A Movement With No Heart

One of the central problems facing the British working class is that the leaders of the “labour movement” are wedded to the practice of class collaborationism.  What we mean by this is that the (so called) trade union leaders have long embraced the idea of “partnership” with the employers and the government. Thus even when they are trying to promote the practice of trade union membership they do so in the weakest and most compromised way possible. Take the example of the “heart unions” week which is currently being run by the TUC. Supposedly this is a campaign to promote union membership by demonstrating the value of joining a trade union. What it actually is though is yet another attempt at selling the utterly false idea that employers and workers can both benefit from stronger working class organisation. What the TUC aim to do is to sell the utterly bankrupt idea of “partnership” to the working class and the ruling class. What is their real intention in doing so? The real intention is to promote the idea of a union leadership who know how to “manage” the workforce together with a “responsible” management. Is it any wonder, when workers are facing relentless downward pressure on wages from ruthless employers that the TUC’s attempts to sell such “partnerships” is falling on deaf ears. 

The number of workers organised in trade unions has been flatlining at around 6 million for well over a decade now. Even with the class war waged upon our class by the bosses getting worse every year the numbers organised in the trade union movement stay stagnant. Even as more professions that were previously relatively privileged, Doctors for instance, start to feel more pressure on their terms and proletarianisation starts to spread the numbers in unions barely move. This is partly because the wider working class simply see no point in joining a union and part of this is because the campaigns (such as “heart unions”) put together by the TUC are utterly divorced from reality. The truth is that every worker knows that the employers hate and fear the idea of workers getting organised and want to retain a hyper-exploitable, easy to fire workforce who are totally unaware of how to fight back. That is the business model adopted by the British ruling class and they have no interest in changing it.  

The only way the working class, the great majority of whom now remain outside the trade union movement, will be inspired to organise is if they see that they can stand a chance of winning in doing so. We are under no illusions that this can be done quickly but the absolute minimum we should expect from any trade union is a basic acknowledgement that our interests and those of the employers are not aligned and have never been so. The job of a trade union should be to relentlessly pursue the class interests of the workers, not to pander to the delicate sensibilities of the employers. A fighting programme that advocates for the needs of our class must be adopted throughout the trade union movement and that is what we will be advocating for this week rather than the bowing and scraping of the traitors at the top of the TUC.