By Tim Nailsea
The trade union movement in Britain saw something of a strike wave in 2022-23, in response to the double-digit inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. Yet in the following years the tide has definitely ebbed. In December 2022, 830,000 working days were lost due to strike action; by December 2024, they had dropped to 52,000.
Moreover the elements of this ‘movement’ remained isolated and limited to their own goals with no serious attempt to link the various struggles into a fight for a pay rise for all workers. At the same time national ballots of civil servants and local government workers failed to pass the legal threshold for strike action.
The one attempt to build a national movement, Enough is Enough, did not go beyond rallies in which strikers and left union leaders, notably the RMT’s Mick Lynch, whipped up the crowds with class struggle rhetoric before going on to strike modest deals which took their members out of the firing line. The reasons for this failure lie with the role of the trade union leadership and the absence of a lasting organisation of union activists armed with a political perspective.
Bureaucracy
The trade union bureaucracy, both its left and right wings, owes its position to mediating between workers and capitalists. While it may be forced into more radical positions by its members demanding more, under pressure from rank and file activists, it has a vested interest in keeping this under control, so that its position is not challenged.
The left bureaucracy, traditionally in the CWU, RMT and Unite, but also in education unions UCU and NEU, are usually willing to ballot for strikes and give fiery speeches – but their main aim is to bring the bosses ‘to the negotiating table’ avoiding the need for serious action.
Unite’s Sharon Graham, elected in 2021, pledged to dump Len McCluskey’s Corbyn era focus on the Labour Party and get ‘back to the workplace’. Obviously building union presence in the workplaces and organising non-union firms was needed, and as a consequence Unite has won several significant victories, but this strategy has now revealed its limitations.
Unite’s focus on key industries and limited gains guaranteed that the momentum of victories would not be generalised into a class-wide anti-government fight over the cost of living crisis. Joint action with other unions was avoided and even Unite’s gains remained patchy, localised and sectional.
Not enough
Rail workers in the RMT, and postal workers in the CWU conducted successful national strikes in 2022-23. The RMT strikes in particular, buoyed by effective media appearances by the union’s leaders, won widespread national support and had the potential to generate a real mass movement for automatic across the board wage rises to fully compensate for inflation.
The Enough is Enough campaign, led by the CWU with the support of the RMT and UCU, seemed like it could be the foundation for such a movement, uniting ‘politics’ with ’economics’.
But sensing the Tories’ acute leadership crisis (three PMs in as many months) and their likely electoral meltdown in favour of Labour, these left leaders did not want to unleash a strike wave linked to a radical political movement that might upset Starmer’s chances. A few rallies and it was literally ‘enough’!
Labour
When the Labour government eventually arrived, union leaders were happy with a government they could ‘do business with’ and Starmer was careful not to pick a fight with them. Their passivity has been cheaply bought with concessions, providing they did not alarm the bosses, being courted with ‘growth’.
Labour settled the train drivers’ dispute in September 2024 with a concession of 15% over three years and the junior doctors’ dispute with an 8% pay increase. It also pledged to repeal the draconian 2016 Trade Union Act (ballot thresholds) and 2024 Strikes Act (minimum service levels).
These plus concessions on fire-and-rehire and zero-hours contracts, combined with the pay deals, has led to a period of industrial passivity, with the partial exception of schools and some NHS grades.
Politics
Starmer is heading a deeply unpopular government, which will only become more detested. Reform has passed them in the polls. If there is no strong class alternative created, the hard right may become the main beneficiaries of economic stagnation and general discontent. Five years after Corbyn’s defeat, the left remains disorganised and powerless.
The union leaders cannot be relied upon to provide the leadership required to change that. Even a shift towards more militant workplace activity will see them do everything in their power to limit it, as they did in 2022-23. The left cannot sit back and rest its hopes on a spontaneous outbreak of trade union militancy to drive the union leaders to the left.
What we need is a truly radical rank and file movement. But it is not going to be built just by knitting together a handful of strikes over pay and conditions, nor by Broad Left candidates winning a few elections. Nor even by workplace reps while they remain hemmed in by the anti-union laws and bureaucratic procedures.
It will require a political leadership. But this is precisely what the British left is not offering.
Troublemakers, which aims to pull together union militants across industries, is the best initiative, the only initiative that goes some way towards organising the rank and file. But so far it has avoided setting itself up as a real network with local branches.
Strike Map provides a useful information exchange but has outsourced its educational wing to the left wing of the bureaucracy. Its reprints of syndicalist and Stalinist pamphlets from the 1920s and ’30s offer history lessons rather than guides to action.
We Demand Change, a ‘Summit of Resistance’, animated by Counterfire and the Socialist Workers Party, has been called for 29 March in London. But these organisations have a long history of setting up ‘coalitions’ and one-off events, graced by a few left union leaders, which lead to no change in strategy or tactics on the ground and no politics. For a genuine rank and file movement to be built, an openly radical, socialist political leadership must be formed within it, to link up and build upon struggles as they emerge, generalise their experiences and feed them into a national leadership. This is the task Workers Power sets itself and we encourage other revolutionary militants to join us and fight for it.
