Lindsey Dispute and the left...behind

If the Lindsey construction workers had been looking for a political lead from the far left they would have found a fair bit of confusion, and quite a bit of shrill denunciation. The right wing media campaign against foreign workers and the sight of hundreds of workers apparently rallying around a “British jobs for British workers” slogan spread panic in groups who either couldn’t remember, or chose to forget, the nationalist and job protectionist slogans that dominated the workers’ movement in the 1970s and 80s.

Then, in an era before globalisation and the massive movement of labour across national borders, the trade unions and the Labour left responded to recession by demanding nationalist and protectionist solutions. The “Alternative Economic Strategy” peddled by the Communist Party and the Labour left, was based on advocating import controls to keep out “foreign” manufactured goods and concentrated on advocating state investment in “British industries”.

The campaign against the European Economic Community, as the EU was called then, was part of this “little Englander” strategy. Meanwhile “Buy British” campaigns stuck Union Jacks on British products and railed against Japanese and German imports. Then the majority of the far left related to these workers’ campaigns, arguing against nationalist sentiments, import controls and for workers’ unity against the bosses across Europe and advancing a workers’ solution to the crisis. They did not stand on the sidelines and denounce the likes of the steel workers’ whose strikes contained explicit nationalist appeals to save British steel.

In the intervening years the far left has grown ever more isolated from the workers’ movement and the isolation has bred a new style of agitation – denounce the workers who fightback, don’t try to relate to them.

Whole sections of the far left threw their hands up in horror and decided this was an unpleasant and nationalist strike that they would not have anything to do with. Workers Power (WP) took this position to its logical conclusion, denouncing the strike as reactionary and nationalist from day one and holding to this position despite the developments in the strike.

According to WP this was a strike against Italian workers (it wasn’t), the six demands adopted on 2 February were “progressive” but it was “what was left unsaid” that counted. Quite what such a comment means is anyone’s guess.

WP ended by denouncing the result of the strike (where not a single Italian worker was sacked) because a hundred local workers recruited would mean, somewhere down the line, less Italian workers employed – by an inverted logic they ended up siding with IREM and the bosses’ right to employ any non-union labour it likes. In the name of abstract internationalism and ignorance about the actual strike WP ended up advocating outright opposition to the strike which, had they had a member there, would have meant one thing and one thing only – advocating breaking the strike.

Similarly the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) declared at the start of the dispute, “The strikes echo Gordon Brown’s reactionary and populist slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ . . . Worker fighting worker cannot be the way forward.”

But within 48 hours they had done a 180-degree turn, declaring, “the workers on strike are our people”. They managed to keep both articles simultaneously on the front page of their website (no doubt while the two factions fought out whose line would triumph).

Socialist Resistance (SR) issued a statement worrying that the demands of the strike “imply that the Italian workers should be sacked and replaced by British workers”. The strike they said would only be “legitimate”, and should therefore be “fully supported”, if it was shown that wages were being undermined by IREM. SR never managed to come to a conclusion on this during the strike, or since, as far as we are aware – it remains uncomfortably on the fence.

Even the largest organisation on the British far left, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) refused to support the strikes. It felt compelled to issue a statement on 30 January saying that while a fightback was necessary against unemployment, the Lindsey strikes were “based around the wrong slogans and target the wrong people”. It went on:

 “It’s right to demand that everyone is paid the proper rate for the job and that there’s no undercutting of national agreements. And we need militant action, including unofficial action, to win these demands. But these strikes are not doing that – whatever some of those involved believe.”

This position of non-support did not change over the course of the strikes, although Socialist Worker did try to have it both ways, as it couldn’t quite bring itself to oppose the strikes outright. SW suggested that the precedents set in the Lindsey dispute were both “good and bad”, good that the workers took unofficial action but bad that they demanded local or British workers be taken on alongside IREM workers:

“The answer is not to argue about hiring a quota of British workers, like Unite has done at Lindsey. It is to demand that all construction workers are paid the rate for the job and to fight against the subcontracting system that is driving down pay and conditions across the industry.” (SW 14 Feb 2009).

Yet only a week later it was encouraging trade unionists to sign a petition to the TUC (www.PetitionOnline.com/jobs0209) that opposes the “British jobs for British workers” slogan but also clearly says, “We support the demands of the Lindsey Oil Refinery strike committee”, demands that the SWP opposed!

In the context of these strikes against the PWD is it wrong to demand, as the Lindsey workers did, “union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members, with nominating rights as work became available”? We don’t think it is. It is a version of the socialist demand for union control of hiring and firing, a demand relating to the union closed shop smashed by the Thatcher governments.

The only reason Total and Alstom use subcontractors and the PWD is to avoid using local union labour and to bust national agreements. At Staythorpe the Polish workers are not paid higher overtime rates, however many hours they work, in clear contravention of the Blue Book agreement. Union control of hiring, which would break the discrimination against local workers, would undermine the purpose of subcontracting and the PWD itself.

Are there dangers that such a policy could be turned into an anti-foreign worker one? Yes there are, just as in the closed shop, union control of hiring was used, in the print industry for example, to discriminate against women and black people by passing apprenticeships and casual jobs to family and friends. Such practices have to be fought by socialist and militants in the unions, but it does not make the demand itself reactionary.

Neither does the demand for registering unemployed and local workers have an anti-foreigner element. The PWD directive is designed to discriminate against all domiciled workers in a country of whatever nationality they are. It was revealing that in the wave of strikes in solidarity with Lindsey several hundred Polish workers from the Plymouth area’s Langage Power Station joined the strike. As the strike leaders at Lindsey said, what was involved was a class issue not an anti-foreign worker one, the point was not to drive out the Italian labour force but to have an integrated one working on union agreed conditions.

The employers and the right wing press would certainly like to set national worker against national worker, and certainly the slogans put forward by Unite at Staythorpe, such as “Stop excluding British workers” and “Fairness for British workers”, play into this trap. But really, if socialists are so worried about traps that they become paralysed – or worse – faced with workers moving into struggle against the bosses, then they should steer clear of the class struggle altogether. It is full of such traps – real socialists fight to get workers to avoid them.

The Socialist Party (SP) played a creditable role in the Lindsey strikes, winning workers to a set of demands that steered the strike away from the nationalist and anti-foreign worker filth peddled by the right wing press and expressed, albeit in a milder form, by the union leaderships.

They had the great advantage of a member, Keith Gibson, a seasoned union militant with the respect of the workforce. But the SP, while recognising that “dangerous” slogans had been raised, have since preferred to forget this and bask in what they clearly regarded as a victorious outcome. Often very long resolutions put in trade union branches in support of the strike failed to even raise the dangers of the “British jobs for British workers” slogan, or to criticise the way the Unite leadership tried to pose the campaign in terms of “Fair play for British workers”.

Not surprisingly such an approach fails to deal with the genuine fears of many black, Asian and migrant workers, who see these slogans as stoking racism and nationalism, especially in the midst of a rabid right wing press campaign against foreign workers.

Taken together, the response of the left exposes the gulf that exists between its own sheltered world of “party fronts” and rotten borough trade union branches and the working class in this country. It shows a left that has lost its bearings. And it shows why we need to redouble our efforts to rebuild the movement at every level.

Wed 10, June 2009 @ 18:19