What is the government going to do with the illegally striking prison officers? Send them all to jail?
The strike on 29 August by prison officers showed up the union leaders who have been dithering and "consulting" and making calculatedly vague threats of future action for months about Gordon Brown's imposed cut in real wages. Brown insists that public sector pay rises be limited to 2% at a time when inflation is 5%.
The strike was doubly illegal. The Tory government in 1994 made all strikes by prison officers illegal. And anyway, under the general Tory anti-union laws, continued by Blair and Brown, any strike is illegal unless the bosses are given seven days' notice.
The government quickly got a court injunction against the action, but also agreed to talks which it had earlier refused.
Every trade unionist should support the prison officers' right to strike.
Prison officers are an anomalous group of workers. Socialists might not support their economic demands in the same automatic way as we do other workers'. But we support their democratic rights.
And in this case the prison officers are fighting the same 2% pay limit that hits all public sector workers. They're doing it in conditions exacerbated by the policy, from successive Tory and Labour governments, of "dealing with" the social problems caused by an increasingly unequal and insecure society by stuffing prisons to overcapacity.
The Guardian of 30 August quotes a Leeds prison officer, Kirk Robinson: "When I started here we were locking up criminals. Now it's mostly people with a drug habit or psychiatric disorders. I'd guess 80%".
On official figures, 48% of prisoners are illiterate, and only 30% have "basic skills" of literacy and numeracy. Stuffing them into prisons only worsens their social marginalisation.
Health service workers strung out by Blair and Brown's privatisation policies in the NHS, civil service workers afflicted by job cuts, and teachers suffering from the school-league-tables frenzy, would do best to follow the prison officers' example in refusing to be cowed.
For public sector action against the pay freeze
We should support the prison officers' right to unionise, their strike and definitley the way they went about- mass meetings with rank and file, defying the anti-union laws and definitley try to spread it to other unions against the pay freeze.
I thought I'd try and post a link to a piece I wrote.