3 December union rights conference - the labour movement must do better

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch speaking

As strikes burgeon in the UK, we are also seeing a resurgence of the decades-long drive to legally suppress strikes. The edifice of multiple anti-union/anti-strike laws introduced under the Thatcher and Major governments was completed by 1993; the 1997-2010 Labour governments did nothing to touch these laws; and the next attack, the Trade Union Act, was not passed till 2016. Then, in July 2022, we had the legalisation of agency labour for strike-breaking, and now an attack on transport workers’ right to strike.

The Tories are not moving as fast or on as many fronts as Liz Truss promised; nonetheless this is a major assault. The proposal for a “minimum service requirement” during transport strikes – forcing transport unions to participate in breaking their own action – is extremely serious, and seems very likely to be extended to other sectors.

So the 3 December “conference” to discuss anti-union laws organised by the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom (CTUF) and the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) was certainly timely. It was worthwhile, just from the point of getting people together and thinking about some of the issues. However, it fell very far short of anything like what is needed, in terms of:

• Who participated
• Opportunities for discussion and debate
• Planning action
• Clear and adequate demands

The more grassroots and radical Free Our Unions (FOU) campaign distributed an open letter calling for united organising and action to mobilise protests against the threat of new anti-union laws and win repeal of the old ones.

The IER (a think tank) and the CTUF (more of a campaign), symbiotic organisations, have very extensive formal institutional labour-movement backing, including paper support from almost every national union. There were some high profile speakers – including RMT gen sec Mick Lynch, the Bakers’ Union’s Sarah Woolley, the NEU's Kevin Courtney, ASLEF’s Mick Whelan, Young Labour chair Nabeela Mowlana and John McDonnell MP. (Plus Barry Gardiner MP, whose surreal record of scabbing on the labour movement and democracy in India continues to be largely ignored.)

We also heard, to the credit of the organisers, from rank-and-file speakers from a range of disputes and potential disputes, including the NHS, schools, railway cleaning and universities.

Yet if there were a hundred people in the audience it was only just and only briefly; in the afternoon session it was more like seventy. (I remember in the late 90s campaigns against the anti-union laws that later merged into what became the CTUF would routinely mobilise hundreds to events.) It was very much an older crowd, seemingly very patchy in terms of which unions were represented, and I didn’t get the sense there were significant numbers of workers involved in disputes or even of workplace reps.

Seventy or a hundred people, even if not representing a very good range of groups, can still have some very good and useful discussion. But, while much of what was said from the platform was good in a general way, the event gave virtually no opportunity for discussion. There was essentially a continuous plenary. In the course of the four and half hours of sessions, there was about twenty minutes for discussion, early on in the day, when the chair asked exclusively for comments on the campaigns’ new “Workers’ Bill of Rights” - which, however, most there must have just seen for the first time. I can't currently find the text of this document online.

In the afternoon session there were twelve speakers and no discussion at all.

Not only was there no opportunity to propose and discuss, let alone make decisions about, campaigning or action; essentially no proposals for action were made at all. The organisers called for people to support their organisations; and to circulate the Workers’ Bill of Rights (and make comments on it – though I’m not very optimistic comments will be taken seriously). But that was pretty much it.

The CTUF and IER seem unconcerned about the fact that, despite the seriousness of the attack on workers and trade unions, there has been very little in the way of protests (one smallish demo organised by Free Our Unions and Earth Strike, and one smallish one organised by RMT), or even of using existing strikes, demonstrations, rallies and media appearances to raise the issue and protest. They seem strongly disinclined to do anything to try to change that. Presumably not fully intentionally, they reinforce the culture where anti-union laws, existing and new, are more something to criticise or lament than something to fight militantly and immediately.

They did not even respond to invitations to co-sponsor the protest that FOU organised in October. In general they are reluctant about non-sectarian cooperation as well as about on-the-streets action.

FOU has said it intends to organise more protests against the anti-union threat, cooperating with as many other labour movement organisations as possible, and to try to lever much wider sections of the labour movement, including our unions, into action.

Everything I’ve described so far reinforced my previous observations and impressions of CTUF and IER; so did the ambiguity of their demands. During the Corbyn period, when these organisations were official advisers to the Labour leadership, they progressively dropped or faded out the demand to repeal all the anti-union/anti-strike laws, seemingly regarding it as too “difficult”.

Their new Workers’ Bill of Rights nods to this idea (section 3, point 5), but is still unclear. The demand needs to be stated clearly and explicitly, and argued and campaigned for energetically, winning the bulk of the labour movement to actively support it - or there is no chance at all of anything like it happening. (With this Labour Party leadership, it will be hard enough even if we do all that.)

Addressing the event, CTUF and IER leader John Hendy said something like: “Of course we want to repeal the anti-trade union laws. That is a given. The question is what will replace them”, then arguing for positive legal rights. That is indeed an important point, but the (absolutely necessary) demand to repeal the anti-union laws is not a given, as shown by the CTUF/IER record on this question and their campaigning demands even now. We need to argue to “repeal and replace”, as Hendy and comrades once did, many years ago.

As for years, speakers at the conference over-emphasised the (real) importance of legal encouragement or enforcement of collecting bargaining between employers and unions, and under-emphasised removing restrictions on the right to strike (though not as much as CTUF/IER did in the Corbyn years).

The CTUF and IER are now very much linked to the Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star. There were multiple CPB speakers at the event, including MS editor Ben Chacko, and a big deal was made of the paper. (An important aside: the CPB and MS are, of course, aggressively pro-Brexit. The IER and CTUF seem generally pretty Brexit-critical, on the grounds of its impact on workers' rights. I'm not quite sure how that fits together.)

One (non-CPB) speaker claimed the MS “has always supported complete repeal of the anti-union laws”.

In fact, in September 2019, when the then very new FOU was making strong headway, prominent CPB trade unionist and CTUF leader Andy Green wrote in the MS to denounce the campaign's “false” “absolutism” and dispute it is actually necessary to “make a bonfire of the Thatcherite Acts of Parliament”. CPB/MS, CTUF and IER never raised the demand for repeal of all the laws themselves - in fact going further in dropping anything like this as the Corbyn period went on - and never supported FOU’s organising in the unions and Labour Party for it.

Despite all the problems described here, CTUF and IER do have important support and connections in the labour movement - and some useful ideas. I think FOU should continue to propose united organising and action to them (and others) as it seeks to generate militant campaigning against anti-union laws.