Wildcat

 

MANAGERS AND UNIONS ACT IN UNISON

[proposed article for Wildcat 17 – not published]

In August and September 1993, there was a strike at University College Hospital, London. The National Health Service is being commercialised, which means competition between hospitals for less funding. The result is that hospital management, an increasingly ruthless rat pack of yuppie scum, are rationalising the service by moving patients and equipment to more central locations, closing down hospitals, increasing waiting lists for operations and the time taken by ambulances to reach casualty departments.

We made numerous mistakes. There was too much respect for the strike committee. At the beginning of the occupation we just hung around waiting for the strike committee to support us. There was no attempt to go to the strike committee meeting and demand support from the workers. We should have set up an occupation committee, and tried to ensure its domination by the more politically advanced people involved, in other words, ourselves. Such a committee would have been able to send delegates to the strike committee, and argue against the shop stewards. There was a fear of being too well organised and openly political, well expressed by the leaflets we put out. The first leaflet was signed "Health Users' Group", a nice, non-political name, and the contents were similarly harmless, calling on people to support the strike, avoiding the union question completely, although the people who produced this leaflet are all perfectly aware that unions have been stitching up strikes since before the first world war.

The more advanced elements in the occupation held a separate meeting to discuss what to do about the leftist take-over. There was no agreement. A member of Wildcat argued that we already were a political faction, since we were having an exclusive meeting, separate from the occupation, consisting of people chosen solely on a political basis, and not because we were "local residents" who merely wanted to "defend our needs". Comrades responded that we mustn't fall into the trap of behaving like the SWP. But for revolutionaries to organise against the manoeuvres of the left, and tell workers that that is what we are doing, does not mean we have become like them. We should have openly fought as an organised force against union sabotage. Claiming that this would have given the SWP "more to go on" is wrong. The SWP sussed us out straight away, and moved like clockwork to neutralise our influence on the course of the occupation. There is no point in trying to hide our politics from these seasoned stitch-up merchants, and still less in hiding them from the workers.

We are not suggesting that the workers were straining at the UNISON leash. The workers sold themselves out, by accepting that the union is in some sense "theirs". The health service is unique in that it is not necessary to bring out all the workers on strike, since obviously health service workers do not want to harm patients, and that it is relatively easy to spread the struggle to other workplaces. The nurses tried to call for support via their shop stewards' contacts with other shop stewards -- a waste of time. They seemed to have forgotten that in 1988, a few nurses were able to close down car factories and the Yorkshire coal field (before it was permanently closed down by the government!) by simply standing outside, appealing directly to other workers for support. Some workers were shocked at the behaviour of management, let alone the union. This is because the NHS used to be run in a friendly, paternalistic style. British workers believe the NHS belongs to them, as they used to think about the whole capitalist state, which wasn't even true before social democracy was abandoned.

The working class in Britain has had 150 years' experience of trade unions sabotaging their struggles, but still has not organised against them to any significant degree. If this is going to happen it won't be because workers in particular struggles see through "their own" unions and draw all the right conclusions. Class consciousness and organisation doesn't just arise from direct personal experience but also from political study and activity. We know that the unions are always reactionary, not just from our experience in workplaces and on picket lines but because we are part of a communist tradition which remembers what most of the class has forgotten.