Image - Firefighters on education workers’ picket line; but really effective joint action requires going beyond union control

Spread the strikes! Stop the War Drive!

It’s not so long ago that Tony Blair was crowing about the end of class struggle. The working class, however, is still alive and kicking. The firefighters’ strike is the first for 25 years and comes at a time of growing unrest. Strikes are planned by air traffic controllers and firefighters in airports. University staff in London staged a one-day walkout during the firefighters first strike, part of a whole series of protests by public sector workers seeking higher compensation for working in London. The postal workers’ dispute is still rumbling on, with further strikes planned. Teachers and nurses are looking at pay claims and are watching the firefighters carefully. UK Magistrates Courts were closed in an unprecedented strike on the same week the firefighters came out. Transport workers in Strathclyde walked out on a wildcat strike. A series of strikes by ASLEF and the RMT were halted only after intervention from the London Mayor, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. If the working class is dead, it’s a pretty active corpse.

Government demonisation of firefighters

Firefighters are demanding a 40% increase which would take their pay to £30 000. The Government has offered them 4% amid the usual barrage of abuse about how irresponsible they are to strike and how greedy they are to demand a realistic wage. That great man of the people, Two Jags Prescott, denounced the strike as “completely unnecessary and completely unjustified”. Some Ministers denounced the strike as “criminal”. The Financial Times suggested using legislation which allows employers to sack strikers after 8 weeks of dispute, but seeing the pitiful attempts of the army with their antique Green Goddesses trundling through the streets at thirty miles an hour, sacking 50 000 firefighters suddenly doesn’t seem like the best suggestion the FT has ever come up with. Some Local Authorities, meanwhile, tried to have the strike declared illegal and wanted strikers sent to jail for “putting lives at risk”.

This is especially rich given the fact 33 firefighters have been killed since 1990, and especially at a time when the state is considering going to war and killing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. The Government is making much of public safety, hoping the longer the dispute carries on, the more the public will turn against firefighters as more lives are lost. The concern for public safety doesn’t go that far, however. When 100 tube drivers refused to operate trains without fire cover, the Government immediately urged London Underground to “look at disciplinary action” against them.

In the topsy-turvy world of capitalist logic anything goes. If firefighters had had the pay increases given to Ministers, their average wage would now be £34,000. One of the negotiators trying to ward off the strike has just been awarded a 180% increase. A rise of 40% will only bring firefighters into line with the police, and oddly enough there has always been enough money to reach a settlement for them. The government is happier paying £5.2 millions each day there is a strike to the army and police rather than to firefighters whose jobs have become unimaginably more dangerous than in the 1970’s.

Some votes are more democratic than others...

At a time when the working class is being asked to support the bombing of innocent Iraqi workers in the name of democracy, when democracy at home is practiced it is condemned if it doesn’t give the right results. The firefighters’ vote to strike was one of the highest ever recorded under current employment legislation. Some 87.6% voted for industrial action on a turnout of 83.5%. In Northern Ireland the vote was even higher, with 96.6% voting to strike. For any vote, let alone a postal ballot which is designed to keep workers deliberately isolated, this is a massive result, one which politicians with their miserable turn-outs at ballot boxes must have eyed with envy.

There is no doubt that the vote to strike was far more solid than any mandate ever given to Tony Blair or any of his cronies. Despite this, the union took it upon itself to ignore the demands of its members and scuttled off for a series of negotiations. The FBU’s leader, Andy Gilchrist, has stated he is willing to accept far less than the 40% his members have demanded. He was happy to negotiate a settlement of 16% offered by Local Authorities in the summer, which the government then blocked. There is no doubt the union is unhappy about the strike and is doing everything it can to reach a settlement favourable to the government which they can sell to their members as some kind of victory. The FBU delayed the strikes demanded by their members until the Bain Committee Report had made some of its recommendations. The Bain Committee, made up of the usual mixture of civil servants and trade unionists, suggested firefighters be offered 4% in the first year and 7% in the second, subject of course to changes in working practices, including closing down some of the smaller stations, splitting firefighters up and lengthening their working hours.

The FBU will reach a settlement which, whilst not giving firefighters anything like their claim, will impose on them worse working conditions and worse fire safety for us all. They are already talking about being willing to consider 16% and will call off strikes for this amount. The FBU agreed to strike because it had no choice, given the strength of feeling by firefighters, some of whom turned out to lobby the FBU’s executive meeting after the second lot of strikes had been called off without any single FBU member being consulted. The FBU, fully aware of the strength of feeling, feared strike action would go ahead anyway, especially after workers in 20 London stations started an unofficial work to rule. The first day of the strike was also the last possible day action could have gone ahead under the ballot.

Labour isn’t stupid and it knows how valuable the unions are in isolating workers from each other and keeping their strikes within the narrow confines determined by the state. At the start of the dispute Blair went straight to the TUC and asked them to invoke a 23-year old code of practice banning strikes by workers in essential services. The TUC has preferred to work behind the scenes in getting the dispute settled as painlessly for the government as possible, urging the FBU to give Prescott ‘breathing space’ to come up with a way to fight the strikers. Other unions are making sure their disputes are not raised at the same time leaving the firefighters on their own. Local authority workers were urged by Unison to accept a pathetic settlement in the summer in anticipation of the firefighters’ dispute, and the FBU quietly settled an equal pay claim for control operators and retained volunteers which have left them free to scab the strike. Needless to say the FBU will not pay any strike pay, and firefighters will be left to cope on no pay in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Labour on the war path

The Labour Government has two courses of action. Firstly they could tough out the strike and crush the firefighters the way Thatcher did with the miners, after a long and bitter struggle. Labour is certainly talking about action which would escalate the conflict. They are preparing troops to cross picket lines to use red fire engines instead of the Green Goddesses, in the name of public safety of course. They are also talking about making future strikes illegal under 1992 legislation by obtaining a high court order against the strikers. How this would work in practice is another matter. Any application for an injunction would be slow, and even if it did go through the sight of firefighters being arrested for striking would not be good for publicity. The longer the strike lasts, the more Blair must hope that any loss of life will turn public opinion against the strikers. So far the armed forces have stated that those people who died in fires during the strike could not have been saved if the firefighters had attended as normal anyway. The Government also knows that if the firefighters can be decisively defeated it will save the treasury from the pay demands by other badly- paid public sector workers like the nurses. A defeat would also demoralise the rest of the working class. It could be argued that the Government is in a fairly strong position having delayed the strike to as close as possible to Christmas.

The second alternative is to reach a quick settlement. This would prevent damage which a long period of strike breaking and vicious attacks on the working class would do to Labour’s in some way a peoples’ party and future electoral chances. However, a rapid settlement would, as explained by preacher Blair, be wrong because it would open the floodgates to other public sector workers. The capitalist class has a real fear of this since the government’s spending plans would be thrown off course, the iron chancellor would have to print money and inflation would rise. Worse still interest rates would have to go up. At present industrial capitalists are unhappy that interest rates are higher in the UK than in Europe or the US and a further rise would create howls of protest. Eddie George the governor of the Bank of England stated bluntly that the economy could not stand this. Labour is therefore in a dilemma. A further consideration for them is the impending war in Iraq. Using troops to break for a matter of months would seriously limit deployment in Iraq. The plans by Britain to attack Iraq included 20 000 personnel in all. Some 19 000 are now on standby during the strike and 7 warships have been taken out of operation to train Royal Navy firefighters. As the chief of the defence staff put it:

The situation at the moment is such that if there was a large scale or medium scale operation, we would have great dificulty in coping...if this runs on into next year we shall have extreme dificulty.

Blair and Labour see the firefighters as traitors to their country for putting their class interests above those of imperialism. They fully agree with The Sun headline that the firefighters are “The Stooges of Saddam”. So far their attempts to demonise the strikers have failed. There are even problems with their ploy to use troops to cross picket lines. Despite the fact the Firefighters Union has said they would not look to hinder the armed forces if they wanted to cross picket lines, senior military officers have expressed misgivings about ordering their troops to do so, saying that members of the armed forces have made it clear they would be unhappy about such a move.

High stakes for the whole working class

Much is at stake here, not just for the firefighters but for the working class as a whole. The union, looking to start negotiations on 16%, will negotiate worse working conditions which the government wants as part of its cost cutting agenda. This will have implications for us all, with fire services being reduced and funding cut back. Firefighters can win their strike and hinder the state’s war plans only by linking up with other workers, calling mass assemblies to discuss tactics and breaking out of the isolation the union imposes on them. There is a real possibility of doing this with the tube and rail workers. The Government is furious that tube drivers are refusing to work for safety reasons, since this is not technically secondary action and is therefore not illegal. Nevertheless they do want those drivers who are refusing to work to be disciplined. The tube drivers have stated if this happens they will threaten industrial action. If firefighters are to win their strike they need active solidarity from other workers. They won’t get this as long as the unions call the shots and control the situation. The FBU has bent over backwards to delay the strike, ignoring the ballot result to do so. It has made sure it has split the part-time firefighters from the full-time workers. It has ignored its members wishes and is undertaking private negotiations for a vastly reduced percentage increase which will be linked to some kind of productivity deal. All solidarity action has taken place despite the unions and not because of them.

Mass meetings where revocable delegates are elected to strike committees with the aim of spreading the dispute to other workers, particularly the Tube and Rail workers need to be set up. Committees should be set up outside union control to arrange common strikes aimed to bring London to a standstill. The strike should be made indefinite until the full demand is granted. The present intermittent strikes only give the enemy more time to prepare and organise themselves and give the unions more time to wear down militancy and sell the strike out. Only workers organised together, fighting for themselves and rejecting all calls for considering the needs of the state or for sacrificing their interests to those of the nation can be successful. The firefighters have shown that the working class is capable of taking us in a different direction from the capitalist barbarism which our rulers are leading us towards. This is the only way forward for workers in Britain, and also the only hope of preventing the kind of imperialist violence that threatens to kill thousands of innocent workers in Iraq.