CWU: don't leave Labour

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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WHEN Peter Mandelson starts quoting Margaret Thatcher soundbites at trade unionists, the implicit tactlessness is almost certainly perfectly deliberate. While New Labour plans to sell a 30% stake in Royal Mail to the private sector might fail anyway – simply because nobody is willing to stump up enough cash – the business secretary insists the government ‘are not for turning’ on the issue.

Those shocking words – exactly the ones to emerge from the mouth of the former prime minister in one of her best-known speeches in the 1980s – constitute either a Freudian slip indicative of Mandy’s subliminal attraction to Thatcherism, or were purposely chosen to highlight arrogant contempt for the organised working class.

No surprise, then, that the Communication Workers Union conference, which meets in Bournemouth next week, will hear strong calls for disaffiliation from Labour. A motion from Coventry branch argues that the CWU ‘cannot continue to support a political party whose government continues to ignore the interests of our members’. Read the full text of this and other similar resolutions here.

Disaffiliation was defeated in 2007, but the union has already promised to ballot the membership on the withdrawal of funds from the Labour Party if the Royal Mail sell-off goes ahead.

Ironically, former CWU general secretary Alan Johnson sits in the cabinet as secretary of state for health, and may even find himself a stop-gap prime minister if Brown can be defenestrated prior to Labour’s crushing defeat at the next general election.

The CWU is not one of the unions I have cause to follow for work these days, so I won’t make any predictions about which way the vote will go. But while I absolutely understand, and even sympathise with, the arguments set to be advanced by backers of the motion, I nevertheless hope it fails.

The reality is that disaffiliation – contrary to hopes that the CWU will sign up to some radical labour movement regroupment – is rather more likely to result in further trade union depoliticisation.

Unions and the Labour Party have parted company before, of course. Labour effectively kicked out transport union RMT in 2004, when some of its Scottish branches decided to donate funds to the Scottish Socialist Party. The FBU, which represents firefighters, quit that same year in disgust at the government’s stance during its 2002 strike over pay and conditions. Proposals to rejoin have since been defeated on a number of occasions.

The RMT has not pulled out of the political arena, and is the driving force behind the No2EU slate in next Thursday’s eurovote. But this project has, to put it politely, failed to take off, and leader Bob Crow is rightly reticent to hitch the union’s wagon to any of the existing far left formations.

Meanwhile, the FBU – now headed by my old Bethnal Green Labour Party Young Socialists comrade Matt Wrack – has little by way of an organised political presence, despite signing up to a number of leftist pressure groups.

CWU leader Billy Hayes is seen as part of the trade union awkward squad, and plainly has some sort of political relationship with the Socialist Workers’ Party, making him one of the few general secretaries ever known to contribute articles to SWP-backed bulletins ostensibly aimed at the rank and file.

But Hayes seems to be staking his strategy on the hope that the union can somehow sweet-talk Gordon Brown out of pushing ahead with privatisation, purely by polite request and logical reasoning. While I do not know him personally, he does not strike me as another Crow or Wrack.

What follows is a judgement call, rather than an issue of principle. It is obviously barking to maintain that unions should be wedded to Labour at all times and in all circumstances. But a more sensible immediate approach for the CWU would be to join forces with other Labour-affiliated unions to throw the weight they still collectively possess behind a agenda that takes trade union concerns on board, including the right to put forward political resolutions to Labour Party conference.

With election defeat likely to dictate an entirely new balance of internal forces inside Labour within the next year or two, such a task is likely to prove easier than it might appear right now. There is little to lose by staying in and gearing up for a fight.

[baldrick]

http://www.davidosler.com/2009/06/cwu_d ... abour.html
But a more sensible immediate approach for the CWU would be to join forces with other Labour-affiliated unions to throw the weight they still collectively possess behind a agenda that takes trade union concerns on board, including the right to put forward political resolutions to Labour Party conference.

That is exactly what the CWU did do before the last General Election, getting the Labour Party Conference
to commit to keeping Royal Mail in public ownership, and including that pledge in it's election manifesto.
But we all know that with the return of the unelected lord Mandelson, that pledge has been ignored.
I hope that CWU conference next week votes for an immediate ballot on disaffiliation if the part-privatisation
goes ahead.

[k979aaa]

Next they will be telling us they have no expenses and we had to do postal liberalisation because the EU told us so not that they planed too liberate first and sell later for a big juicy profit!. But the money was not their as they fu*ked the economy up and the cupboard was bear so they seek to sell the family sliver set for all they can get!. NEW LABOUR = NEW DECEIT!.