Unite shadow boxes in the face of transport privatisation

The cancellation of the bus and rail strike planned for May 6th by Unite is not surprising. The union leadership’s promise to put up a fight against Stormont’s austerity policies was always less than convincing. The complete lack of co ordination between the different trade unions reflected their support for the Stormont settlement and turned opposition to cuts into shadow boxing aimed at bamboozling their members.

Following the day of action on the 13th of March ICTU called a truce and returned to the status quo ante of lobbying the political parties to seek the dispensation of patronage and clemency. This mechanism can only lead to ICTU agreeing to manage the cuts. What then of the ‘left’ led by Jimmy Kelly of Unite?

One of the groups of workers most threatened by Stormont’s austerity plans were Translink employees who had become increasingly worried about the effects of these cuts on their job prospects and the advancement of the privatisation agenda. It was a groundswell of anger among these transport workers that led to the call for an extension of the previous successful day of action and the opening of a concerted campaign against austerity. 

The Unite leadership’s response was to agree to a further day of action but it was half hearted from the start. Apart from an initial announcement no attempt was made to consult with the membership on tactics or strategy or to make or communicate plans for the action. 

Even up to the last moment the local shop stewards had received no notification of the details of the strike. No publicity had been produced, no posters or flyers printed, no speakers or local union rallies planned. 

As the strike day neared the only thing produced by the union officials was a blustering press release in the form of an open letter to Danny Kennedy from the Unite Official Davy McMurray complaining of the lack of “consultation” and threatening that Unite would “not stand idly by and watch as our public transport system is decimated”. The entire leadership then proceeded to “stand idly by”.

The pressure from some sections of the drivers most likely to be impacted by the cuts and the introduction of the new Belfast cross-city transport system has produced a ‘sandwich’ which has trapped a layer of lay functionaries between an obvious sellout by the full time bureaucrats and an increasingly angry workforce. Union full timers refused to allow lay members to accompany them, as they usually do, on their delegation to Stormont on Friday May 1st. 

The promises made by Minister Danny Kennedy, on which the strike was called off, are nothing new. He stated that the brunt of privatization would not be borne by frontline services but that was always management’s claim. All that was brought back from the meeting at Stormont was an agreement to allow time to Unite to agree their own “efficiency proposals” for Translink, otherwise known as cuts.  

The cuts agenda is not going away, the global capitalist crisis is enforcing its persistence, and a fight back has to take place otherwise the austerity measures will be implemented in one form or another. An agreement that allows transport to borrow from other budgets will allow the Stormont government to divide and conquer the working class. A deal that saves some bus routes but puts downward pressure on wages and conditions, or a deal that may save some jobs in transport at the expense of jobs in health or education is divisive. The only alternative is to build a coherent programme of action by all unions against the Stormont House Deal, but ICTU, seeing the implications, have already refused that option, which explains the present debacle. 

Trade unionism is not ‘finished’, as some would have it! The anger at rank and file level must express itself organizationally if it is to build a new rejuvenated trade unionism. This can only start by communicating grievances, not vertically to the full timers but horizontally to other groups of discontented workers in all bus and rail depots and to concerned groups of transport users and community organisations concerned at the withdrawal of services. It must build for coordinated action with workers in all unions and anti austerity campaigns on both sides of the border, in particular the anti water charges campaign and against the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest by Stormont’s planned cuts in corporation tax. 

Above all we need a political fight, not just against disparate cuts in various unrelated sectors but against the reactionary sectarian political façade at Stormont which agreed to them and coordinates their implementation. What the British state wants is to maintain that façade but the working class has been thrown into opposition to plans for austerity that threaten Stormont’s very existence. It is a struggle, the victorious resolution of which, as we have seen by the current debacle, is far beyond the imagination of the ICTU leadership who are in full retreat. But, it can be won if there is a systematic, coordinated working class fight back. The growing pressure coming from rank and file workers shows us that fight back can, and must, be built from the bottom up.