Make 15 December a solidarity day

Thursday 15 December will see rail workers, postal workers, and nurses striking on the same day. Workers in other sustained strikes, some of them indefinite, will also be out, including factory workers in Aintree and Billingham, Metroline bus workers in London, and workers at the housing charity Shelter. Members of the PCS civil service union in three major government departments are also taking sustained action throughout December.

Wherever strikes coincide, strikers should send delegations to each others’ picket lines. A priority should be made of visiting nurses’ pickets. Most nurses will never have been involved in a national strike, and the encouragement derived from supportive picket line visits from delegations of strikers from other unions could make a real difference to their confidence to prolong their strikes if necessary.

Local union branches and Trades Councils should organise joint strike rallies in towns and cities. The organisation of such events needs input from below, to ensure they are not organised at times and in locations that risks disrupting or pulling strikers away from important picket lines. But the opportunity to bring striking workers from different industries and unions together should be taken wherever possible. At rallies, rank-and-file voices must be prioritised. However good a speaker a regional or national official may be, platforming the same (often white, male) speakers over and over again inhibits rank-and-file workers from speaking and acting for themselves.

The organisation of such local rallies will be easier where steps have already been taken to establish ad hoc, cross-union strike committees, linked to local Trades Councils. Where such steps have not been taken, organising towards joint activities on dates like 15 December which see multiple strikes can help jumpstart that process.

Teachers in Scotland struck on 24 November, the first time the current strike wave has spread into primary and secondary education beyond local disputes in individual schools. Their unions, the Education Institute of Scotland, is demanding a 10 percent pay increase. Strikes by nurses’ union RCN on 15 and 20 December will see the strike wave spread into the NHS. There, the union is demanding RPI+5 percent.

Both demands have limitations; demanding a percentage pay rise, rather than a flat-rate increase, maintains pay differentials between grades rather than boosting the pay of the lowest paid the most. And in EIS’s case, their demand is now below inflation. But despite these limitations, simply making a specific demand is a significant advance on disputes where unions have not even done that. In what are perhaps the two most significant national strikes so far, on the rail and post, the RMT and CWU have not made a specific pay demand. Without clear, agreed demands, unions can only be reactive to employers’ offers. And a lack of clear demands makes it hard for rank-and-file workers to hold union negotiators to account.

The disputes on the rail, post, and on the London Underground share features which makes them somewhat distinct from other disputes in the current strike wave. They rail and post disputes intertwine battles for higher pay but against radical proposals for restructures and job cuts from employers.

The London Underground dispute has no pay element at all, and is exclusively about job cuts and attacks on terms and conditions, especially pensions. Unions must resist bosses’ pressure to “sell” jobs or conditions for higher pay.