Strikes take anticuts fight to next stage

As we go to press, the Universities and Colleges Union is in the middle of a week of strikes. This will culminate on 24 March, when 120,000 further and higher education teachers will strike together across the UK.
For lecturers this is an opportunity to payback the students, who showed such determination last year. The strike isn’t just about jobs, pay and pensions, but about the whole future of Higher Education. Importantly, it’s also the first, major national strike against the cuts.
However, the UCU is not alone. Communication Workers Union members in Crown Post have voted 9:1 for strikes over pay. Andy Young, a CWU rep in Royal Mail, told Workers Power: “All postal CWU members – counters, delivery, network, and indeed BT staff – now need to strike together.”
This theme has been taken up by the National Union of Teachers and the civil service union PCS, which have called for coordinated strikes against the attack on public sector pensions.
While talks to get this off the ground have been agonisingly and needlessly drawn out, Tower Hamlets teachers and council workers in Unison have launched their own united strike against budget cuts with a borough-wide walkout on 30 March. Neighbouring Camden NUT members are also taking action on that day.
Numerous other strikes are also on the way.
This all shows that anger against the cuts and falling wages is bubbling over. The bankers keep their pensions and corporations dodge their taxes, while we get job losses and pay cuts. But workers are fighting back.
Now we need to step up the action in two ways: one, unite the strikes and link our demands; two, extend the strikes and go all-out, indefinite to win. Anticuts groups and rank and file organisations can really help move things in this direction.
Union leaders have shown no stomach for such action – which would quickly develop into a showdown with the government and pose the need for a general strike. That’s why workers need to elect their own strike committees and wrest control of their disputes from bureaucratic leaders all too eager to call off action for talks or bow to the vicious anti-union laws.
A million public sector workers are facing an historic attack.
Imagine the power we would have if we all struck together.