NSSN Conference: The Network that does Not Work

Brian Caton of the Prison Officer’s Association set the tone by labelling the TUC bureaucrats a load of wastrels who he intended to put on the spot by demanding they call a general strike against anti-union laws that banned his members from striking. His phrase will live in the memory – why don’t they “get off their arses and break bad laws”.

Other speakers through the day included rank and file members who had led the recent strikes in the London Post, the Underground, the Lindsey strike, the SOAS and RMT cleaners faced with deportation and Rob Williams from Linamar who had successfully won reinstatement after a strike against his victimisation.

From the recent Belfast Visteon occupation convenor John Maguire spoke. He put his struggle’s victory in winning redundancy payments into perspective by reminding people that jobs had been lost because the union leaders were scared of an all out fight. His answer was a programme of thoroughgoing rank and file reform in the unions with accountable officials paid the same as the workers they represent and elections that involved members at the workplaces, renovated democracy and turned the unions back into organisations committed to a fight.

To hear these voices of rank and file leadership in recent struggles was refreshing. It showed the potential that exists to organise resistance to the bosses’ offensive.

Highs and lows

But despite these highs the conference was a failure for one simple reason – it didn’t decide a single solitary thing. It didn’t discuss how to build the NSSN. Workshops on the lessons of recent disputes – like Lindsey – were utterly ruined by woefully poor chairing that allowed the debate to sink into a vacuous slanging match between the Socialist Party (SP) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). And above all, the picture that emerged was that the NSSN has been transformed into the industrial arm of the SP.

Some 300 militants from a wide spectrum of unions and industries were treated to endless, colourless repetition of the SP’s call for a “new mass workers party”. Hand-picked speaker after hand-picked speaker repeated the SP mantra and told of how the SP had helped this or that dispute, rescued this or that cause and saved god knows how many children from a life of slavery and starvation (I am making this last one up – but you get the idea).

And in the background an army of SP full timers grinned like new parents holding up their first born to the admiring coos of the assembled family.

By comparison the SWP, usually past masters at the stage managed rally, looked like Billy No Mates at the prom party – they’d been invited because of a past liaison but had no one to talk to and nothing to say to anyone.

Lessons of Lindsey

Let’s get things straight – fair play to the SP, their working class roots and their skilful leadership in disputes like Lindsey have delivered some much needed and well won victories to the working class.

Lindsey is a case in point. At the conference and in the workshop the assembled non SP (non-PR!) left were quick to pour praise on the June strike while at the same time uttering dark warnings about how the strike in January was “possibly” reactionary. Utter rubbish. If the fight had not been fought and won in January there would have been no June victory. The issue was the same – defence of terms and conditions against bosses trying to undercut them by importing non-unionised foreign labour. The strikers in both cases tried to organise the foreign workers for a common fight, not demonise them.

Just because some wag on the picket tried to use “British jobs for British workers” as a slogan did not invalidate the essence of the January strike. And just because he didn’t in June didn’t make that a “better” strike. Both won because they used militant tactics, defied the anti-union laws and relied on rank and file leadership and it is to the SP’s credit that this happened in both disputes.

But should this be a pretext to turn a potential rank and file movement, like the NSSN, into a party front? Absolutely not. It should be the starting point for trying to build the NSSN into a genuine rank and file movement, democratic, anti-bureaucratic and free from party dictats.

No to party fronts

But this did not happen. Flushed with success the SP spent more time at the conference getting their members to stand up and bang on about the new workers party than they did about putting forward a single solitary proposal on how to build a rank and file movement that could take the lessons of Lindsey into the wider working class.

Part of the problem lies in the NSSN itself. It was set up by the RMT, back in 2006, on condition that it did not “interfere” in the internal affairs of other unions. This is bureaucrat speak for letting fellow bureaucrats get away with murder. As a result when we should have discussed an organised campaign in Unison to oppose the scandalous witch hunts of Yunus Baksh (SWP) and a host of leading SP militants we were instead reduced to listening to moral denunciations of Unison’s leadership but without any proposals on what we can do about it.

The NSSN, after one pre-conference and three proper conferences, hasn’t taken a single meaningful decision. When yours truly proposed it support a march on the TUC called by Liverpool TUC for example, we were told by the SP secretary of the NSSN that it does not take motions because it has no structure.

Let’s be clear a body that has no structure and cannot take decisions cannot, by definition, do anything. And something that it is incapable of decision and action is not much use to the rank and file. The SP may be happy with this because it gives than an annual industrial conference in which they can advertise their prowess and maybe recruit a few more members. But from the point of view of building a movement that can recapture the unions for the rank and file and regain the initiative from the bureaucracy it is redundant.

This cannot be allowed to happen for another year. We need a rank and file movement that is not a party front. We need one that can take democratic decisions and mobilise the forces it has rallied for campaigns. Of course we can start small – a network that ensures all its members know when there is a dispute, can mobilise support for it and can raise a militant voice in opposition to the prevailing whine of surrender from the bureaucrats would be a start.

A network that puts the call out for all network members to take up the campaign against the witch hunts in Unison in an organised and co-ordinated way would also help.

A network, in other words, that takes decisions and appoints officers charged with carrying them out, would be a great leap forward. Whether the SP allow this remains to be seen. If they don’t they will be condemning the NSSN to oblivion.

We don’t want that to happen – and over the next months we will try to make the NSSN take itself seriously by taking a decision, at least one, that represents a step towards building itself into a rank and file movement. If we lose then next year’s conference will be an SP rally full stop – and whether trade union branches will pay to send people to it will be a moot point.

Thu 02, July 2009 @ 22:16