Workers' Liberty

AWL PRE-CONFERENCE MEETING, LEICESTER 26/04/07

PUBLIC SECTOR PAY

Nick: It remains a possibility that unions will unite for strikes against pay cuts, but it won't happen if we just wait for it.
Unison health exec met about four weeks ago. Leadership said most branches hadn't responded to the consultation, many had not rejected the 2.5% but only the staging. So their line: another month of consultation (which goes past the formal pay consultation meeting for non-pay-review groups).
However, we won that the exec should put an emergency motion to Unison health conference. The leadership's draft was much stronger than their line in March. Rejected the 2.5%, not just the staging. But did not mention joint action, though leadership agreed to include it when pushed.
All the emergency motions from branches on pay were composited together, and the exec agreed almost all their content.
So conference passed a composite to (1) support activity on 1 May; (2) seek coordination; (3) reject the 2.5%; (4) restate initial claim for above-inflation pay rise and abolition of bottom band.
This is a big shift. RCN conference line was to oppose the staging, not so much the 2.5%. Amicus similar. GMB has rejected the 2.5%, though only on a "consultation".
I suspect the leadership has been told by the Government that there are no easy concessions on the staging, so have taken a more radical line in order to be able to mobilise the membership at all.
There was an argument about an amendment to modify the claim to 5% or £1000 (similar to local government). That was defeated on the grounds that inflation might soon be above 5%, and we should not drop abolishing band one.
So the bureaucracy are raising expectations. They are "talking up" the pay claim.
Another issue: everyone in the pay review body, or everyone in collective bargaining? You can't have some in pay review, and some in collective bargaining obliged to reach the same result. The leadership wanted to win a position that everyone should be in pay review, and they did.
Very little discussion about practicalities about what we would actually do to link up with other unions. So all the unions now have paper policy for joint action on pay; but who will move to make that reality? We should call for the lay leaderships of all the unions to meet together.

Kate: NASUWT have some sort of similar position too. Jon Rogers says that there are joint meetings of left members of Unison, PCS, and NUT execs. If so, funny we haven't heard of it. Plan is to delay the local government dispute until September so as to get joint strike action then. We should also seek local joint committees. 1 May may be a good time to start that.

Pat M: At NUT conference the Exec produced an emergency motion on pay which effectively handed over control to the TUC. We managed to amend out the reliance on the TUC. But I'm not sure how much pay is a burning issue among teachers. School Teachers Review Board has asked the government to reopen the pay settlement, but in the classroom people are more bothered about workload. NUT has to do a lot more work on pay with the members.

Martin: The slogan should be "name the day". Problem is, one union has to take the initiative. Patrick Murphy will be pushing this on NUT Exec. If NUT Exec refuses, we keep on pushing. We push in every union. Local committees? Good, but they're unlikely to gain momentum until a strike is definitely scheduled.

Nick: Dubious about "name the day". Too far ahead? Just "take the initiative"? "Action now".

Martin: The point is not so much the exact day, as pressing for a union to take the initiative.

ASSESSMENT AND ORIENTATION/ EDUCATION

Martin introduced the motions.

Pat: I don't think there'd be much disagreement about the general importance of political education. But the reason why we're small is to do with the general, objective situation more than deficiencies of education. No Sweat? Yes, there are impressive meetings. But we don't recruit a lot from it. And where does that leave it?

Kate: Is education the way to grow? Well, it's certainly the way to integrate people. And if our members can't operate effectively as propagandists, how can we grow? No Sweat has turned up some good contacts. But we've done the work patchily. Then how do we turn our trade union work round so that we can recruit?

Tony: In the workplace I feel I'm much more educated than the workers around me. Maybe we should have educationals about the history of the British labour movement, stuff like that, which are more accessible. More abstract educationals tend to put people off.

Nick: The bad state of the labour movement around us has a depressing effect. It's a struggle to get our ideas across to an audience. One problem is to make sure people have a balanced activity, not totally absorbed in one area, e.g. as with me in Unison. Where do we get recruits from? I think when I try to talk to people about politics, they see what I'm saying as unrealistic or abstracted from what other workers are doing. E.g. in Unison I can't get anyone else on the left to agree about the idea of withdrawing union money from the Labour Party. Knowing more isn't going to help me.

Pat: More political education is good, of course. But how do we fill the gap between Liam being very popular in NUT and very few coming to our fringe meeting?

Tony: The rest of the left doesn't educate people. No-one wants to know how to change the world.

Nick: At Unison health conference, the SP's big intervention was opposition to withdrawing Unison money from the Labour Party. SWP's big intervention was on STWC and the victimisation of Yunus Bakhsh. Our intervention was around a strategy on pay and privatisation, including political intervention in the Labour Party. But we weren't able to turn that into political contacts. People prefer a knee-jerk reaction to a worked-out political strategy.

Kate: That's an unbalanced picture. We sold more papers at this Unison health conference than any before that I can remember. Yes, a lot of people are lazy. If there's action, more people will be prepared to talk to us. Our education programme is about making sure that we ourselves stay oriented.

Pat: In NUT I think we should bring more people from our areas as delegates.

Martin: The argument is that education is not just good, but central for us now. The broad political situation is unfavourable. Educating ourselves won't change that, but then neither will anything we can do at will.
We have done better among students and in PCS. Not because of particularly good objective conditions or big successful actions there, but because there we have had comrades able to do the one-to-one propaganda work and willing to persist at it over long periods.
We don't have the conditions where people come into a general left milieu through activity and then learn "on the hoof" through the debates and activities within that milieu. Most of our contacts will be initially a long way from us. We can't do anything with people who don't want to know, but most who do want to know are a long way from us.
To educate such people requires more thorough and rounded self-education, more knowledge, more confidence with ideas, than educating people who have already acquired a lot of common reference points through a lively general left milieu.
Educating people to be educators is crucial in giving members a sense of purpose, and potential recruits a sense of what they will be able to do as members. Educating the labour movement - and in the first place, for now, those around us who do "want to know" - is the fundamental thing we can do and must train ourselves for.
Design educationals so that they are attractive events for contacts? Yes, but it's not just, or even mainly, about being "consumer-friendly". We need educationals to generate "producers".
Self-education is also about renewing the organisation and equipping younger comrades to develop as leaders.

LABOUR PARTY

Kate: I'm writing some amendments to this. Generally the document reaffirms our position. We've had some involvement with the McDonnell campaign, fine, but the document says that doesn't affect the basic previous conclusions. I think it's bent the stick too far that way.
Come conference, of course, either the McD campaign will be finished or we'll be in the midst of a leadership ballot. Anyway, the document urges more activity in that campaign, and says that any AWL member not specifically excluded should hold a LP card and check out their local CLP.
We need to state what we advocate positively in the unions, i.e. not just that they don't disaffiliate, including what they do locally.
The document restates our case for independent socialist candidates, though it says that the conditions for that are worse than they were back in the days of the Socialist Alliance.

Pat: In Northampton there are candidates in two wards under the banner "Save our services, save the NHS". One is an ex-CPer, Harry Tuttle, the other is ex-Workers' Fight from yesteryear, Dave Green. I've been involved in the campaign.

Martin: If it's Dave, Northampton campaign is probably good. But there is a danger of thinking that single-issue anti-Blair electoral campaigns can substitute for socialist substance.
What should we advocate positively in unions? What we have advocated. With some success in CWU; but CWU leaders don't carry it through, CWU doesn't have right to put motions to LP conference, and most other unions, basically, have not yet had a proper debate on what they should do politically. Difficult because of the poor state of working-class confidence, but what we've got to plug away at is clear.
What we do locally? Can't see we can do much by local action without getting unions to move at national level.

Nick: In Leicester West, the SP have run a campaign against Hewitt in the last two elections and done very badly electorally. They've got a high profile, a fair number of people who'll put up their posters, etc., yet they get poor votes. Isn't that wasteful? It doesn't lead to anything. If those same people were directing their fire through the union structures... There's no-one in our Unison branch who will be a Leicester West delegate. There will be no selection battle in Leicester West. OK, if the lefties did force a selection fight and were likely to deselect Hewitt, then the CLP would be shut down, but that would be better. It would generate publicity, etc. The document should advocate work to get such a selection fight.

Martin: If there were lots of leftists and union delegates in CLPs, that would be better than now. But there aren't. That's one of the basic assessments that shapes our tactics. We can't change the general conditions by ourselves "miming" in miniature what we advocate the unions should do. Socialist electoral activity which gets only minority votes may yet be very useful in "making socialists".

Jim: It's not a matter of miming or doing in miniature what we think the unions should do at national level. But the document should say what we advocate in the unions.

Kate: We should say what we advocate when unions like CWU adopt the policy and don't implement it. In Leicester West we could have got a trigger ballot if just CWU and GMB and Unison had had delegates and voted for a trigger ballot. France? But we don't have presidential elections here. And the two-stage ballot there helps. And the SP runs their campaigns on lowest-common-denominator politics, not socialism or working-class political representation. This is a slight difference, but we have to state what the positive purpose is on fighting within the Labour Party. We talked more about those reselection battles back in the late 1990s.

Martin: If we led the unions in Leicester West and had left union activists around us keen for a fight in the CLP... But we don't. If there is a CLP where we can do that, fine. But that would be a quirky exception rather than a strategy.

Kate: Yes, we're in a bad position. But the point is to have a strategy for the class to show the way out of it.

NEXT MEETING

Tuesday 8 May, 7.30pm, ICC, Mansfield Road, Nottingham.
Agenda to include:
Iraq
Labour Party
"Inside organising"
Feminism