The Failure of Trade Union Struggle

The National Education Union, Britain’s biggest teaching union, announced on 31st July that, following a consultation with its members, it would be accepting the 6.5% pay offer made by the Government through its proxy, the Schools Teachers’ Review Body. In so doing, the NEU brought to an end months of struggle and strikes by accepting a pay offer that is not fully funded, is below the rate of inflation and, on its face, does nothing to remedy the two key issues that the NEU proclaimed underpinned their dispute: Years of inadequate pay rises and safeguarding the very future of the profession.

The NEU was one of four teaching unions to accept the offer. The National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers (the NASUWT) arguably performed even worse during this pay dispute – they balloted their members for strike action late last year and, despite the ballot returning a 90% vote in favour of strike action, the vote fell foul of anti-trade union laws because only 42% of members returned their papers. All in all, the conclusion of the teachers’ strike can only be viewed as yet another trade union collapse in a period of collapses in teaching, the Royal Mail and the NHS.

To refresh our memories, on 11th July the Communication Workers Union announced that their members had voted to accept a below-inflation pay rise and degradation of attendance policies after the CWU bureaucracy failed to call the union’s members out for a single day of strike action in 2023, despite them sacrificing considerable amounts of money in strike action taken from May 2022 until the end of that year. Within days of the CWU’s collapse being confirmed, Royal Mail leapt into action against its members, extending attendance reviews by six months while the union scrambled around trying to reassure the membership that it could workshop its way out of the quagmire it had willingly leapt feet-first into. It also meant that CWU members who were suspended, disciplined, or both as a result of trumped-up charges brought by Royal Mail for alleged misconduct would only have their case reviewed, not dropped.

On 27th June, the Royal College of Nursing effectively ended their pay dispute with the NHS when their attempted re-ballot of their members for further strike action failed to meet the 50% turnout threshold demanded by anti-trade union laws. This was after several other trade unions, including Unison, GMB and the Royal College of Midwives collectively capitulated and accepted the insulting and below-inflation pay offer from the Government, while the RCN itself had originally recommended the same deal to its members for acceptance, only to be given a bloody nose by its own membership, who rejected the deal, took further strike action, and extended the dispute for another two months.

The collapse of the teachers, posties and nurses strikes effectively ends a period of over a year of class struggle in Britain, as workers have fought and sacrificed their own wages in the face of rampant inflation, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, only to be betrayed by their own union leaderships. In these three cases in particular, trade union bureaucracies have been dragged into disputes by their membership, only for them to collapse into seeking a settlement at almost any cost. Only RMT and ASLEF, still fighting in their long-standing dispute with the train operating companies after over four years without a pay rise, along with Unite, who are fighting many varied and localised disputes across a raft of industries, are outliers.

So how did three industrial disputes, with substantial ground roots support, all collapse within six weeks of each other?

The first key factor is the Labour Party. Whilst on its face this may seem a strange assertion given that only one of the three unions cited in this article are affiliated to the Labour Party, the fact remains that the self-proclaimed party of ‘working people’ (because no social democratic party should ever make their politics about actual class) infects every level of the trade union movement, whether that union is formally affiliated to the Labour Party or not. Labour Party members hold posts at the very highest levels of trade unions, including as paid organisers, executive committee members, presidents and so on.

In so doing, the Labour Party’s pernicious influence pervades all levels of trade union structures, including Labour’s imperialist and anti-worker positions on subjects which directly affect trade unions, like strike action and anti-trade union legislation. The ideology which underpins the Labour Party’s policies also underpins the political outlook of senior trade union officials: They lack class consciousness, they see the working class as the object of their politics rather than the subject of their politics; as a charity case rather than the locus of a movement which would see them ascend to a point where they will run society for themselves, and they have no desire whatsoever to allow trade union members to become either better educated, motivated or engaged in the democratic processes of their trade union, as they will then be better equipped to overthrow them.

One thing which binds these trade union officials together is the belief that the working class’s cup runneth over in 1945 as we were benevolently bestowed with a veritable bounty of benefits by the Labour Party, including housing, the welfare state, the founding of the NHS and 20% of the economy nationalised. They live in perpetual fealty to the Labour Party in the belief that this brief period, and the short-lived transformation it brought, can be repeated, if only the ‘right’ (no pun intended) Labour Government could be elected.

Sadly, this brief period of generosity from our elected oppressors cannot be repeated today because the circumstances which brought it into being in the first place do not exist anymore. The Soviet Union, the example of a triumphant workers’ state, has long gone, the Americans are in no position to lend us the money we would need (which they did predominantly because they were as keen as anyone to avoid Britain slipping into communism) and there is no empire to loot or colonial subjects to hyper-exploit to help pay for it. But Labour members wilfully ignore history or simply have no idea of the circumstances of the birth of the welfare state and why it actually came into being.

The second reason for the failure of modern trade unions is that they are as disconnected from the mass of the working class and each other as they have ever been. In the post-war period, working class solidarity was in its peak period in the 1970s: This period is replete with examples of workers taking it upon themselves to act against not only their own employers, but often against their own trade unions and in solidarity with their comrades. Rank and file trade union members were, first and foremost, working class people: The union to which they belonged was secondary. This shared philosophy was built on a strong working-class consciousness and the belief that workers’ struggles were shared across regions, industries and nations. When working class disputes broke out, other working-class people would always rally to their cause. When workers who were industrially weak tried to stand up for themselves, industrially strong workers, aware of their strength, would come to their aid. The working class in the 1970s were capable to toppling governments and did just that to Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in 1974.

In 2023, trade unions’ spheres of influence extend only to the limits of the industries in which they organise and no farther. They have totally rejected the principles of class and class consciousness, and in so doing have rejected the principle of building solidarity with other workers in strife, while perfecting the art of standing idly by while fellow workers battle for improved terms and conditions. Trade union activist’s training has been eroded, over a period of some thirty-five years, from a fully class-based education delivered by esteemed trade union dignitaries and politicians to one totally devoid of class, where reps are trained to be more like social workers than working class leaders. Another part of the reason for this abandonment of building and maintaining working class consciousness amongst the membership is that there is a considerable section of the collective trade union bureaucracy which aren’t working class at all – they’re middle class, with privileged backgrounds, university educations and all the beliefs and politics which flow from that. 

Also at play are the anti-trade union laws, particularly two key aspects of anti-trade union legislation: The legal definition of an industrial dispute, which is a dispute between an employer and group of employees, the other being the banning of secondary action, which made it illegal for employees to take strike action in support of another group of employees working for a different employer who were in struggle. These between them not only legally stifled the working class, but they also changed the mindset of the trade union bureaucrats themselves. With their organising strength curtailed, they looked to other channels to protect workers’ rights, namely in their rabid and almost unanimous support for the imperialist trading bloc known as the European Union, and Jacques Delors’ speech to Trade Union Congress in 1988, which assured union bureaucrats that they no longer needed to engage in bitter working class struggle, as this great European project would be the arbiter and protector of their hard-won terms and conditions. 

Meanwhile, trade union bureaucracies cower behind these anti-trade union laws and the threat of sequestration of assets to abandon struggle before it even begins, disavow unofficial strike action when it breaks out and, as we have seen in the teachers, nurses and postal workers’ disputes, march their members to the top of the hill only to march them back own again with a below-inflation pay rise, just as a huge and deep recession, exposing again all the fault lines in capitalism which were papered over in 2008, looms large. 

The third reason is that trade unions are run at their highest level by people who do not want to challenge the authority of the ruling class. They would much rather both the workers that they represent and our rulers to rub along with minimal friction, contestation or struggle. Our three examples of trade union collapse all had one key thing in common: they were, at least for a short time, driven by a strong and motivated rank and file, only for the trade union bureaucracies to take the reigns and drive their respective disputes straight into a ditch, arguably deliberately. 

We must remember that the RCN’s leadership were forced to continue their dispute for weeks longer than they had anticipated because the membership rejected the rotten deal that they were recommended to accept. CWU members led pickets lines the length and breadth of the country for seven months in 2022, only for the CWU leadership to decide not to call for a single day of action in 2023. The NEU, particularly in its previous incarnation as the National Union of Teachers, was recognised as the most militant teaching union, yet despite teachers striking for weeks in support of a pay claim which, according to the NEU, was not only to offset the devastating effect of years of below-inflation pay rises and the huge rise in the cost of living, but to defend the future of the profession itself, a paltry 6.5% pay rise was offered, not even fully funded, and the NEU buckled and recommended acceptance. 

In all of these cases, trade union bureaucrats, seemingly unable to control the member-driven momentum built up in each of these disputes, used varied tactics to dissipate that momentum and then call upon a demoralised membership to accept rotten deals in the full knowledge that they would. 

That is trade unionism in 2023. 

So what can be done about it? Well it certainly won’t be easy. There are no silver bullets to transform a weak and decaying trade union movement into a member-driven, member-led working class movement. But the first place to begin is to rebuild working class consciousness. After decades of rampant consumerism, telling a working person with a home that they own and a nice car on their drive that they are working class will be a tough sell. But anyone who has to sell their labour to live is working class, regardless of their trappings. It’s also important that the ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ ethic is a myth and must be dispelled as such – every day workers across the world give their labour to their employers for free, yet are given a wage. We need to explain to workers everywhere why and how this happens.  

As for trade unions, we need to break the belief that joining a union is a consumer-driven choice, like joining the AA or getting insurance. Trade unions should be a working class movement: An active, engaging, democratic and vibrant organisation run by its members at every level, which imbibes its members not only in class consciousness, but in the skills and knowledge to ascend to the highest levels of the organisation and use those skills in the world outside of work – to be able to engage with friends, family, neighbours and everyone else to create a working class-driven movement to bring not just change in the system we exist in, but to change the whole system itself.