Firefighters' solidarity: some ideas

Submitted by on 23 February, 2003 - 7:09

Amendment submitted to the Socialist Alliance National Conference (details www.socialistalliance.net) on why and how the SA delivers solidarity to the firefighters...
Around the country, since the firefighters began their dispute with their employers and with the government, the local fire station has become a focus for working-class people's anger with New Labour.
The Socialist Alliance has joined the stream of well-wishers, and we have done sterling solidarity work. We have looked for ways to be and must continue to be more than cheerleaders of the firefighters: we are movers and shakers in the labour movement - where we are not, we must set out quickly to become movers and shakers.
We can harness the resolve and the creativity of the firefighters to the cause of the whole working class. In return, we must put all we know about working-class politics and history, and about labour movement structures, at the disposal of the firefighters. We must intervene politically in this dispute.
Working-class people, and in the first place the firefighters themselves, have invested heavily emotionally in this dispute. With them we all wish for a successful outcome in terms of firefighters' pay and conditions. But also, for ourselves, for the firefighters, for working-class communities and for the labour movement, we wish for something more: enduring lessons in the value of working-class solidarity and working-class political activity.
Regardless how the dispute pans out in the months ahead, the Socialist Alliance can help to ensure that it has a lasting beneficial legacy for working-class politics. Not least because, after the firefighters', there will come many more disputes. To this end, we propose:

* To use the TUC. Firefighters are rediscovering the trades council as a conduit of local union solidarity. SA members should get involved in their trades councils, affiliate their workplaces where possible, encourage local FBU members to attend meetings.
The SA should produce a briefing on the TUC structure, its calendar, and on how to push policy up the TUC hierarchy, through the trades councils themselves, and through affiliated unions.
In broad outline, and always with sensitivity to FBU wishes, the SA should push the following policy for the TUC: in the event of the government/and or employers dragging their heels in negotiations with the FBU, welshing on any deal, banning industrial action, imposing any settlement, etc., the TUC must throw its whole weight behind the firefighters. Full support to the firefighters! This would include such measures as: calling a TUC conference to discuss organising solidarity; national levy of trade union members to sustain the firefighters financially; calling a national solidarity day of action on a week day; organising a demonstration for the whole labour movement.

* To use our unions and workplaces. Insist that management reviews health and safety at work at times when fire cover is reduced: act on the outcome of reviews, with walkouts where necessary and possible. Collect money for the FBU hardship fund. Visit fire stations with union banners; twin with local fire stations. Invite FBU speakers to union and workplace meetings.
Link the struggles! Where possible, bring forward our own struggles to coincide with action by firefighters. At the very least, organise joint rallies and demonstrations. Build bridges between workforces. Hold meetings and coordinate campaigns on issues of common interest, such as PFI in the public sector.
Counter government, management and media propaganda that is aimed at fostering competition between different sections of workers in the public services. Don't let them drive a wedge between healthworkers, teachers, etc., and the firefighters!
The SA's trade union and industrial fractions must be established where they don't exist or revived where they do around this issue, if no other! Every union and industry will have specific ways and means to deliver solidarity, e.g., in the media unions, the SA fraction might help coordinate protests at News International; in the rail unions, the SA fraction might discuss the situation on underground railways; all fractions can coordinate devising solidarity policy for their unions.

* To work in our communities. Conjoined with government and employers' hostility to the firefighters' pay claim is the government and employers' plan to 'modernise' the fire service by cutting it to the bone. They aim to achieve this through attacks on the workers in it - through measures such as those proposed in the Bain Report - and through closures - facilitated by Prescott's proposed amendment to the Local Government Bill for partial repeal of Section 19 of the 1947 Fire Services Act.
The latter by itself is worthy of a community picket of an MP's surgery, on the grounds that, yet one more time, a means of exercising some political control over the services they need is being stolen from the working class. Even if, by Prescott's manoeuvring, our opposition to partial repeal of Section 19 can be only rhetorical... we must voice that opposition!
We must publicise the defeat in the Scottish Parliament of the attempt to repeal Section 19.
We should intervene at public meetings of local Fire Authorities.
We must prepare to fight cuts or closures. SA members should consult now with firefighters to identify the services that Prescott et al have their beady eyes on.

* To build support groups, involving local trade unionists and the wider community. SA members should set them up where they do not exist. Where they do exist, we should intervene in them to make them effective in delivering support, but also to make them into political bodies. This is especially true of support groups that have been set up under the aegis of the TUC.

* To support politically and materially firefighters victimised by management for their activities in this dispute - in the first rank, the SA's own vice-chair, Steve Godward. Publicise their fight for reinstatement. An injury to one is an injury to all! We cannot watch management and, behind them, the government pick off the best working-class militants and corrode our movement.

* To foster debate. We must inform ourselves. The SA urges members to register to use the forum at www.30kfirepay2.co.uk where they can follow the ins and outs of the firefighters' dispute, and contribute their own perspectives and experiences. The SA must put its media at the disposal of firefighters and encourage them to debate there the way forward in the dispute.
We have something to say too! SA members should not be shy about taking the SA's literature into the solidarity movement, the material produced at the office and our own local efforts. By the same token, we must be ready to have it scrutinised by people who know better than we, and to adjust our views where we are wrong.
SA members themselves can make better use of SA media. Why do we all each have to write our own brilliant leaflet? We can share ideas and resources.

* To build the working-class voice in politics. There will be debate in the coming months about which electoral candidacies we support to meet this aim. Some of the candidates we support in elections will be Labour candidates, some will be Socialist Alliance, some will be unaffiliated candidates on a platform of working-class demands - many of those candidates will be firefighters. In choosing our candidates, at all times we put the political interests of the working class first.
We must build the Socialist Alliance, where possible through recruiting new members - including firefighters and others we impress in the course of our solidarity work - but, most important, we must build the influence of its ideas in the working class.
We use all the means that we have to exert pressure on the government to stop their attacks on the firefighters and on the union movement. This will mean SA members formulating policy for trade unions that are affiliated to the Labour Party along the lines of: demanding a recall Labour Party conference to discuss the firefighters' dispute; pressing Labour MPs and councillors to oppose New Labour over the firefighters' dispute. Where we can, we must push local Labour Parties to support the firefighters and to oppose cuts in the fire service. If making such a stand redounds to the credit of a local Labour Party, so be it. The firefighters' cause is too important for us to raise objections of this sort.

Amendment submitted by Vicki Morris, Wandsworth and Merton Socialist Alliance, to the SA national conference, to be held on Saturday 15 March, see www.socialistalliance.net. Amendment to Section A "Building the Socialist Alliance"; add to motion no. 4 "Build the Socialist Alliance", after point 2 "Full support to the firefighters, and other working [sic] coming into struggle".

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