regulations do exactly this must be overhauled.

Unless these conditions are met, and notwithstanding the disincentive to employers to undercut as a result of the militant action, the engineering construction workers will be bound to have to fight these battles again and again. In doing so, they will lose a considerable amount in wages and this is likely to disincline them to take sustained action.

One big push through a national official ballot, leading to action if necessary, to resolve these issues once and for all is what is really needed. But already the employers are saying they will play hardball by challenging the ballot. Skill, strategy and determination will be needed to see this fight through to the end.

One can speculate that a quicker and more fulsome victory could have been gained if the strikers had managed to get the production workers at the Lindsey oil refinery (or any other of its refineries – like in France) to come out in support. This would have kicked Total immediately in the pocket where it hurts and land the killer blow. The problem here is that these production workers were not in dispute and not affected by the same issues, particularly job security. Rather, they are employed on permanent contracts with reasonably well paid conditions.

So the June 2009 strike was a victory and builds on the earlier victories in the industry (and those at Visteon and Linamar) but we also need to see it in the cold light of day to realize that the underlying issues are far from settled.

An article by Gregor Gall on The Guardian site.

Click here to read Gregor’s analysis of January’s strike wave, which appeared in issue 3 of The Commune, and here to read his recent debate with Chris Kane on the current state of industrial struggle.

These are days of defiance in the engineering construction industry. The employers won’t give in and neither will the striking workers, even though the ante has been continually upped in the last week.

Total, on behalf of its contractors, refused to engage in any talks to settle the dispute while the unofficial strike at the Lindsey oil refinery continues. Last Friday, it spurned the use of the state conciliation service, Acas. It has also robustly supported its two contractors, IREM and Jacobs, who sacked their strikers (647 in all of them) and has made no play of its other seven on-site contractors who have not sacked their 500-odd strikers. For Total, this is a game of hard hardball.

This assessment is supported by the revelation that Total managers deliberately provoked an unofficial strike by stopping the transfer of soon-to-be made redundant workers to another contractor who was taking on the same type of skilled workers. An unofficial strike means that workers can be sacked with impunity – unlike strikers on official strike, who cannot be sacked for the first eight weeks. This looks suspiciously like trying to lure workers into a trap.

Meanwhile, the 1,200 striking Lindsey workers have sacrificed nine days’ pay over their right to work and to protect their hard-won terms and conditions under their national agreement. They’ve thrown caution to the wind by defying the anti-union laws: no ballots, no notification to the employer. Instead, they voted with their feet.

They are in no mood to compromise or back down. The majority did not re-apply for the jobs by the 22 June deadline set by the company. Some went further and burnt their dismissal notices in a public display of protest. On top of that, one of the strikers’ unions, the GMB, has organised a mass demonstration at the gates of the Lindsey oil refinery today. Together with the Unite union, the GMB is preparing to hold a national ballot for industrial action on the issues of pay and job security. This is likely to result in a national strike by 20,000-30,000 engineering construction workers. After the weekend and the solidarity action that greeted the sackings last Friday, even more workers at more sites – between 3 and 4,000 workers at power stations and oil refineries – have come back out on unofficial strike in support for the Lindsey strikers.

In a time of general recession and with unemployment at 25-30% in the engineering construction industry, this is serious stuff. Conventional wisdom say workers don’t do this in these situations. Where can the dispute go next? There are three options. The first is that the strikers succumb to financial hardship and decide to continue to fight the battle another day – maybe later in the summer through the official ballot. The second is that Total throws in the towel as it did in February this year. The final one is that we’re in for a prolonged deadlock, with the union movement starting to raise money to keep the strikers from having to be forced back through economic penury.

Already, there’s some sign that it may be Total that blinks first. Today it is emphasising that it has not sacked any workers – rather it’s the two contractors that have sacked workers – and it is actively encouraging talks between the contractors and the strikers to resolve the strike. So under the pressure of escalating action, the line that no talks could happen until the strikers returned to work has been shelved. Of course, talks neither guarantee an end to the strike nor the resolution of the issues that gave rise to it. All in all, it’s shaping up to be the mother of all battles for the union movement this summer.