Strike together on 15-16 March

Firefighters in the UK have voted for the first nationwide strike on pay since 2003. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) says it will not start walk-outs until 9 February at the earliest, to “allow employers further time to make any new offer”. 88% of members voted for industrial action, with an impressive 73% turnout.

Wednesday 1 February sees the biggest single day of strikes for more than a decade. Schools, rail, universities, and the civil service are all coordinating action. On 6 February nurses and ambulance workers strike simultaneously for the first time.

CWU members in Royal Mail close their reballot on 16 February, and we can hope for further strikes there after that. The pressure is increasing, with many CWU reps being victimised and many local managers pushing through work-conditions changes unilaterally.

Further united strikes and big trade-union street demonstrations look possible on 15-16 March, 15 March being Budget day. The National Education Union (NEU) has set those days for the next strike for teachers across England and Wales, and school support staff in Wales, with regional strikes in the interim. The PCS civil servants’ union is likely to call action then, and the UCU university workers’ union has set 16 March.

Activists will press for firefighters, transport workers on rail and the London Underground and buses, postal workers and NHS workers to join them, as part of a comprehensive escalation.

The ongoing strike wave is the most significant upsurge in workers’ struggle for a generation, and an opportunity for the entire labour movement. Though fewer workers will be out on 1 February than the 2011 pension strike, in many ways this wave is more significant. The strike-day total will be larger, as the disputes are ongoing, rather than one day set pieces.

Pickets have already been large and lively in many strikes. Now the NEU is organising energetically for picket lines at all schools, in a break from its usual practice. Many workers are being brought into union activism for the first time.

We can’t assume a big and lasting revival of combativity and confidence of the working class, but we can say that will be more likely if some big disputes win. To win significant disputes requires an intensification of action. “Marathons” of sporadic striking are not an effective strategy. Employers can weather that kind of action more easily than workers. The schools dispute has an inbuilt time-limit — it has to be brought to crunch-point before the school summer holidays, and probably earlier — and there comes to be an air of unreality about disputes over 2022-3 pay when they run past the settlement dates for 2023-4.

Unions must enact tactics that can win disputes, including intensifying and accelerating action. Activists are calling for uniting the strikes, via the widest possible coordination between unions, but without slowing disputes to wait for unity. Letting the most conservative unions set the pace was one of the factors that tanked the 2011 pensions dispute.

Each dispute needs specific demands — demands decided and understood by the membership and seen as actual aims rather than bargaining positions nobody expects to win. A union may settle for less that its initial demand without that being a sell-out, but we want to push back against the “common sense” notion that workers should always expect something between the employers’ offer and the union’s demand. We need the maximum degree of democratic control within each dispute, including transparency in negotiations

We will work to make the unions and Labour run political campaigning alongside the strikes. Restoring the NHS, defeating the anti-strike laws, increasing benefits and public-sector pay, and nationalising rail transport and energy are all popular political demands with little current street campaigning.