Good union

Off to parliament for a good session on the fight for a Trade Union Freedom Bill:

It's 7pm on a nice autumn evening, and several hundred trade union activists are gathered at a lobby at the House of Commons, having a fabulous time taking the piss out of T&G general secretary Tony Woodley. As you do.

The lobby is part of an ambitious, united union campaign to interest our hopeless Labour government in the idea of repealing this nation's draconian anti-trade union laws and putting a slightly more humane Trade Union Freedom Act in their place (one that at least allows people to take solidarity strike action). The large audience (it spills over into several committee rooms in the House) is made of up of posties, firefighters, prison officers, union reps, nurses, local government people and tube and train-driving people.

They are all normal, everyday persons whose various attempts to fight for decent pay and conditions in the last ten years have largely been fragged by New Labour's refusal to get rid of the anti-union laws and restore some balance in favour of everyday punters who just want to make a living (as opposed to a killing, like New Labour's neocon and city-bonus mates). The truth is that low-paid people will have almost no means to fight attempts to drive their wages down further while laws preventing solidarity strike action stand.

Anyway... New Labour, whose ex-very own Tony Blair cheerfully bragged about overseeing the most oppressive anti-union laws in Europe and repeatedly ignored Labour conference's calls to get shot of those laws, ain't exactly the most popular gig on the grassroots union circuit. Nor is anyone who tries to argue that unions should keep financing the Labour party.

You don't have to follow life too closely to understand that these are sensitive times on the union front. The posties are none too thrilled about their pay, pensions and conditions, or the salaries that Royal Mail's senior management person pay themselves while crying poor, the Prison Officers' Association faces court and fine action for walking out in August, local government members are being balloted to strike over their latest pay offer, and the PCS is trying to deal with 100,000 civil service job cuts. The fallout on the ground, which is where it counts, is brutal. Very low-paid people (the ones trying to live on £200 or less a week) get sacked when they ask for a few extra quid. Behind closed doors, Labour-affiliated unions like Unison are busy targeting activists who are either leftwing embarassments, and/or who refuse to toe New Labour's various anti-poor-people lines.

Which is all a very long way of saying that you have to pick your moment if you want to peddle the notion that the Labour Party is worth fighting for from a union perspective. This probably isn't the moment. Nonetheless, there's old Woodley up on the stage, yabbering on about the joys of intimacy between the unions and Labour, and predicting an ugly end for any unionist who dares to suggest cutting emotional and financial ties with Gordon Brown's New Labour.

This is taken - rightly - by the crowd to be a pointed commentary on the antics of the RMT and its majestically confrontational and popular general secretary Bob Crow. Crow sits very quietly behind Woodley during all this. He flicks his eyes up at Woodley's back every now and then, like he's measuring Woodley for a coffin.

Woodley is indifferent to danger. He launches himself upon an ode to the potential inherent in developing strong union links with Constituency Labour Party branches. The CLPS, Woodley says, can be encouraged to support union priorities. Sadly, he fails to mention that most CLPs couldn't support union priorities even if they wanted to. They can't even support themselves. That's because CLPS barely exist anymore. Most of them have next-to-no members, or have disappeared altogether, and that's because at least 200,000 Labour Party members have torn up their membership cards over the last ten years and departed the scene entirely.

All of which the crowd knows.

'Piss off.'

'Shut up.'

'They've had ten years to listen to us, Tony.'

'Where have you been.'

Crow sits admirably still. His own speech went down very well, not least because he politely avoided the subject of the Labour Party, and stuck to points like wages and terms and conditions. It's all very obvious to Bob, really. 'You have to have the right to take solidarity action. All the poverty is not going to go away if you don't sort this out,' he says.

Prevailing media and political preoccupations have him climbing the walls. 'I mean - inheritance tax. Who gives a stuff about inheritance tax? That affects six percent of the population. Why are we even talking about inheritance tax? ... We've got MPs who are not voting for the Trade Union Freedom Bill, but they're still taking TU money. It's unbelievable. UNBELIEVABLE. No wonder we can't get young people excited about [this movement]. Looking at the TUC conference this year, it was like the night of the living dead. The truth is that we're not roughing them up enough (the government and management). We've got to campaign for this at every election... '

Brian Caton, General Secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, is also on excellent form. He reveals that his union is facing crippling fines for walking out of prisons at the end of August this year. He remains no fan of the charming Secretary of Justice Jack Straw, either.

'The Secretary of Justice thinks we should be condemned [for taking the August strike action], but that's not the reaction we got when we put our reasons forward. It was about conditions and the way that we were being treated. [The prisons are] filthy, and we are looking after thousands of mentally-ill people that should be looked after by a properly-resourced NHS. In some of our prisons, about 90% of people have got mental health issues. They shouldn't be in there. Prison is not the right place for them to be.'

And as for 'the disgusting state of our prisons now... there are 81,000 people in the prisons. There are more black people in prisons than there are at university... we are professionals that work in these places and we believe that we have a responsibility. We do not want this government driving down wages and standards to the standards of the privateers who are obscenely profiting from prisoners. The government has to tackle offending in the right ways, rather than just competing [with other political parties] to just lock up more people.'

Too true, says PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka, who adds that a rescue fund should be set up if anybody tries to fine Caton's POA out of existence for striking. And as for the Trade Union Freedom Bill: 'how can any Labour MPs say that they don't support this? When they [Labour] were in opposition, they supported it [repealing Thatcher's anti-union laws]. Then, Tony Blair turned up and said that the UK had the most restrictive trade union laws in Europe - he said this as though it was a badge of honour. ..and it's okay for [city people to get] huge city bonuses, but apparently our workers have to be stopped from standing together to get small pay rises, because they're causing inflation.'

Perhaps the most useful point of the night comes from Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union. He rightly points out that the last thing working people want to do is take strike action. 'They lose pay, and it's frightening [for them] to take on management [in that way]. If they do [take strike action], it shows that there is great injustice in the workplace... Billions are handed out each year in city bonuses, while so many other people are living in poverty. We can only really fight poverty once the anti-union laws are broken. We don't want the huge hurdle that is anti-union laws [while we're] fighting for a more just society.'