by Chris Kane

The much vaunted “green shoots of recovery” from the recession have been revealed to be no more than weeds in the New Labour cabinet. The only actual recovery we have seen has been the recovery of banks by the capitalist state. For the working class unemployment continues to grow: uncertainty about wages, job security and paying the rent or mortgage is on the mind of every working class person.

The main capitalist parties, Tories, New Labour and Liberals, are in disarray over the recession: they lack any clear understanding of its cause or a solution. But there is unanimity in maintaining the capitalist system and the idea that the working class should have to pay for the recession.  Yet in this dire situation, where is the alternative? We have a deep structural crisis of capital which has been expressed first in the economy then the political system of parliamentary democracy, which has revealed to millions of people that there is something deeply rotten about the capitalist system.

However, the body that was founded to provide an alternative, the labour movement, is in crisis itself, with some sections in a state of virtual paralysis.

The trade unions have long fighting traditions which were built up over years by workers who joined together to promote their interests against the employers.  Today the unions have become more of a prop for decadent capitalism than the fighting organisations we need.  One of the main problems is the union bureaucracy, a broad stratum of officers, unaccountable leaders and unelected full-time officials.  This layer stands over the rank and file members and its interests are distinct form the bulk of the membership.  In some unions the whole organisation is run by ‘men in suits’ who spend their time lording it over the local members and their shop stewards, their main function being to keep a lid on things. In Unite and Unison, activism considered normal only a few years ago is viewed as ‘ultra left’ or even an ‘attack on the union’ these days.

The TUC and union hierarchy have been tied to the capitalist state and the logic of the system for years.  Over 50% of TUC income now comes from the government.  This situation has grown worse with their symbiotic relationship with New Labour, which unions have bankrolled no matter what it does!  Having preached social partnership between labour and capital they are now stuck with the recession.  Fearing the prospect of a Tory government, the official labour movement has come to terms with the recession, unwilling to rock the boat and jeopardise the current government which is carrying out its own austerity policies.

The traditional left strategy on the industrial and political front is also in deep crisis.  For years activists sought to push the union leaders to the left through broad lefts capturing positions. Leadership is important, but unless it is tied to a strategy to actually transform the labour movement it is the left which is transformed – sucked into the bureaucracy itself.  In some unions, it has become indistinguishable from the very people they used to oppose.  On the political front, for twelve years the traditional left, especially in England, has engaged in initiatives which have repeatedly failed to solve the crisis of working class representation.  The last throw of the dice, No2EU, was like a swan song of a left bereft of ideas, which in a climate of chauvinist British nationalism emanating from all parties, took the pressure off our own ruling class and contributed to further retrogression in the working class.

After years of failure and lost opportunities under New Labour by the official labour movement and the traditional left, there is a turn away from even trying to solve the crisis of working class representation. The worst example is a return to the living dead – the Labour Party. The argument has re-emerged that New Labour should be supported because it is the lesser evil; some imagine that history will repeat itself with a left revival as with Bennism in the 1980s.    There is no evidence that this will happen: in the 1970s the Labour Party structures had emptied out as badly as today – but there was a 15 million strong trade union movement and militant rank and file. That movement reacted to the Callaghan Labour Government, underpinning the new Labour Left of Benn, Heffer etc.   There is no comparison to our situation today.  This revived Labourite perspective is a reflection of a left which has lost faith in itself and the capability of the working class to change society.

What should we do?

We should not give up on the working class: our efforts to resist the recession face difficulties and efforts to stifle initiative, but the victories at Lindsey show what is possible. On the political front we should not allow the abandonment of addressing the crisis of working class representation. The left wing RMT rail workers’ union  has a policy of democratic workers’ representation committees. Activists should fight for this policy to be implemented.  The question of representation needs to be tied to that of regaining control of our own organisations and using them to resist capital: we need to break the link from New Labour and from the stranglehold of the labour bureaucracy.

Communist recomposition

The failure of capitalism could not be more apparent, and the case for a new society – communism – could not be stronger.  Communism is not a party, it is a new, free society fit for human beings.  Nevertheless communists need to get organised.  We do not have a genuine Communist Party today: the CPB is committed to its parliamentary British Road to Socialism, which means old style state-socialism. There is no genuine successor to the original CPGB which was revolutionary in the 1920s before its degeneration. There are many committed militants who do believe in a genuine communism, who are sick of the traditional left and sectarian socialism. We need to unite our forces.

The Commune is produced by a communist network, based on committees and individuals united around our platform.  We advocate a plurality of ideas in the network, shedding the poisonous culture of the sects. We may be a minority for a long time, but an effective and organised minority of communists would be a step forward from our current fragmentation. We could start to make a difference in disputes and struggles of our class.  Building a communist network would also be a step towards wider recomposition of the communist movement, both in terms of a vision of communism for the 21st century and developing concepts of how communist organise.  A return to Labourism after the experience of the last decade is no way forward – let us throw off the dead weight of tradition and build for our own communist politics.

Andrew Kliman, author of ‘Reclaiming Marx’s Capital’, will be giving a talk in London on Wednesday 8th on ’causes and implications of the capitalist crisis’. The meeting takes place from 8pm at the Lucas Arms, Grays Inn Road, near King’s Cross.

Kliman, a member of the USA’s Marxist-Humanist Initiative, has argued that we have to see the current crisis as part of a wider structural crisis of capital, and moreover has argued that statist and Keynesian solutions to the crisis are a dead end for the working class. See our October interview with him here.

The meeting is being jointly hosted by The Commune and The Hobgoblin group.

All welcome. Plenty of time for discussion. Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info: map of the venue appears below.

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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

Alberto Durango is a cleaner activist who has  repeatedly been victimised for his prominent role in union organising. In this piece he charts workers’ attempts to get a better deal and Unite’s abandonment of their struggle.

I came to London in 1995 running away from persecution by paramilitary groups because of my union activities with the banana workers in Uraba (Colombia).  When I was new in London, despite my sense of justice, on several occasions I had to put my head down and let bosses commit abuses and steal my salary just because of my immigration status.

In 2002 when I was working all night with another 22 full time workers for Lancaster Office Cleaning Company at its Enron contract, the manager invited us to a meeting and told us that because of Enron’s bankruptcy all of us had lost our jobs. Then he said what good workers we were, expressed his apologies and invited us to leave the building. We were in shock but immediately replied that we would stay until the company guaranteed our jobs. After an exchange of allegations he told us that he was going to call the Police. We insisted on staying but after half an hour we decided to leave the building because of the immigration status of some of the workers, including my own.

Then we decided to go to Lancaster’s headquarters in Keston, Kent. When we arrived the top bosses were shocked but we were treated very well, with food and even money for minicabs, but again they tried to convince us that Lancaster had nothing to do with what happened and inviting us to go home and wait until the company found new jobs for us. We asked how long we should wait and if the company was going to keep paying our salaries. They replied that the company was not going to pay our salaries because it was Enron’s fault, not Lancaster’s, and we should be pleased that the company was going to try to find jobs for us.  So we decided to fight using the legal system and start going to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau; I remember we went along to the CAB with 22 workers, and the people inside used to tell us to come only one or two at a time, but we always went together. After an exchange of letters with the company the company owner attended a meeting with us and in the end we won redundancy money and reinstatement.

After that I got involved in different struggles, including one with McLaren cleaning company’s Grant Thornton contract, where I was working on a part time basis, and where the manager was very abusive towards the cleaners, stopping money from the salaries. Because we complained I got dismissed, and that is how I met the Latin American Workers’ Association. I received all the necessary support and won my case in the employment tribunal, forcing the company to offer my job back, give me references and pay compensation. Because of this I became a voluntary member of the Association, helping people with individual employment cases and recruiting them to the union.

Then I got involved in the Justice for Cleaners campaign: a campaign that gave a lot of hope for cleaners in London. I helped to recruit many people during the campaign, using such examples of victories as in the Canary Wharf area at Goldman Sachs, Barclays etc; at that time I was working in the City area in a contract at Schroders investment.  Guillermo Sanchez and I unionised the whole contract, 42 workers in total, and were expecting the union to do the campaign, but the leaders used to respond with promises that never they never then fulfilled.  At the same time I started receiving complaints from some workers from othermbuildings that I had recruited to the union, telling me that the union had let them down, including workers at Lloyds TSB (the building next to Schroders), ING bank and some others with individual cases.

I decided to meet them to see what the situation was and find out about situations similar to what had happened at Schroders. With this information, after a democratic meeting we decided to start writing to the union, with all the workers’ signatures, trying to call the union official’s attention to support an action so we could get the living wage. After the letter to the union we mobilised all the workers to Transport House (Unite’s headquarters) for a event with cleaners from other sites. When the union official started calling the people by site name, he realised that the Schroders cleaners were all there so he told us to go to a meeting room because Schroders was a special case; we did so, somewhat happy thinking that finally we were going to get the union’s support, but instead the union official told us that if we wanted to demonstrate we should wear masks so the company would not take action against us. The people were stunned, listening to him talking to us like fools: this guy was the symbol of the fights in other sites around the City and Docklands.

But we decided to keep fighting, with or without the Union officials. So we started writing our petitions on three fronts: one letter to Schroders, one to Lancaster and another one to the union; surprisingly the responses from Lancaster were nearly the same as the union’s. Schroders, in reply, tried to change the hours of work and reduce the number of part time workers from 32 to 9, so we responded with the threat of demonstrations.

The union officials contacted us and invited the workers to talk to them outside the building and again tried to persuade us to accept the company’s proposals; we were very united and knew of the fairness of our petitions. Unfortunately the union officials looked like they were working for the HR department of the company because they were using the company’s language.  The unions managed to stop us demonstrating on three occasions: every time, before the demonstration the official would call us and tell that the company had called for negotiations, but this never produced any result. The last time was when we confronted him and demanded that he tell us what the result of the negotiations were. He answered that we were going to have the right to have a consultation meeting: again he was treating us like fools. That is when we decided to put a date for the demonstration. When we informed the union official he went again to the Schroders building and proposed changing the date because the union had a better, long plan to do daily demonstrations and so win; the workers did not believe him but decided to play his game. He told us the organisers could do October 15th 2008, and all the workers said, OK, we will wait for you that date (we knew that was not going to happen). We had already decided a date (October 17th).  We waited for them on the 15th but as predicted they never arrived.

On the 17th we did the demonstration with the solidarity of other cleaners and groups, after intimidation and threats from the company we negotiated with them and as a result of our resistance we won.

As normal the bosses always hit back and started a process of constructive dismissal against me but I defended myself using the employment laws.  During this time I met Edwin Pazmino, a Unite shop steward  working at Willis insurance company for MITIE cleaning services. He told me the history where the workers got dismissed at Willis, including him. In his history we found coincidences with the Schroders workers: he recruited all the workers to Unite, and after they won the living wage, the company responded by changing the hours of work (from 7-11 to all night) and reducing the number of workers. They had the same official as us and the workers did not trust him. He and three women workers wanted to fight back and asked me for solidarity, so we started creating a network of solidarity to fight back and start a series of demonstrations in front of Willis from the beginning of February 2009 trying get the reinstatement of these workers and at the same time trying to get the union to support the workers.  The workers wrote a letter to the Unite deputy general secretary Jack Dromey asking him to support the union members, and he responded with the same story as the company, a situation that did not surprise me because in Schroders we got used to this.

We managed to get support from some of the union’s branches, workers and important personalities around London including the Unite Visteon workers, Unite construction workers branch, RMT Finsbury Park branch, John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, and sent a letter to Jack Dromey  asking him to listen to the workers and support them.

In March Schroders used the third party pressure law and asked Lancaster to put me out of the building. Lancaster put me in different contracts around the City area but never told me what my job was, introduced me to anyone or showed me any place to sit down (like a prison) and on many occasions the managers verbally abused me.

When I was on the May Day demonstration I received a call from one of Lancaster’s managers inviting me for a meeting to offer a alternative job at 9:30am on the 6th.  I went early that morning to the construction workers’ demonstration in the Olympic stadium where the organisers were going to use our megaphone (we got it in solidarity from one of the Unite branches).  At 8:45 I went to Lancaster’s headquarters and arrived at 9:15; one of the HR managers (the one attacking me all the time after the Schroders victory) told that he was calling me to make sure I wasn’t late then asked me to sit down in a meeting room and wait for him. Then he come back with the Police and immigration. They immediately started asking questions and then searched me. They found on me lots of socialist propaganda and asked me if I am a socialist, then they hand cuffed  me and took me to my home in a private car. They searched the whole house and kept asking me what is my name with MITIE (which proves my solidarity with the MITIE workers is related with my arrest). They also found a DVD from the Tamil community which I collected at a forum on May 4th; one of the Police said that the Tamils are a terrorist organization so I could get arrested on the basis of terrorism laws. They confiscated my partner’s and daughter’s passports saying that the passports were false. They took me to a Peckham police station and I left at 8pm with a caution.

The company dismissed me so I called the union to get represented and I got the same official that let the Schroders and Willis workers down. During the process I found many irregularities where instead of helping me he was doing the opposite. When I got the evidence I wrote to the regional secretary asking him to investigate this union official but I never got a response.

After this I was invited to Unite’s United Left meeting, a situation that give me lot of hope because I was expecting the progressive part of the union. But the same official that let the Schroders and MITIE workers down and tried to help the company to dismiss me was there. In some ways I was happy because I was going to have the chance to say the truth in front of the people and open their eyes, and also I was ready for the people to listen to a debate. But the chair did not let me talk, with various excuses. The first was that we did not inform the organisers on time, but the people who invited me proved that they wrote e-mails in advance. Then he said that the same union officials had issues with us (the Willis campaign and me) so I was not allowed to talk. The most progressive people there managed to get a vote of the whole meeting: the result was 39 against me talking and 29 in favour.

I think the difference in the votes was about the friends of the union officials. For me it is shameful for people that call themselves ‘left’ to vote not to listen to a victimised worker supporting an unofficial demonstration trying to get back the jobs of three women and the shop steward. I know people were manipulated but I think they should listen the workers’ side of the story and then make conclusions. In the same meeting other workers talked about unofficial demonstrations and got applause. I want to ask the people who voted against us…what is the difference between those workers and us? I think we are class brothers and should support each other.

I am clear in my sense of solidarity: that is why I give solidarity to Visteon workers on the picket line, construction workers at their demonstration, SOAS deported cleaners during the occupation and rallies, RMT train workers on the picket line and RMT cleaners’ demonstrations for the living wage.

Another thing that attracted my attention was about two weeks ago when I was in a meeting in Transport House about the SOAS campaign. One of the demands is to remove ISS (the cleaning contractor) and put the cleaning in house. It was a big surprise for me when one of Unite’s security guards told me that he works for ISS, not for Unite.

At the National Shop Stewards Network’s conference there was circulating a Unite Official leaflet saying bad things about the Willis campaign and I guess that is Jack Dromey’s answer to the cleaners. It is very questionable that the union prefers investing in propaganda against workers instead of investing those resources trying to get better conditions for members.

by Adam Ford

The recent reinstatement of union convenor Rob Williams by his bosses at the Linamar car parts factory is a welcome victory for the Swansea workers, as well as all those who expressed their solidarity. Amongst the celebrations, however, caution is needed. Linamar are likely preparing a counter-attack, and this is just one front in a global war on car workers’ conditions.

Linamar sacked Williams on April 28th. According to the company, there had been an “irretrievable breakdown of trust”.

The company’s use of the word ‘trust’ – even though it had apparently broken down – is instructive. It pretends that there is some common interest between capitalists and the workers whose labour they exploit. For this reason, a modern boss expects to ‘trust’ the onsite representative of the workforce – i.e. be able to tell that rep they intend to make an attack on pay, jobs or working conditions, then expect that rep to meekly accept it. This top-down pyramid of power leaves no room for workers having the slightest say on matters that shape their lives.

By all accounts, Linamar had good reason not to trust Williams, a dedicated class fighter. In the weeks running up to his sacking, he had shown support to sacked Visteon workers occupying factories in Belfast, London and Essex. This solidarity with people in active resistance must have frightened Williams’ bosses, for two reasons. Firstly, like Linamar, Visteon is a company with strong links to Ford (indeed Visteon sold the Swansea site to Linamar last July). Secondly, as the recession takes hold and car sales plummet, Linamar Group President Brian Wade intends to attack wages and conditions at Swansea.

In the month between the 6th May confirmation of his sacking and Linamar’s concession, Williams told rallies about talks between Wade and Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite the union. According to Williams, Wade spoke of  ‘buying down’ – i.e. worsening contracts – in return for a one-off ’sweetener’. Though no further details are available in this case, union tops around the world have regularly responded favourably to such deals/ultimatums over the past few decades, and especially since this catastrophic economic collapse began. Like the corporate bosses, they have a parasitical relationship with ‘their’ workers, living off union dues rather than unpaid surplus labour.

Linamar finally reinstated Williams on 10th June, with just hours to spare before an indefinite strike was set to begin. The ballot for strike action had passed by 139 to 19, on a turnout of over 90 percent. Woodley then took a week to name the first strike date. It is not possible to know what happened behind the scenes, but we can examine the social pressures involved.

Linamar want to attack pay and conditions. Linamar workers want to defend what they have. Tony Woodley, as a union bureaucrat, wants to keep as many union members as possible, and has the power to negotiate sacrifices ‘on behalf of’ those he must force to swallow the bitterness, albeit with a ’sweetener’.

The Linamar standoff is only a small part of a bosses’ onslaught against car workers. With UK sales down a quarter in May compared to a year ago, and similar figures throughout the wealthiest nations, the ‘Big Three’ companies – General Motors, Chrysler and Ford – are in real financial trouble, and are making ferocious cutbacks. This has provoked preliminary worker resistance in many countries, and this will only intensify when more dodgy deals are struck over the coming months.

As a globalised economy crashes, international labour struggles are coming. It promises to be an exciting time, as well as a time of hardship for workers in struggle. Such workers must find allies amongst their counterparts, wherever they live on the planet, because ultimately they won’t find them in union headquarters.

The global crisis, caused by the chaos and calculated insanity of capitalism, requires a global working class response.

by Kofi Kyerewaa

Despite the repetitive Nazi name-calling, the British National Party achieved their hope of getting elected into the European Parliament, and the British hard left once again finds itself at the margins of electoral politics and unable to match the BNP in votes even across its fractured political front. The landscape has changed: the British National Party can command 900,000 votes, while a hotch-pot of Stalinist bureaucrats, Impossibilists (SPGB) and Scottish Socialists garnered less than half at 350,000.

What is Socialist Workers Party leader Martin Smith’s remedy to this tragic state of affairs? More of the same with added egg throwing, “No freedom of speech for fascists”, “we should ban the BNP” and, bizarrely on BBC’s Newsnight Smith exclaimed to the polite but patronising Jeremy Paxman and Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes that the BNP had to be stopped because “they are counter-revolutionaries [to a Socialist Revolution?]!”

The question facing socialists is that as believers in democracy, do we respect the BNP’s ‘democratic right to express its views’? Or does the call for ‘No freedom of speech for fascists’ and therefore state censorship  help in the battle to defeat the far right?

The principle of ‘No platform for fascists’ has been a stalwart of anti-fascist tactics since the days of accepting no platform in the National Union of Students in the early ’90s. This argument has been outlined as follows:

1) When the BNP speak, attacks on migrants increase in the surrounding area – 6 million Jews didn’t die because they failed to win the argument.

2) Rational debate with the BNP is impossible because they lie.

3) The BNP are fascists and seek to destroy working class power, they are not a “respectable” or “legitimate” party! They destroy our freedoms so we must destroy theirs!

Point 1: Without doubt the BNP are particularly good at attracting vicious and hateful racists. Where they organise it is without surprise that incitement to hatred results in attacks on immigrant communities. No platform in society means a state enforced media blackout, a laughable demand when you consider that Daily Mail and the Sun are the most popular papers in Britain and that the BNP has the most popular political party website.

To prevent the BNP from having  the ‘right to speak’ does not just mean banning them as a political party but also means calling for more powers for the state to suppress wherever they seek to speak. ‘No freedom of speech for fascists’ is equal to McCarthyism for fascists which is as precarious as pissing in the wind. Yes, we must defend ethnic groups from racist attacks which happen by the state much more than BNP thugs our answers are at looking to working class self-defence against fascists and not by an extension of the surveillance state. And as it happens, it is we who must physically confront fascists in self-defence when they pose a threat: we cannot rely on any organ of the state to do that for us.

Point 2: Avoiding debate is a non-solution as rather than denying the BNP the oxygen of publicity or legitimacy, we find that their ideas are spread unchallenged politically. Socialists, rather than making the case politically about why we need to fight for the defence of all, are reduced to name calling and reporting on certain personalities (odious though they maybe). Electoral victories for the BNP shows that it isn’t working. Such adherence to the principle of being willing to physically fight but not ideologically fight the BNP is absurd when they are close to controlling councils and have elected members of the European Parliament.The BNP are not going to be banned. Neither should we clamour for it: fascist ideas are not defeated by state diktat.

When socialists are campaigning on bread and butter issues like council housing or unemployment, working class people are dealt out rhetoric and propagandistic activity rather than mutual aid and support. The hard-left’s love-hate affair with the Labour Party has crippled it in acting independently on delivering social solutions. The BNP have been growing steadily in councillors, a prelude of bigger electoral gains, because they canvass through door-knocking much more than the radical left. Electoral fronts are not enough: we need a political project that is long-term in thinking and is relentless in building a constituency in communities and not just in remote trade union bureaucrats’ offices.

Point 3: The ‘Why the Nazis don’t deserve democracy’ argument, but the state would replace Nazi with Islamist, or revolutionary socialist. We already can see the results of the rhetoric “they are not [legitimate] like us”; the reintroduction of detention without trial, extensive monitoring of all electronic communication and the promise of identity cards and a central database of all citizens.

As socialists we cannot trust the state to respect the historical values of bourgeois democracy or to decide which political parties are “legitimate” or not. Fascists can only be stopped by answering tough political questions through practical competence. Unlike liberals, we do not use the concept of freedom of speech to excuse ourselves from organising on the streets but rather the opposite. We know that where the BNP seeks to spread its agenda we must be on the same streets bringing people together in a left-wing coalition for a better alternative.

If we believe the BNP must be fought physically then we must also do this intellectually too: walking off from public debates can’t be done in London’s City Hall any more than it can be done the European Parliament. Pretending that no-one will take them seriously if only we shout “Nazi Scum” loud enough must end. The political process has legitimised the BNP whether we like or not, ignoring the BNP as a political force is no longer an option, they are a growing powerful political force and we must treat them as such. UKIP raided £2 million in expenses from the EU, we can only assume that the BNP will do the same.

Working people will only trust a political party that not only offers real change to the status quo, but appears to know how to do it. This is why community organising is so important, this is why Scottish Socialists despite the splits are doing better than their English and Welsh counterparts.

by Joe Thorne

Parents faced down four vans of riot cops in Lewisham on Wednesday 24 June, to retain occupation of the Lewisham Bridge Primary School roof.  Two days later, parents re-occupied Wyndford Primary School in Glasgow; and the next day formed a picket line, refusing to allow council officials to move equipment from the school.

The direct action is a response to school closures which have placed children’s education under threat, promising large class sizes, and longer journeys to school, as well as disruption in the short term.  In the case of Lewisham Bridge, the council plans to transfer the pupils to a school under control of a private foundation, removing elected parent governors.

A report from parents at Lewisham Bridge describes the morning on which bailiffs were scheduled to arrive:

“By 9.00 am there were about 20 of us in the occupation and about 20 in the park below us. We secured the gate and drew up the ladder much to the concern of the few journalists who were now stuck on the roof with us. The crowd below us was swelling with parents and other supporters, including mothers from the Charlotte Turner Parent’s Forum who have been fighting the draconian decision by Greenwich Council to close their primary school in July.

“As the police formed their line around the school the bailiffs arrived. The journalists were finally let out by the security inside the school to the hysterical screams from Lewisham’s press officer that they would all be arrested for trespass.
“There then followed a 2-hour standoff. We kept up our chants and even sang songs courtesy of Goldsmiths students’ musical accompaniment.  Finally the cops realized that they couldn’t physically remove us from the roof and they left, followed swiftly by the bailiffs.”

In Glasgow, 22 schools are threatened with closure, as part of a council plan to plug a £6 million overspend.  Parents previously occupied the school for a week in April, but have returned as part of the ongoing Save our Schools campaign.  The day after the re-occupation, parents formed a picket line to trap vans which had arrived to take away materials.  Occupiers refused to allow the vans to leave until all materials had been returned, and they were able to inspect each van.  The council initially tried to intimidate picketers with a surveillance van, but eventually gave in, and returned the school materials.

School occupations have recently been effective in preventing closures in Edinburgh.  While it looks ever more likely that similar cuts will intensify in the coming months and years, the occupations continue.

The Wynford occupiers can be contacted via Nikki Rathmill on 07894 123721.  Please send messages of solidarity, and look for updates on http://sosglasgow.wordpress.com.  The Lewisham occupiers can be contacted on 07946 541331 and have a Facebook group, Hands off Lewisham Bridge Primary School.

An article by activists involved in the recent SOAS occupation covering the story of the dispute and the lessons learnt from its results

Even for those well used to the low standards and dirty tricks of private contractor ISS and the UK Border Agency (UKBA), the brutal immigration raid on cleaners at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London last month came as a shock. It sparked a protest movement and occupation which – for 48 hours at least – constituted a significant show of strength against the university management and promised to win real concessions from those directly involved in the shameful intimidation of workers who – the timing was not coincidental – had only recently won union recognition and the London living wage.

That SOAS Director Paul Webley eventually managed to get his office, the Directorate and two conference rooms back without having made any real concessions proved a disappointment for many involved in the action. As activists continue to assess ‘what went wrong’, and rue an opportunity missed, it remains to be seen whether future gains made by the ongoing campaign will vindicate the strategy of those who wanted to end the occupation early.

Immigration attack

Workers had been instructed to attend an “emergency staff meeting” at 6.30am on Friday June 12. Forty Border police, kitted out in full riot gear, were hidden behind a stage in meeting room G2. As managers barred the exit during the first part of the meeting, an ISS manager used a code word as a cue for the immigration officers to emerge and begin making arrests. The SOAS campus was sealed off while the cleaners were locked in a room, and interrogated one by one, without legal representation or translation.

Of the nine detained, six were deported within 48 hours and three placed in detention. Luzia, six-months pregnant, was one of those on a flight to Colombia that weekend. Two cleaners, Marina Silva, a 63-year-old who had applied for asylum after the murder of her husband in Bolivia, and Rosa de Perez, a Nicaraguan supporting four children, remain in detention at Yarl’s Wood as The Commune went to press.

The focus for anger and resistance against the raid quickly became the role SOAS had played in facilitating it. By the morning of Monday June 15th, a broad coalition (from student union activists to anti-deportation campaigners, the Campaign Against Immigration Controls (CAIC), University and College Union (UCU), Unison, the SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Latin American workers’ organisations and several members of The Commune) had been mobilised to, amongst other demands, work to halt the deportations and ensure SOAS did all it could to secure the release of the cleaners in detention.

As SOAS Director, Paul Webley, conducted a Monday-morning conference in the main campus building at Russell Square, dozens of protesters entered his office to call on him to make immediate representations to the Home Office on the cleaners’ behalf. The 20-minute ‘dialogue’ that followed – all posted to youtube shortly afterwards – show Webley feebly claiming that SOAS had had nothing to do with the raid and refusing to lift a finger in support of his own staff. It would lead to ‘chaos’, he said, if he was expected to frustrate the objectives of the UK Border Police. ‘Friday’s visit was not arranged or influenced by any member of staff at Soas,’ he continued to claim, setting the tone for 48 hours of lies and evasions from university management who still deny they were complicit in the attack.

Occupation

After Webley had been turfed out of his palatial offices – the academic and administrator earns £193,000 a year – activists moved to occupy the space and begin the work of building a movement capable of sustaining itself for the long haul and winning immediate and urgently needed gains for the workers fighting deportation and detention. Numbers were regularly bolstered by rallies in the square which the first-floor offices overlooked (and it was to those gatherings that other cleaners were able to come – though this remained a limited line of communication, something that was to prove important later on) and on Monday evening over 50 people were crammed into one of the Directorate’s conference rooms to decide on the direction and tactics of the occupation. Two dozen protesters stayed the night – a successful, radical and long-lasting action seemed possible.

But that evening turned out to be the height of the protest’s strength and coherence, as debates and divisions over negotiations throughout Tuesday gradually allowed the SOAS management to wriggle out of making significant concessions. The occupation ended by Wednesday June 17 with a victory rally but few real gains. A statement released in the afternoon by some occupiers admitted that the ‘concessions’ made by Webley in a signed letter, were ultimately more ‘symbolic’ than real.

Those concessions included Webley writing to the Home Office and a commitment by him to arrange a Governor’s meeting to discuss the issue of ending the contract with ISS and bringing the cleaners in house.

Crucially, there was no commitment by SOAS not to facilitate further raids nor a more limited agreement to notify the union, on health and safety grounds, before future ‘visits’ by the Border police. There was certainly no apology. The 11 original demands made by the occupiers, including the reinstatement of Jose Bermudez Stalin, who had done so much to organise his fellow workers at SOAS, had been swept aside or qualified into non-existence. For many of those involved throughout what was often an inspiring protest, the question remains: Why did the occupiers walk out when still in a position of strength and with so little gained?

‘Victory’ claimed

Some members of the occupation were shocked to read the ‘victory post’ that went up on the FreeSOAScleaners blog on the Wednesday afternoon, and have since collectively released a counter-statement to temper the triumphalism. It called not only for the continuation and renewal of the campaign against ISS, union-busting and collaboration with the Border police, but stressed that lessons must be learned from the occupation after so much promise and negotiating strength on Monday evening was allowed to dissipate in the rush for a deal.

It identified a failure of participatory processes and a lack of consultation with cleaners as key determinants of the occupation’s rush to a deal. ‘There was never a decision made at the occupation about who would negotiate on its behalf,’ the statement read. ‘This role was taken by the Student Union representatives, in particular the outgoing Student Union president. At the first meeting with the directorate the occupation’s demands were not even presented. Following this, occupation participants who were also elected to the Student Union were present at the negotiations, but still control was not held by the occupation over the negotiations and, as they continued, the demands – which were collectively agreed and changed in a series of meetings – were progressively watered down.’

‘Crucially the cleaners themselves were not involved in the decision making process of the occupation. While it may have been difficult to make the occupation a ‘safe’ place for the remaining workers to visit, the occupiers could and should have made a more concerted effort to inform, talk to and take direction from the workers directly affected by the raid. This could have helped to increase the occupations militancy and keep it focused on demanding tangible concessions from management.’

‘We should be clear that whatever gains were made during the occupation were made by taking direct action against the SOAS management and that many demands – including bringing all contract staff in house, keeping immigration officers from entering campus under any circumstances, the reinstatement of Jose Stalin Bermudez and even an apology for their role in the raids – were not met because of the continued intransigence of that same management.’

Why did it end?

The drift towards agreeing to Webley’s offer – one that was not voted on at any stage, even on Wednesday morning – was ultimately determined by the priorities and perspective of the SWP and the leading SOAS students involved in the occupation. Collectively they had, of course, been the most prominent figures throughout and had assumed responsibility for conducting negotiations through the elected student union (at least one of whom, Nizzam Uddin, was clearly opposed to the action and had a vested interest in cautious compromise), using a line of communication which Webley had stipulated on Monday afternoon for reasons of delegitimising the broader membership of the occupation, on the (as it turned out, correct) assumption that indirect, fragmented dialogue would work to his advantage.

This is not necessarily to criticise the role played by those negotiators: the SOAS student and SWP position within the protest was privileged by what they had contributed to it, and by their greater knowledge of, and access to, the university management. Whatever the reason, personal or structural, a ‘natural’ hierarchy emerged which, combined with the SWP’s eagerness to claim a victory, and the general sense among a majority of occupiers that things were getting ”riskier”, contributed to the willingness to accept Webley’s limited offers.

There was, without doubt, a gap opening up between some more concerned about the ”threat” of eviction than others, and the panic decision-making that the mass meetings degenerated into was seemingly born out of that. However frustrating this may have proved for those advocating a more militant stance, it remains true that many activists who wanted a different, more uncompromising negotiating strategy were unable to persuade the majority because they hadn’t put bodies on the ground when it most mattered: over both evenings and the Wednesday morning. At least a dozen activists had the potential to shift the direction of the occupation but relationships of trust hadn’t been built in time to enable that to happen. The ‘privileged position’ of the SOAS students and the SWP was, in a sense, ‘earned’, and the analysis that the SWP brought – and what they considered a ‘good outcome’ – could only be challenged (amicably and productively) by investing as much time and energy into the protest as they had done.

The problem of the negotiators pushing for a deal, and the imbalance of information and power that entrenched, became seemingly unstoppable by Tuesday night. While it reflected the divisions between the occupiers – in politics, outlook and organising principles – that began to emerge once the management started making offers, however derisory, it might have been more effectively countered by focusing more clearly on the cleaners’ key demands – namely, the guarantee that SOAS would not facilitate any future raids – and by reassuring the majority that the threat of eviction was not as high as some were claiming.

Indeed, it was known by Tuesday that the injunction that had been served that morning was of dubious legal value. With Webley regularly threatening to evict throughout the day, only to then ‘give more time for negotiations’, it was clear he was trying to avoid having to use force. It was equally clear that he was desperate to get his offices back. The strength still lay with the occupation on Wednesday morning.

The ‘decision’ to leave has wasted the chance to win gains for the SOAS cleaners in detention and for those that remain to work in an institution that has proved itself complicit in union-busting and racist immigration controls. The campaign, of course, continues; and the SWP and others hope that a decision of the Governors in November ending the contract with ISS can’t be discounted. It was also their view that ‘forcing’ Webley to make representations to the Home Office was a significant concession which would have been put at risk if the occupiers’ had been expelled from the building by police. This is arguable: but anti-deportation experts were wary of giving too much weight to any letter sent by SOAS and were far from confident that a late call from Webley would have much practical effect.

The SWP position also maintained that the power was with the ’students’ and the faculty’s sympathy with the occupation in general, and the students in particular, and with the end of term coming that week, the presence of both those groups was going to diminish sharply, and with it the strength of the movement. There was moreover a view among students that it was they who were going to have to take the brunt of any repressive measures following a forced eviction. They also argued that the chances of SOAS authorising another immigration raid are now minimal, irrespective of any formal written agreement to this effect.

These are legitimate differences, argued in good faith; but the undemocratic way the occupation ended remains a cause for concern. As an activist who stayed on Tuesday night said: ‘People were already tidying up when I got up [on Wednesday morning]. It seemed like people had decided from the start that it was going to end on Wednesday, no matter what. There certainly weren’t any conversations that I was involved in that talked seriously about maintaining the occupation if the managers came back with less that the agreed minimums.’

‘It all started to get a bit worrying when people in the room started requesting that the management write up its own wording of what they thought the occupation was trying to get out of them. This left us with two documents – one that the occupying group had been working on collectively for days with agreed minimums, and one that the management had drawn up that gave very little – and certainly didn’t meet many of the agreed minimums.

‘The group was discussing how to marry the two together (i.e. make even more concessions) when Nizzam [the outgoing Student Union president] got frustrated by how long discussion was taking. At one point he highlighted that the statement was between management and the SU which meant he could go and get it signed without the support of the group!

‘Everyone panicked and that only strengthened the perceived need to basically pass the management back the document they had typed up to sign. Any act of signing was seen as a victory.’

Another commented: ‘There was a frustrating level of deference to management: Nizam gets a phone call to say [a deal] must be signed by 11am and everyone panics – we say, ‘Hold on a minute. Since when do we defer to their deadlines and their requirements for negotiation – we’ve occupied his bloody office!’

Moreover, Webley’s rhetoric since the end of the occupation doesn’t provide much hope that SOAS will begin to respond to the demands made. In a letter sent to SOAS staff on June 22, he wrote: ‘Thankfully many colleagues are aware that the allegations being made against SOAS are untrue, most notably that we had invited immigration officials on to our campus. This is something that has caused a great deal of concern and anxiety to our staff, students, stakeholders and peers.

‘Throughout this entire process SOAS has acted in good faith and in accordance with the law. SOAS is obliged to co-operate with the authorities and not breach any law that could lead to prosecution.’

The campaign continues

While an open and self-critical debate is needed to ensure that future occupations realise their potential, many aspects of the SOAS protest nevertheless offer hope for the future: the breadth of the coalition assembled, the willingness to adopt militant action, the barriers (at least initially) that were broken down between workers and students, and the growing awareness of the connections between immigration policy and exploitation in the workplace.

As the counter-statement by the ‘dissenting’ occupiers put it: ‘We hope the campaign will become bigger and stronger after this occupation. Cleaners are still facing deportation, while union busting tactics and the frequency of raids against migrant workers are increasing. Practical victories are urgently needed and these will only be achieved through a realistic understanding that management, the police and the government are not on our side. It of course takes longer than two and a half days, but the occupation was a significant show of power. In future we should be more confident about what can be achieved when we stand together.’

Clifford Biddulph begins a series on forms of communist organisation with this piece on the origins of Bolshevism

For Lenin, as for Marx, organisational forms are part of a living process which changes and adapts to different situations. But Lenin’s general approach to communist organisation was “to state that what might be a general Marxist truth does not always apply in concrete circumstances” (Lih, 2006, Lenin Rediscovered p 555), As Alan Woods puts it “it is about the demands of the moment rather than abstract theory” (Bolshevism, 1999 p 93). So for Lenin a general Marxist truth in some  circumstances was the wrong priority. This flexibility towards Marxist theory was a hall mark of Bolshevik organisation.

The phrase often used to describe Lenin‘s organisational method is ‘bending the stick.’ Lenin bent the stick or polemically exaggerated in order to grab attention and focus on what really mattered to move forward. For many Leninist and Trotskyist activists trapped in the cult of Lenin, he might have bent the stick too far in some circumstances, but he always bent it back or corrected his mistake in the long run. This was the ‘infallible Lenin’ who embodied the revolutionary dynamic or  the actuality of the Revolution. But a bent stick can be permanently twisted, distorting reality. The bent stick analogy is also used to suggest continuity where inconsistency exists.

Lenin’s polemic against the so called ‘economists’ in What is to be Done (WITBD) resulted in a concept of the relationship between organisation and class which bent  Marxist theory. According to Lenin: “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness”. Therefore, “there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the workers themselves-socialist consciousness is introduced into the proletarian struggle from without.” (CW, 1973, vol 5 p375). This was, as Trotsky stated at the time, absurd (Our political tasks, 1904). According to myth the Leninist truth is concrete, but  the historical  facts are that  the mass strikes of the Russian workers from 1896 to 1905 confirmed workers spontaneously went beyond trade union consciousness as they did in the earlier chartist movement in Britain.

Lenin’s formulations were not so much realist as political imagination. Lenin exaggerated the influence of economism and saw economism  where it did not exist. The reality was that Akimov and his Rebochee Dyelo comrades were not economists. In  words and deeds they had opposed leaving the political struggle to the Liberals. The fact was, Lenin saw them as rival leaders. A factional war with false polemics was waged against them. Zinoviev  claimed that “Akimov told workers to know their place and not concern themselves with politics.” (History of the Bolshevik Party, 1973 p60). This claim was entirely false.

The view of Marx was that the emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class itself. If socialist consciousness derives from the intellegentia, and the spontaneous class struggle against exploitation is simply trade unionism,  then little is left of  this conviction of Marx expressed in a letter to Bolt, in November 1871, that “the political movement of the working class has its ultimate objective, of course, the conquest of power by the working class developed up to a certain point and rising precisely from its economic struggles” (Marx and Engels on the trade unions, Kenneth Lapides, 1987 p113).

A one sided  focus on the politics of the expected bourgeois revolution, which  was a mistaken perspective, caused Lenin to downgrade the workers’ class struggle rooted in their material conditions. Lenin had previously recognised that socialist conscious could develop through economic struggle. The organisation was to be rooted in the factories where the industrial workers were most susceptible to Social Democratic ideas. (CW, 1977 vol 2 p327). The political struggle was not outside the economic struggle. Rosa Luxemburg’s intricate analysis of the Russian mass strike’s showed the strikes “passed from the economic field to the political so that it was almost impossible to draw a dividing line between them” (Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004 p194). The economic  and political factors were interwoven.

Trotsky  mocked Lenin’s short term instrumental use of theory in WITBD and one step forward two steps back. Yesterday the proletariat were crawling in the trade union dust; today the workers are raised to the role of teachers, instructing the intelligentsia in discipline. Yesterday the intelligentsia was the teacher of socialist consciousness; today  it is a pupil learning factory discipline. “And this is supposed to be Marxism” (Our Political Tasks p104). Moreover, the task of Marxists was to replace factory discipline not glorify it.

Communist organisation is created in the process of class struggle. Marxists are not outside but internal to the  movement of workers. Luxemburg criticised Lenin for making a fetish of centralism. “The ultra centralism that Lenin advocates seems to us ,in its whole essence to be imbued not with a creative spirit but with sterile spirit of the overseer” (Rosa Luxemburg reader, 2004 p256). The Leninist central committee would think for every member of the organisation down to the smallest detail or in Trotsky‘s sarcastic words “ I am recognised by the central committee therefore I am.” (Report of the Siberian Delegation, 1903 p44). The masses learn from their own mistakes.

Lenin’s response to these criticisms was defensive.  “Comrade Luxemburg says for example that my book is a clear and detailed expression of intransigent centralism. Comrade Luxemburg thus supposes that I defend one system against another. But actually this is not so. From the first  to last page of my book I Defend the elementary principles of any conceivable system of organisation.” (Le Blanc, 2008, Lenin p152)  But despite these evasive words Lenin was an advocate in this period of  bureaucracy rather than democracy because it saw it as effective in Russian conditions. In his letter to a comrade on organisational tasks published in 1904 “by assuming all power to the executive bodies it takes little account of the requirements of democracy or rather ignores them completely” (Liebman, 1980, Leninism under Lenin p39).

In  One Step Forward Two steps Back Lenin disregarded the  issue of the  degree of centralism. It was centralism, centralism, centralism.  Democracy was  dismissed: it was a mere  toy. To open up the party to publicity and elections was to open up the organisation to arrests and detention. But this one sided stress on centralism did not answer points about lesser forms of democracy such as local autonomy. Besides centralism is not an organisational form which necessarily keeps out the police. It can make an organisation more vulnerable, if the centre is penetrated by a state agent, as the Bolshevik centre was by Malinovsky. In any case, the Bolshevik underground organisation was not very effective in keeping out the police (Lih 2008). And even if ultra centralism was necessary, why make a virtue of it?

It is a myth that Menshevism and Bolshevism were fully formed political tendencies at the time of the split following  the 1903 congress. There were no  programmatic differences. Nor was it a break between revolutionaries on one side and opportunists on the other. On Lenin’s side was Plekanov who would go on to oppose the Moscow insurrection of 1905 and the revolution of 1917. Against Lenin was Trotsky the leader of the Soviets in 1905 and 1917. (Woods, 1999, p142). The Mensheviks accepted Lenin’s rule on membership at the unity congress in 1906 so this rule was not a life and death question as Lenin admitted. Lenin went on in isolation to break organisational rules and set up his own central committee against the Bolshevik central committee, but described his opponents as individualistic intellectuals.

Lenin’s concept of organisation was strongly influenced by the model of German social democracy with a heavy stress on the role of leaders at the top of the organisation. “Without a dozen tried and talented leaders professionally trained, schooled by long experience and working in perfect harmony, no class in society can wage a determined struggle” (CW, 1973 vol 5 p461). Lenin’s political machine or the Bolshevik leadership which was predominantly made up of the intelligentsia was left behind by the creative spontaneity of the Russian workers in the revolution of 1905. The Bolshevik leadership in Russia trained in the organisational concepts of WITBD and One step forward distrusted spontaneity, were suspicious of strikers and saw the Petersburg soviet and non party mass organisations as a rival to the Bolshevik organisation. The Bolshevik leaders threatened to withdraw from the Petersburg soviet if it did not accept the authority and programme of the Bolshevik party.

Lenin was compelled to attempt to re-educate and reorganise the Bolsheviks to correct his previous distorted view of the relationship between party and class. “Lenin was essentially forced to rehabilitate working class spontaneity as a  politically important factor of revolution” (Lynne Poole,1995, ‘Lenin and Trotsky a question of organisational form’, p123 in The Ideas of Leon Trotsky). But there was no repudiation of previous positions or self criticism. Contrary to WITBD workers were instinctively spontaneously social democratic. Although he added that more than ten years work by social democrats had helped transform spontaneity into consciousness. But he was defensive stating that he had not intended to give his previous formulations programmatic status.

Lenin is often seen as separate from other Bolshevik leaders or committee men as if he had no responsibility for their organisational methods. Writing in exile in the 1930s, trapped in the cult of Lenin, Trotsky described Lenin as a political genius. Lenin was not so much the machine as the workers in motion. But in 1905 it was Trotsky who had an organic connection with the self activity of the masses.  Trotsky  was one of the first exiles back in Russia to lead the Petersburg soviet. By contrast Lenin’s less positive relationship with spontaneity resulted in  ten months delay in a  return to Russia following the outbreak of the revolution. (Isaac Deutscher, 1961, Stalin). Following the 1905 revolution Trotsky described Lenin’s perspective of dissolving the class struggle into a democratic coalition in a bourgeois republic  as hopelessly idealistic. (Trotsky, 1905, Our differences, p330).

For Lenin politics is an endless chain but “the whole art of politics lies in finding and taking a firm grip as we can of the link that is last likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at any given moment” (Callinicos, 2007, ‘Leninism in the 21st century’, p26 in Lenin Reloaded).  The problem with this method as we have seen is short termism, inconsistency, and a  lop sided view of reality. Part of the Marxist truth is not the Marxist truth.

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.