Socialist Movement trade union conference: Trade union left moves ahead
Labour Briefing1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
550 trade unionists — the overwhelming majority of them non-aligned militants — attended the conference organised by the Socialist Movement in Sheffield on November 11th and 12th.
This highly successful event represented an important development for the left in the unions and the fight-back against New Realism, and could not have come at a better time given the current rise in struggle and the beginnings of a regeneration of the unions at rank and file level.
The conference was sponsored by over 40 labour movement organisations; and 160 trade union branches and nine trades councils sent 250 official delegates to it. There were 57 members of NALGO, 16 CPSA, 23 MSF, 22 NUJ, 18 NUM, 16 NUPE, 18 NUR, 33 NUT and 22 TGWU, plus members of most other TUC affiliated unions.
The opening plenary was chaired by Jeremy Corbyn MP and featured Tony Benn, Micky Fenn (victimised Tilbury Docks Steward), Anne Speed (Irish TGWU), Anne Henderson (NUR Broad Left), Debbie Epstein (LGLGR and STA), Kim Moody (Labor Notes US), Rauion Corriz (General Motors Barcelona) and an ambulance crew.
The Sunday plenary included representative from four other current disputes — Pergamon, Essex Chronicle, Sheffield CPSA, and Islington NALGO childcarers.
It was the biggest unofficial, rank and file gathering of its kind in Britain for over ten years — showing that despite damage done by Thatcherism there is still a keen response to this kind of organisation.
Many of those attending came from a new generation of trade union militants brought forward by the new mood of rank and file militancy expressed in the industrial actions of the last year and a half, represented most clearly at the moment by the ambulance crews.
But it was not just its size and scope which made the conference important. It was the democratic basis on which it was organised which represented a sharp break from previous initiatives (organised by the LCDTU, the IS/SWP, and BLOC in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s) which were rigidly controlled and discussed only short, unamendable, statements made available on the day.
This conference was organised by a committee elected at the June Socialist Movement conference and discussed a comprehensive policy document circulated in advance and open to amendment via discussion in the 36 workshops held over the weekend.
The political scope of the conference was an important innovation as well. The policy document set out to address not only the more traditional "trade union issues" (the employers' offensive, the anti-union laws, health and safety, new technology, the changing nature of the workforce, privatisation, the defense of the NHS, the fight for higher wages and the defence of working conditions) but also to make the issues of women, blacks, and lesbian and gay workers in the unions a central part of the agenda.
For the first time at such a conference there was an out lesbian women speaker in the opening plenary. It also had sections on ecology and the unions, the Poll Tax, and international issues.
The central themes of the conference were: build a fight-back against new realism; defy the anti-union laws; support those in struggle; and democratise the unions. These were the key lines of divide which the conference sought, with some success, to draw in the trade union movement.
There were a number of important discussions in the workshops. John Palmer introduced the workshop on the Single European Market and 1992 (which developed into a debate between those supporting the policy document which saw 1992 as the reorganisation of capital on a European scale which would have a devastating effect on the working class as big corporations rationalised to meet new conditions) and an attempted amendment (which saw "… the concentration and socialisation of capital symbolised by the market represents a move forward in the organisation of production, creating new structures and links across national boundaries which can only be to the ultimate benefit of workers sharing a common class interest").
This key sentence in the amendment was defeated, but the discussion made an important contribution to an important debate which is as yet under-developed in the British trade union movement.
A debate which did go to the floor of conference was on an amendment on broad lefts and how they should be organised. The workshop on broad lefts adopted an amendment which outlined a series of principles on which all broad lefts should be based.
No one disagreed with the principles as such but the extent to which they should be preconditions for supporting broad left formations, as opposed to objectives which socialists should fight for inside the broad lefts themselves, was controversial.
It would have been too restrictive and required broad lefts to be near-perfect political formations before they could be supported by the Socialist Movement. This was not cleared up in the debate since the mover stressed that these were not preconditions, while the seconder stressed that they were.
It was pointed out in the debate that most of the BLs which had sponsored the conference do not meet all the criteria concerned. The amendment was carried against the platform and a strict interpretation of it would represent a potential problem in the relationship between the Socialist Movement and the broad lefts which took part, formally or informally in the conference.
The conference took several important practical initiatives designed to strengthen the work of the Socialist Movement in the unions. A new Socialist Movement Trade Union Steering Committee was elected at the conference from regional meetings of delegates and from caucuses of members of the individual unions.
This committee was charged with carrying out the decisions of the conference, organising the trade union work of the Socialist Movement, and building solidarity with those in struggle.
The Socialist Movement plans to publish the agreed policy statement almost immediately as a pamphlet for sale in the trade unions. Various other practical decisions of the conference will be implemented as well - including caucuses of members of several of the unions present, a conference on the Poll Tax and the possibilty of a conference of the European left.