By David
What will it take to defeat the government? Big, big protests for one thing. So the
Fairness at Work protests called by the CTU for Augsut 21 are good next step. The 40,000-strong anti-mining march has shown that a big mobilisation can force National to back down.
However, there is more at stake for the government and the employers on this issue, so it is likely they will be more willing to endure protests. Their side knows that the long-term gains from beating the unions will out way short-term damage to National’s popularity. So it’s going to take more than one big rally.
We need a campaign of escalating mass protests until these plans are dropped. The starting point has to be educating and then mobilising the existing union membership, some 350,000 people. But the campaign must look to go beyond them and reach out and win over the unorganised majority.
If the ruling class fear this campaign is drawing in, politicising and organising previously unorganised workers, they will back down.
I’ve heard (and read) various people on the Marxist and anarchist left talk about the likely inadequacy of the response from the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and big unions, and the need for the socialist / anti-capitalist left to offer some sort of alternative. As Wellington unionist and Workers Party activist Don Franks put it in a comment here on my
previous post on this issue, “Workers who really want this legislation stopped in its tracks will have to go beyond the politics of the CTU.”
I don’t see any point in counter-posing the two. Even if we all pull together, the socialist left is in no position to organise the mass mobilisation of union members that must be at the heart of this campaign. So we have to work with the CTU-led campaign, even as we seek to go beyond it.
What can the radical left achieve?
The question is what can we do to make this campaign more successful, to increase the chances, not only of beating the government, but of building a workers’ movement that is politically and organisationally stronger?
One way is for socialists who are union members or organisers to work together to push for a stronger response from their union.
Another is to work to involve those outside the union movement. Officials, necessarily, will be focussed on their own members, but I don’t believe we will win this campaign if it’s seen simply as a struggle between unions and the government. We need to convince the majority of the working class that this is a battle for their rights (and for their pay and conditions) against a government and an employing class that profits from grinding them down.
If currently non-unionised workers see the union movement successfully defending their rights, it could open the doors for a surge of union recruitment. So the more forward-looking union leaders should support this strategic approach.
What can socialists do to involve more non-union workers and to provide a more radical political and organisational lead for union and non-union members alike?
Here in Christchurch the
Workers Rights Campaign was established as a coalition of radical left activists when the first Fire at Will law was passed last year. Now an enlarged group of leftists is organising against the new attacks. Following from the first protest the Sunday before last, a second protest has been called for
August 8.
It sounds like similar radical coalitions are forming in other parts of the country.
Many within this group share the general desire to link this struggle with an anti-capitalist analysis of why these attacks are happening and what workers can do about it.
So a joint leaflet (and or posters and billboards) is one possibility. Let’s say we agreed on a leaflet combining an a notice about the upcoming actions with arguments against the attacks and an anti-capitalist analysis. We’d need to distribute a fair number to have any real impact on the political consciousness of the Christchurch working class. How many could we afford to print? How many could we distribute? Could we do 30,000? 30 people letter-boxing 1000 each? What would that cost $1000?
It seems to me that’s the sort of scale (on the upper limits of what’s possible) that we need to be looking at, if we’re serious both about reaching out to the working class and pushing the political boundaries of this campaign.
