reflections on june 30th strike day: less work for all!

Steve Ryan struck along with PCS civil servants’ union colleagues in Wrexham.

30th June went as well as was expected , Schools and offices closed, hundreds of thousands walked out and there was massive publicity.

The left are now getting ready for the next phase, a general or at least mass co-ordinated strike in the autumn. Clearly communists welcome the increasing militancy of the fight back, and the prospect of mass action.

reflections on june 30th strike day: tense debates over camping plan

Activist solidarity initiatives for last month’s J30 national strike day had rather mixed results. Daniel Harvey stresses the need to centre our activity around the workplace.

We sat around in a circle in room 3C of the University of London Union (ULU) building on Malet Street. The rain pounded down outside the window, as the residue of J30 activists discussed how the day had gone. In my short experience of the left it was probably the meeting least worth the train ticket, but it was in fact a microcosm of what the build-up to J30 had been from the start: a lot of open chat without much substantial organising focus.

Spanish protesters set up camps in public squares: was J30 time for us to do the same?

On the one hand was the activist side of the debate from the people’s assembly, who wanted to duplicate the events in Madrid and Cairo, and continue the revolution based the occupation of public squares.  On the other, some striking teachers, who said they would have liked the organisation of more pickets, and a more down to earth and local approach.

on the march… at work

A London public sector worker striking on 30th June wrote to The Commune about an action which gave confidence to her and her workmates.

I work in a big public sector workplace, where redundancies have just been announced. Not only are people going to lose their jobs, but some of the services will just be scrapped and very poor and vulnerable people will lose the services that we provide.

People knew the redundancies were coming and there was a lot of anxiety, over who, how many… When we recieved the results there was outrage as it was felt to be decided very unfairly. My department sent a message to management that we were not going to accept these staff being treated so badly and we rejected this list. In the end the process was delayed and then the list was drawn up again to include basically pretty much everybody.

The day to day atmosphere was complicated. On the one hand people were tired and upset. The department has had a few redundancies year on year so people have watched again and again as their colleagues lose their jobs, the department gets smaller, people lose their right to the service, fees go up. Everybody knows if they don’t lose their job this year they might lose it next year. We are a relatively active and traditionally left wing workplace and people had been on a lot of demos this year, there have been some good campaigns around defending the service but there was a tiredness and a bleakness in people’s faces.

On the other hand people were going from angry to furious. The name of a place where recently people had taken very strong strike action suddenly began to be heard again and again in the corridors. The year on year attacks seemed to be making people feel simultaneously ground down and wound up. In a meeting with management a co-worker stormed out. More and more often little meetings broke out, voices were raised.