Aim: a united stewards' movement

Submitted by Matthew on 19 January, 2011 - 12:42

Dave Chapple, chair of the National Shop Stewards’ Network (NSSN), spoke to Solidarity about the NSSN conference on 22 January which will discuss proposals from the Socialist Party to set up another anti-cuts centre in rivalry with CoR and Right To Work.

The weakness of the NSSN is that it’s never succeeded in building a grassroots shop stewards’ network. That is something which remains to be built if the Socialist Party does not succeed in wrecking the NSSN on Saturday.

I don’t think those of us who genuinely want to build the NSSN have made many mistakes; I think some groups within in the trade union movement have their own agendas, but the trade union movement is also very weak at the moment.

Had the Right to Work breakaway not occurred and had the SP not had its own agenda, then we could have had a totally united movement in the left wing of the trade unions. We would have had more success, but with the limitation that the union movement is very weak.

A merger [of all the anti-cuts campaigns] won’t happen if the SP wins on 22 January, because of the sectarianism which exists. For example you have the ridiculous idea that just because the Coalition of Resistance contains some Labour activists you can’t merge with it, as if Labour activists make something unclean.

It’s not realistic to say [as the AWL do] that if an anti-cuts campaign is set up on Saturday then it should merge with the others, because it won’t.

Of course we are for one anti-cuts movement, but sometimes injecting commonsense into a situation doesn’t work.

No-one’s going to give up [on building a rank-and-file network], but it will make it very difficult. I wouldn’t call it a split on Saturday if it happens, because NSSN’s a network, not a democratic socialist organisation. I don’t want to go on in an SP shop stewards’ network. There are discussions going on about what people will want to do next.

I have avoided using the term rank and file movement because that term has a chequered history. I prefer shop stewards’ network because it is based on the democracy of the trade unions, rather than being a Johnny-come-all thing. We have seen such things in the past, and they have been controlled from the start.

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