Workers' Liberty

On 23 November the Leeds Streetscene workers voted to accept the council's latest offer and go back to work after 12 weeks.

The details of the deal are unclear at the minute. It seems the vast majority (if not all) of the workers' pay will not be cut at all. However, the deal also includes some promises on "productivity" levels, and of course says nothing about the low paid women workers whose double exploitation has never been addressed.

Victory?

So, does this constitute victory for the refuse workers? Well the workers have won the narrow demand of the strike, which was just against the pay cuts. This result also constitutes a defeat for the Lib Dem/ Tory council.

Other councils will get away with pay cuts for refuse workers Leeds council have not.

The productivity improvements demanded by the council in the past were ridiculous. The ones in the deal will probably cause further ructions and struggle down the line. As will the council's plan to privatize Streetscene services.

On balance I would argue against chalking this up as a huge victory for worker' militancy

Firstly the workers' slogan was "equal pay now, pay cuts never", and the unions made the rhetorical demand to level up the wages of the lower paid (mainly women) council workers. Yet the situation of low paid women was never really on the table, and no attempt was made to involve these women workers in the struggle.

Secondly this is a great victory for the union bureaucracy, but not so much for the rank and file. Through-out the strike the workers received unprecedented financial support from the leadership of the GMB and Unison.

At one point GMB leader Paul Kenny and Unison leader Dave Prentis were vying over who could pledge the most money to the strike fund. In return for this the strike was remarkably quiescen. The picketing was half hearted and the political leadership was taken by the Labour group in the council and local Labour MP's, even though they support pay cuts elsewhere.

There was no campaign of marching or leafleting to encourage the working class people of Leeds to take action against the scabs, no attempt to spread the struggle, and no attempt to organise the agency workers.

The workers were on the whole happy to let the official leadership of the strike speak for them. So the bin worker speaker whom union branch and leftie meetings advertised seemed always to be Glen Pickersgill, a senior steward from Unison.

In short, the workers won a victory but a limited one.

Failings of the Left

The left (including us sadly) failed to provide consistant, useful support or even alternative slogans or political perspectives for the strikers. Partially this is to do with the strike leaders' lack of interest in wider solidarity work.

A previously exsisting Vestas solidarity group that included us, SWP, SP and Workers Power changed itself into a general solidarity network. However when Glen Pickersgill spoke to the meeting he showed no interest in any joint solidarity work, picketing scab agencies or a march. There were a few voluntarist solidarity actions here and there and not much else. Even stuff like fly-posting did not happen (except for a little bit by us).

The left's reports on the strike tended to be uniform and did not take the leadership to task. Almost every report I read could have come out of the Morning Star and was devoid of politics.
I think the long downturn in class struggle we are only just emerging from means many lefties (including myself) have little or no experience of prolonged strikes, and this showed.