Lionel Jospin and Trotskyism: the debate over the French prime minister’s past

Lionel Jospin and Trotskyism: the debate over the French prime minister’s past


By Peter Schwarz

27 June 2001



For three weeks, the French press has been full of revelations about the alleged Trotskyist past of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
It started when an interview was published in Paris’s Aujourd’hui with Patrick Dierich, a former member of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI, International Communist Organisation). The 56-year old astronomer, who was an OCI member from 1968 to 1986, told the paper that he knew Jospin in 1971 as a member of the party: “There’s no mistake. It was during the summer of 1971. I was in the same party branch as him. He was Comrade ‘Michel’, and I was Comrade ‘Blum’. We all used pseudonyms.”
Dierich’s claims are not new. Similar rumours have circulated since 1995, without there being any concrete proof up to now. Jospin always rejected these allegations, saying he was being mistaken for his brother Olivier, who had been a prominent member of the OCI into the 1980s.
The revelations made by Dierich were followed by an interview with another former OCI member, the now eighty-year-old Boris Fraenkel, which was published on the web site of the weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur. Fraenkel comes from a German Jewish family and was born in Danzig, in what was then East Prussia. He fled the Nazis to Switzerland, settling in France after the war, where he was a founding member of the Trotskyist OCI.
Fraenkel reported that he got to know Jospin in 1964 and taught him politics in his apartment for over a year. “Lionel Jospin came to see me regularly, to take part in a revolutionary studies group. This was the necessary training before joining the Trotskyist movement. As my comrades liked to say, my speciality was finding young left-wingers and catching them in my net. At that time, Jospin was studying at the École Nationale D’administration [ENA, the university for the French political elite]. I trained him in secret. A future top state official wouldn’t want to be known as a revolutionary. Through our discussions we became friends.”
As proof of his friendship with Jospin, Fraenkel tendered a postcard signed “Lionel”, which the latter had sent him at that time while on vacation. In 1966, Fraenkel reported, he was expelled from the OCI and lost contact with Jospin. He presumes that the leader of the OCI, Pierre Lambert, continued to keep in contact with Jospin, but he cannot say for sure. Fraenkel was expelled from the OCI for championing the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilisation he translated into French.
When asked about these recently published claims during parliamentary questions in the National Assembly, Jospin admitted for the first time that he actually had been connected with the Trotskyist movement. “It is true that in the 1960s I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas, and I established relations with one of the groups of this political movement,” he said. “It was a personal, intellectual and political journey over which, if I may use the word, I have no reason to become redfaced.”
Jospin said he had “made the acquaintance of some remarkable people through these contacts” and this had contributed to his development. He had “nothing to regret and nothing to apologise for”.
He had stressed on previous occasions that he was “a child of Suez and Budapest”. This is an allusion to the invasion of Egypt by British and French troops (social democrat Guy Mollet was then premier of France) and the defeat of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops in 1956. Jospin was nineteen at the time.
One day later, Jospin went into more detail about his contacts with the OCI in an interview that was specially arranged with Radio Europe 1. He said he had come to know a “number of strong personalities there, combative workers, autodidacts, sometimes intellectuals”. This was a “useful counterpoint—I could say, almost an antidote—to my outstanding education at the ENA”. He made “experiences with radicalism” and acquired the ability to understand it “better than many others”.
The newspaper Le Monde has also published a long article about “Lionel Jospin’s Trotskyist past”. The paper claims that in June 1971, Jospin joined the Socialist Party (PS) as a “mole”, i.e., as a secret member of the OCI. Le Monde cites some ten witnesses who claim to have worked with Jospin from the summer of 1969 to the autumn of 1971 in an OCI local branch. Apart from Patrick Dierich and a certain Yvan Berrebi, the paper does not name any of these other witnesses.
Le Monde further maintains that Jospin was in close contact with the OCI throughout the 1970s and only broke off relations with OCI leader Pierre Lambert in 1987, six years after Jospin was elected first secretary of the Socialist Party. This is based on the assertions of two more anonymous witnesses, who claim to have worked as full-time party workers for the OCI in the 1970s. According to them, inside the OCI’s Paris offices Lambert made no secret of his relations with Jospin. In April 1980 he boasted that he had helped Jospin prepare a television debate with Communist Party (CPF) leader Georges Marchais.
Attempts by Le Monde to find out more details from former leading members of the OCI failed. Pierre Lambert, now 84, has refused to make any statement. Daniel Gluckstein, national secretary of the Parti des Travailleurs (PT, Workers Party), the successor organisation to the OCI, said he was only prepared to speak about the Jospin of today: “The rest does not concern us. Jospin’s past is his own problem, not ours.” The historian Pierre Broué said he knew nothing. Charles Berg, secretary of the OCI’s youth movement AJS at the beginning of the 1970s, and according to Le Monde responsible for the OCI’s entryist work in the Socialist Party, refused to make any public statement.
However Berg, who was expelled from the OCI in 1979 and today works as a television producer under the name Jacques Kirsner, had already acknowledged in a 1999 article for Libération that the OCI enjoyed relations with Jospin: “For many years, we fought politically alongside Lionel Jospin and shared the same revolutionary, socialist and democratic convictions.”
Asked on Radio Europe 1 about the claims made in Le Monde, Jospin did not deny that there had been meetings and discussions. They were, however, of a “private character” and had not touched his “public and open work in the Socialist Party.”
Questioned whether he had joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1971 as a “mole” of the OCI, and when exactly he had ended his political and intellectual relations with the OCI, Jospin responded by saying he had joined the PS freely and had always acted freely in the Socialist Party. “Ever since I bore any responsibilities in the Socialist Party—that is, since 1973—I acted fully as a member of the Socialists. Everything else was based on contacts and discussions, which I might have perhaps had, but which were purely private and in no way public. Look at what I did between 1973 and 1981, and afterwards, as education minister and in other functions, and see if there was the slightest problem with that!”
Public reactions to Jospin’s confession were rather restrained. From his own camp, he received almost unanimous support. Some representatives of the opposition tried to utilise the affair politically, and reports emerged that in President Jacques Chirac’s office the history of the Trotskyist movement is being scrutinised for ammunition in the upcoming presidential election campaign. Jospin will probably be the Socialist Party candidate in 2002 against the Gaullist incumbent Chirac.
Jospin is not so much attacked for his contacts with the OCI as for having kept them secret so long. Contacts with radical groups in one’s youth are not unusual in France, where the radicalisation of the 1960s involved broad layers. Even the Gaullist Chirac has admitted publicly that he sold the Stalinist newspaper l’Humanité in his youth.
Jospin’s closest circle includes numerous functionaries who still belonged to radical organisations in the 1980s. For example, Jean Christophe Cambadélis, a parliamentary deputy for Paris and one of Jospin’s most important supporters inside the Socialist Party, was a member of the OCI central committee until 1986.
The OCI, Mitterrand and the “Union of the Left” (Union de la Gauche)
Jospin’s latest admissions about his radical past may have been made primarily for tactical reasons. By making them public now, he may be hoping to prevent his adversaries from using such revelations as ammunition in next year’s election campaign. But beyond such passing political considerations, Jospin’s connections with the OCI raise more fundamental questions. How is it that a man, who showed sympathies for Trotskyist ideas and possibly belonged to a section of the Fourth International at the age of 30, stands at the head of the French government 25 years later as a trusted representative of the bourgeoisie?
One can only speculate about Jospin’s personal motivations. Only he could provide information about the extent to which he actually supported Trotskyist ideals in his youth—something he obviously does not intend to do. There is, however, an obvious connection between Jospin’s career and the development of the OCI itself, which rapidly turned away from Trotskyist principles at the end of the 1960s, when Jospin was in close contact with the organisation. In 1971, the year Jospin joined the Socialist Party, the OCI broke organisationally with the International Committee the Fourth International, to which it had belonged up to then as the French section.
In 1971, the OCI pursued a political line that no longer had anything in common with Trotsky’s conceptions, but could easily be accommodated to the aims of Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand. It is indicative that both Patrick Dierich and Jospin himself assume Mitterrand was informed about Jospin’s contacts with the OCI and did not have any objections.
According to Dierich, Mitterrand “knew all about his [Jospin’s] dual membership. Don’t forget, he was a former interior minister! ... At that time, we were not of the opinion that the Communist Party stood closer to the workers than the Socialist Party. Moreover, from an electoral point of view, only a PS candidate could beat the right wing. Therefore, one had to help Mitterrand. Jospin did that in his own way. Objectively, the OCI was an ally of the Socialists.”
Mitterrand quickly favoured Jospin and by 1973 had already brought him into the national secretariat of the party. Jospin acknowledged on Radio Europe 1 that his contact with the OCI did not pose any obstacle. Asked whether Mitterrand knew anything, he answered: “In my opinion, somebody must have whispered in his ear about it, but we certainly never spoke about it. I believe he was pleased by what I did.”
In June 1971, at the congress of Épinay, Mitterrand took over the leadership of the Socialist Party in a carefully prepared surprise move. In contrast to the old leadership under Guy Mollet, which had been in office since end of the war and was completely tied to the conceptions of the Cold War, Mitterrand advocated the unity of the left, “ l’union de la Gauche”. By this he understood both a widening of the Socialist Party—at that time limping far behind the Communist Party with the voters—through the integration of republican and splintered socialist currents, and an alliance with the Communist Party, in which the Socialists would play the leading role.
In pursuing this course, Mitterrand was in no sense acting as a left-winger or committed socialist. An official under the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and a bourgeois minister in the Fourth Republic, he was a man of great political ambition but without great political convictions. This made him all the more adroit in exploiting the convictions of others—a sort of modern-day Joseph Fouché*. Already in 1965 he had stood against General de Gaulle as the common candidate of the left and achieved a considerable result—only to be politically marginalised again soon after.
The student revolt and the general strike of May-June 1968 gave new impetus to Mitterrand’s efforts to form a “Union of the Left”. The Fifth Republic was shaken to its foundations. President de Gaulle had temporarily lost control of the situation and was only able to maintain office with the aid of the Communist Party. The end of his rule seemed imminent.
The crisis of the regime was a consequence of social changes that had occurred. In the fifties and sixties, France underwent a remarkable economic boom that radically altered the balance between agriculture and industry, reducing the significance of the rural petty bourgeoisie who had long served as a conservative force in French politics. A young, militant working class had grown up in the suburbs of its cities. Owing to the damaged reputation of the Stalinists and the fragmentation of the Socialists, the militancy of these layers threatened to take a revolutionary course.
Under these conditions, the Union of the Left served to contain the movement by channelling it into calmer waters. Although Mitterrand’s past had bequeathed him a tarnished reputation, he was successful—with the help of the Union of the Left—in capturing the imagination of broad layers of workers. Enormous hopes and illusions were fostered in the Union of the Left during the seventies. When Mitterrand was finally elected president in 1981, hundreds of thousands danced in the streets—though not for long. Mitterrand was soon to thwart the hopes they had invested in him.
In 1971 the OCI played a decisive role in propping up the hopes and illusions roused by Mitterrand. It provided him with valuable and welcome support from the left.
Following de Gaulle’s resignation in April 1969, the OCI had elevated the demand for a common presidential candidate supported by the Socialist and Communist parties to the axis of its political strategy. It designated this policy a “united workers’ front”, expressly emphasising that it was not merely a tactical demand, but a central strategy. The OCI claimed that this strategy arose from the necessity to counterpose the working class, as an independent class, to the bourgeoisie, its state and its government. “The answer to the question of government power resolves itself into the question of the united workers’ front,” stated the OCI’s newspaper, La Vérité (No. 544, p. 10). “It is indispensable for the solution of the question of power and the state,” the article continued.
The claim that the election of a candidate supported by both Socialists and Stalinists would amount to bringing the working class to power was nonsensical. For decades both parties had demonstrated their loyalty to the bourgeois state. But as a left fig leaf for Mitterrand’s politics, the demand proved effective. When the left failed to produce a common candidate in 1969, the OCI denounced the PS and CPF for “destroying the class front of the proletariat”. Michel Rocard’s United Socialist Party (PSU) and Alain Krivine’s Communist League, which had stood their own candidates, were also condemned by the OCI for “splitting the class front”.
Mitterrand obviously appreciated support from this side. The OCI was not only promoting his ends; it could also supply him with useful political forces. Gérard Leclerc and Florence Muracciole, biographers of Jospin, describe the OCI of those days (then under the name, International Communist Party, PCI) as follows: “Given impetus by the events of May 1968, the PCI was in an upswing at the beginning of the seventies. It had almost 8,000 members and could mobilise tens of thousands more—above all, thanks to its youth organisation, the Alliance of Youth for Socialism (AJS)... It controlled the UNEF-ID, the most important student organisation, and was well established in numerous branches of the Force Ouvrière trade union... It was also very active in the teachers’ trade union and even—although very discreetly—in the CGT [the Communist Party-controlled trade union]”. (Lionel Jospin, L’héritier Rebelle”, pp. 43-44)
In 1971 Mitterrand even appeared as principal speaker at a ceremony organised and stewarded by the OCI to mark the centenary of the Paris Commune.
The OCI and the Fourth International
When Jospin came into contact with the OCI in 1964, it was the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI had been founded in 1953 to defend orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloism, an opportunistic tendency lead by Michael Pablo and later by Ernest Mandel. The OCI’s break from the ICFI and its support for Mitterrand severed the French working class from the programme of the Fourth International and thereby deprived it of any revolutionary alternative. This is one of the most important causes of the current crisis of the labour movement, which has proven unable to defend its social and political achievements despite repeated militant struggles. To understand this issue, a short digression into the history of the Fourth International is necessary.
The struggle against Pabloism revolved around the fundamental orientation of the programme of the Trotskyist movement.
When Leon Trotsky took the initiative of founding the Fourth International in the 1930s, he was drawing the consequences of the fact that both the Second (social democratic) and Third (communist) Internationals had hopelessly degenerated and had exhausted their potential as instruments for social progress. Social democracy had proved itself to be the loyal accomplice of the bourgeoisie ever since the first world war. The Communist International had been transformed into a tool of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, and was responsible for catastrophic defeats of the international labour movement. Particularly as a result of the defeat of the German proletariat—paralysed in the face of Hitler’s takeover due to the disastrous policies of the German Communist Party (KPD)—Trotsky drew the conclusion that the Communist International was no longer of any use in the struggle for socialist revolution.
Henceforth, the crisis of leadership in the working class could be resolved only through the construction of new proletarian parties as sections of the Fourth International. “The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the bureaucracies of the Second and Third, Amsterdam and Anarcho-syndicalist Internationals as on their centrist satellites...These organisations are not pledges of the future, but decayed survivals of the past,” declared the founding programme of the Fourth International, published in 1938.
Pabloism repudiated this perspective. Impressed by the scale of nationalisations implemented by the Stalinist bureaucracy in countries occupied by the Red Army after the Second World War, Pablo proclaimed that the Stalinist bureaucracy—under the pressure of objective events—was capable of reforming itself. The evolution towards socialism, for centuries, would take the form of “deformed workers’ states” like those formed in Eastern Europe at the time. Accordingly, the task of the Fourth International no longer consisted in fighting the Stalinist parties, but of influencing them, of recognising progressive tendencies within their ranks or dissolving itself into the Stalinist parties completely.
Pabloism was later to apply this perspective to a variety of petit-bourgeois movements—Mao’s peasant army, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas, diverse national liberation movements and student movements of the 1960s. The tenor of the perspective was always the same: it was not the working class under its own, independent banner that was the bearer of the socialist revolution, but rather other social forces that would move to the left under the pressure of objective events.
The French Trotskyists split over this question. In 1952, the Pabloite minority expelled the orthodox Trotskyist majority with the backing of the International Secretariat controlled by Pablo. The majority, later to become the OCI, affiliated itself with the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1953. The minority remained with the revisionist International (later, the United) Secretariat. The Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), today led by Alan Krivine, developed out of this Pabloite minority. There was also a third tendency in France that claimed to be Trotskyist but had refused to join the Fourth International in 1938—today’s Lutte Ouvrière (LO-Workers’ Struggle) led by Arlette Laguiller. This party was strongly oriented toward syndicalism and viewed the international conflict over program and principles with contempt.
In the mid-1960s, the OCI placed a question mark over the International Committee’s fight against Pabloism. Initially, this manifested itself in its claim that the Fourth International had become moribund: that it had been destroyed by Pabloism and had to be rebuilt.
The Socialist Labour League (SLL), the British section of the International Committee, vehemently opposed this contention. In 1967 it wrote to the OCI: “The future of the Fourth International is represented in the stored-up hatred and experience of millions of workers for the Stalinists and reformists who betray their struggles. The Fourth International must consciously fight for leadership to meet this need.... Only this struggle against revisionism can prepare the cadres to take the leadership of the millions of workers drawn into the struggle against capitalism and against the bureaucracy... the living struggle against Pabloism and the training of cadres and parties on the basis of this struggle was the life of the Fourth International in the years since 1952.” (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol. 5, London 1975, pp. 107-114)
On the eve of the great class struggles of 1968, the SLL also warned about the consequences of the OCI’s sceptical standpoint: “Now the radicalisation of workers in western Europe is proceeding rapidly, particularly in France... There is always a danger at such a stage of development that a revolutionary party responds to the situation in the working class not in a revolutionary way, but by an adaptation to the level of struggle to which the workers are restricted by their own experience under the old leadership—i.e., to the inevitable initial confusion. Such revisions of the fight for the independent party and the Transitional Programme are usually dressed up in the disguise of getting closer to the working class, unity of all those in struggle, not posing ultimatums, abandoning dogmatism, etc.” (ibid., pp. 113-114)
This warning went unheard. The revolts of 1968 propelled thousands of new, inexperienced members into the ranks of the OCI and its youth organisation (AJS), and the OCI leadership adapted itself to their state of confusion. The demand for a “united class front”—also criticised by the SLL in 1967—now became a formula with which the OCI adapted itself to the social democratic bureaucracy and led the newly won forces back to the old bureaucratic apparatuses.
There was no longer any fundamental difference between the views of the OCI and those of the Pabloites. The only difference was that the OCI oriented itself towards social democracy—its enmity toward Stalinism increasingly adapting itself to the anti-communism of social democracy—while the Pabloites maintained their orientation towards the Stalinist parties.
In the seventies, the OCI developed into an important reservoir for youthful recruits to the social democratic bureaucracy. Lionel Jospin is only one of many functionaries who went through the OCI school. According to Henri Weber, who made his way from the Pabloite youth movement LCR to the right wing of the Socialist Party, there are “hundreds of old Trotskyists in the Socialist Party. This is a classical career. You could make a club out of them.” Making an amalgam between orthodox Trotskyists and pseudo-Trotskyists of the Pabloite and OCI variety, he went on the say that Trotskyism was an “excellent school for education”.
Marisol Touraine, a supporter of Jospin, commented on the claim that Jospin went into the Socialist Party as an agent of the OCI with the words: “What is the point of entryism, when in the end everyone ends up a social democrat?”
The OCI also spread its influence through the trade union bureaucracy. In particular, it had close connections with the leadership of Force Ouvrière (FO), the right-wing splitoff that emerged from the Stalinist-dominated CGT. Numerous members of the leadership of the OCI held full-time offices in the apparatus of the FO. Pierre Lambert, the OCI leader, was for a long time a close advisor of André Bergeron, the FO chairman, and Marc Blondel, Bergeron’s successor, is reputed to have owed his post to the support of the OCI.
At the end of the 1980s, the OCI severed itself from the Socialist Party to some extent and cropped up again under the name Parti des Travailleurs (PT-Workers’ Party). But this did not constitute a return to an orthodox Trotskyist line. The PT is a gathering point for right-wing social democratic bureaucrats who have fallen out with the Socialist Party for one reason or another or have failed to obtain coveted posts.
The consequences of the OCI’s politics have been devastating for the working class. During Mitterrand’s fourteen years in power, at first within the Union of the Left and then in cohabitation with the right, the social gains of the working class were systematically dismantled, under conditions in which the workers lacked a political alternative. In the end Mitterrand paved the way for the return to power of the Gaullists.
In the wake of the mass strike movement in the autumn of 1996, Jospin was, to the surprise of the French political establishment and the media, elected prime minister in 1997. But despite occasional left-wing rhetoric, his economic and social policies have basically mirrored those of his conservative predecessor.
Since coming to power Jospin’s “government of the left majority” has largely exhausted the trust invested in it. The Communist Party, in particular, is on the wane. This party, which in its heyday won over 20 percent of the vote, now fluctuates between seven and eight percent and has been overtaken by the Greens.
The current debate about Trotskyism in the French press—accompanied by numerous articles concerning the history of Trotskyism—is intimately bound up with current French politics. In view of the crisis of the Jospin government, the bourgeoisie is on the lookout for new support from the left and is hoping to find it in the “Trotskyists” of Krivine’s LCR and Laguiller’s Lutte Ouvrière. Based on its experience with the OCI, it will hardly be disappointed with the original Pabloite organisation, which by 1953 had already broken with the perspective of the Fourth International. While Lutte Ouvrière clings closely to the trade unions, the LCR is eagerly awaiting an offer for collaboration from the Communist Party.
Neither party has a perspective to offer the working class. For such a perspective, it will be necessary to construct a section of the world party the OCI turned its back on in 1971: the International Committee of the Fourth International.
* Joseph Fouché—a Jacobin and advocate of the harshest measures during the Terror against the old aristocracy and royalists, later chief organizer of the right-wing coup of Thermidor which overthrew the Jacobin dictatorship, he became chief of the national police under the bourgeois Directory (1794-1799), and went on to serve Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial regime in a similar capacity. Fouché became a synonym for the ultimate political survivor, one who combines ruthlessness, unscrupulousness and complete lack of principle.

France: Socialist Party attempts “left” re-packaging of Ségolène Royal

France: Socialist Party attempts “left” re-packaging of Ségolène Royal

By Antoine Lerougetel

28 February 2007



The past two weeks have seen an attempt to repackage Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party (PS) candidate in the French presidential elections April 22, as a more left-wing figure. She declared on France Inter Radio on February 26 that any confusion between the left and the right in French politics “is very dangerous” and would “prevent French people from choosing between two social models, two opposing political visions.”

Royal was asked about the desirability of a “French-style coalition” government (“coalition à la française”), which has been raised as a possibility by François Bayrou, the candidate of the centre-right UDF (Union for French Democracy). She commented “We cannot take France forward with a drop of social policy in an ocean of economic liberalism, which is what both the right-wing candidates are proposing.”

In opinion polls, Bayrou is presently running third with 17 percent of voters choosing him in the first round, behind the ruling Gaullist UMP (Union for a People’s Party) candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Royal, who are both at 28 percent.

This left tack by Royal is instructive. Official circles and the media have insisted that the current presidential election campaign marks a significant departure, in that both Royal and Sarkozy recognise that France’s economic and social problems stem from the failure of the its social democratic model, as opposed to the “Anglo-Saxon model.”

According to this argument, the supposed commitment to “égalité” [equality] has to be put aside. Moreover, the considerable cost of the French welfare state, which creates an environment “not conducive to business,” has to be reduced. Above all, the pundits argue that the country’s problems have been epitomised by the inability of French governments to push though the economic and social “reforms” required in the face of the determined resistance of the working class and the youth over the past two decades.
The mass mobilisation of 2006 against the CPE First Job Contract was the most recent expression of this resistance, which also exploded in the form of the riots on urban council estates in the autumn of 2005 in defiance of the law-and-order methods imposed by the UMP government.

Both Royal and Sarkozy present themselves as candidates of “change” and put forward right-wing remedies hostile to the interests of the broad mass of the people.
Sarkozy proclaims himself the representative of a “rupture”—a break with past compromises, a strong man, an avowed economic liberal who, at the same time, is aware of the dangers of social divisions in France and the discrediting of the political establishment.
He proposes to combine pro-business policies with measures to win a popular base in sections of the middle class and even the working class by allowing them to become homeowners and by eliminating “disincentives to hard work” such as the 35-hour week and high levels of taxation. Alongside the profound undercurrents of anti-Islamic racism in his campaign, he proposes positive discrimination (affirmative action) to secure a social base in the immigrant middle class. His initiative in setting up the CFCM (French Council of the Muslim Religion) had the same objective.

Royal initially portrayed herself, with the necessary caveats, to be the French equivalent of Britain’s Tony Blair—a “moderniser” who recognised that the old-style social reformism could no longer be sustained. She proposes a more business-friendly programme with lower taxes and targeted, as opposed to universal, welfare provisions. At the same time, she offered herself as the best candidate to prevent the eruption of further social struggles—“a calmed-down France.”
Like Blair, she made much of her relative independence from the Socialist Party apparatus as proof that she was capable of pushing through economic reforms without bowing to pressure from the working class.

It must be noted in this regard, however, that one of Sarkozy’s innovations has been an attempt to cultivate the trade unions as a means of pushing through his policies.
Unfortunately for Royal, the first weeks of the campaign exposed the fault-line running through her programme: in trying to please everyone, she pleased no one. In the first place, her economic appeal to French business circles appeared less radical than Sarkozy’s: in particular, she was not considered committed enough to carry out an all-out assault on the welfare state in contrast to the semi-Bonapartist strong man Sarkozy.

Sarkozy has been able to galvanise some support among disaffected sections of the population who recognise that the French economy is indeed in crisis and entertain illusions that he might bring about a change. In contrast, the traditional support for the Socialist Party in layers of the working class and middle class, Royal’s electoral mainstay, is already in steep decline because of the party’s previous right-wing course and further diminished with every word she uttered.
Poll after poll showed that most workers were convinced that she was pro-business, while few have been fooled by her expressions of compassion.

By the time of the February 11 rally at Villepinte, at which she finally detailed her election programme, after having “listened” to “the people,” Royal was running 10 points behind Sarkozy in the opinion polls. It was in an attempt to rectify this situation and avert an electoral debacle that she emphasised her limited programme of social reforms.
When this did not succeed in raising her ratings in the polls, she adopted her pose of feminine compassion more forcefully in her appearance on TV in the programme “I have a question to ask you” on February 19.
On both occasions, she made much of her recognition of the crisis in the banlieues, the impoverished urban estates, and claimed that she could heal France.
Three days after the latter show, she launched her new campaign team, which included all the grandees of the Socialist Party. It incorporates three former prime ministers—Lionel Jospin, Laurent Fabius and Pierre Mauroy—and former ministers such as Dominique Strauss Khan, all of whom have occupied the highest echelons of the party since the beginning of the 1980s.
It is most likely that the inclusion in Royal’s campaign team of these PS “elephants,” as they are known in France, is an attempt by the party apparatus to take control of a campaign that was going off the rails. But it was also an attempt to paint Royal as a representative of Socialist Party continuity rather than “change,” which to many, quite rightly, signifies further attacks on the social position of the working class.

As reassurances go, this was hardly the most convincing. All of those drafted onto Royal’s campaign team played key roles in imposing right-wing policies that have led to the plummeting support in the working class for the PS. In 1981, when François Mitterrand won the presidency for the Socialist Party on a programme of left social reforms and nationalisations, people danced in the streets and a rejoicing crowd took over the Place de la Bastille. But many of the 110 points in Mitterrand’s programme were abandoned a little more than a year later in favour of austerity policies aimed at preventing a run on the franc and shoring up French capitalism.
In contrast, after Jospin’s Plural Left government’s defeat in 2002, Socialist Party leaders could not show their faces on protests against the Gaullist government’s anti-working class measures for fear of being driven off by angry workers.

Nevertheless, the attempt to resuscitate Royal’s campaign by making a feint to the left serves to expose the true nature of Sarkozy’s recent ascendancy. It does not indicate a pronounced support for his right-wing line, but is essentially due to the fact that socialist-minded workers and young people have been politically disenfranchised by Royal and the Socialist Party.
Most of those who have deserted the Socialist Party have not gone over to Sarkozy, but have decided that there is no point in voting. Recent polls indicate that 27 percent of the electorate would abstain or cast a blank vote in the first round, and 30 percent would do likewise in the second round run-off between the two leading candidates.
Royal’s attempted repositioning is primarily a matter of style, not substance, and most people recognise this. There has been a certain rise in support for her reflected in opinion polls since February 19, but this is relatively superficial. Figaro reported a poll that said that 81 percent of respondents found Royal’s television performance “sympathique” (pleasant), as against 45 percent who found her convincing.

Her ability to win popular backing as the defender of the welfare state is limited, given that the essential thrust of her policies is dictated by big business and the requirements of finance capital for France to become globally competitive. During her television debate, she was unable to give an answer as to how her social measures would be financed. The resignation of a campaign staff member, rebuked for prematurely releasing the figure of 35 billion euros (US$46.3 billion) as the cost of her social measures, has increased scepticism. The fact that she had pledged to make the reduction of the public debt a priority also undermined her promises on this score.
Already, Royal has disappointed the 2.5 million people in the private sector who live on the state minimum wage, admitting that the promised raise to 1,500 euros per month from the present 1,254 gross (984,61 euros net—US$1,303), a flagship measure of her social programme, would be before deductions. This keeps the actual cash received down to little more than 1,000 euros—around 250 euros a week! Even this paltry concession would take five years to be fully implemented.

She insisted, in line with Sarkozy, that “all those receiving benefits must actively seek employment,” a recipe for forcing unemployed people into low-paid jobs. This puts a sinister colouration on her pledge that no school leaver would have to wait six months before finding a job or training.
She also reiterated her opposition to any mass regularisation of undocumented migrants and commitment to strict immigration controls.

Any success enjoyed by Royal’s manoeuvres only serves to disarm the working class. Whoever assumes the presidency when the votes in the second round on May 1 are counted, will proceed to make a systematic assault—long overdue as far as the French bourgeoisie is concerned—on wages, working conditions and social and democratic rights.
A politically reprehensible role is played by the parties considered to be to the left of the Socialist Party—the Communist Party, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and Lutte Ouvrière—who insist that a victory for Royal and the Socialist Party in the second round is the only alternative to Sarkozy. Indeed, her present manoeuvring is in part designed to make it easier for them to give her their support. She is advised in such matters by a former central committer member of the LCR and personal confidante, Sophie Bouchet-Petersen.

Despite criticisms of aspects of Royal’s programme by these “lefts,” their fundamental task of reconciling the working class to the Socialist Party is well expressed by Arlette Laguiller, Lutte Ouvrière’s presidential candidate. In a November 24 editorial, she told readers of the party’s newspaper that workers “could, of course, rejoice if Ségolène Royal wins the presidency because that would mean a defeat for Sarkozy.” She even suggested that Royal could be induced to act in the interests of the working class: “The presidential election is in five months. Ségolène Royal will have the time to make some commitments which she has not so far taken.”

Can the left be exterminated?

Having celebrated the first results – enthusiastic opponents of lay member control await further information from the UNISON Regional AGM…

The answer to the question, by the way, is "no".

The Nationalism of the CPB (ML) number 3

Some comments:

Those within the Trade union apparatus who secretly or publically support the views of groups like the CPB (ML) should be ashamed of themselves. If you google the articles I have posted you will come up with all sorts of weird places that support such right wing viewpoints on immigration and immigration. Such as the very right wing nationailst American grouping "National Vanguard". I think that supporting the CPB(ML) is a contradiction to being a member or appointed official of any trade union at any level and therefore one can guess what comes next in my view...

...The union I am in which is UNISON has a good position on this subject, and this motion was passed at the National Conference in 2005

National Delegate Conference 2005

Composite : AgendaID G - Amnesty for Illegal Workers to End ExploitationConference notes:

1) there are many thousands of paperless workers out there, without whose work the economy would grind to a standstill;

2) paperless workers are the invisible engine room of twilight London. No Londoner can easily escape involvement in this exploitation. Paperless workers serve us meals in restaurants, clean our hospitals, our hotels, streets and tube stations, produce the sandwiches and snacks we have for lunch and many of the clothes, CDs and consumer goods we buy in west end shops. London is not at all unique in this respect;

3) trade unions in the United Kingdom (UK) have found a number of employers with up to a quarter of their workforce without papers or legal status, employed directly or via gangmasters and agencies;

4) these workers are mostly paid cash in hand at rates as low as £2.50 per hour and made to work 80 hours per week without weekends or holidays, often under the threat of deportation;

5) such employers are guilty of defrauding the inland revenue as well as being responsible for the massive scale of illegal working. Many workers have been deported when caught;

6) that UNISON in Greater London has carried out a migrant workers project based upon the experience and perceptions of migrant workers employed at three hospital sites in East London.


Conference believes:

a) that no worker should be classed as illegal;

b) all workers have a right to put a roof over their head and food on the table;

c) all workers should enjoy the same rights at work, including the right to organise a union;

d) it is not the workers who should be blamed, prosecuted and deported for working here without papers, it is the employers and gangmasters who make it possible. Only with an amnesty for the workers and a few company directors prosecuted will we see any improvement in this shameful situation.

Conference also notes the many positive initiatives taken by UNISON with both the UK and Scottish government support including:the UNISON Scotland New Workers Project. This pilot project, funded by the Home Office, provides trade union learning and work experience for refugees in Glasgow;


the UNISON Scotland Overseas Nursing and Health Workers Network. A support network for several hundred overseas workers in Scotland;


One Scotland Many Cultures is the Scottish Executive campaign designed to tackle racism in Scotland and is linked to the fresh talent initiative that positively encourages people to consider coming to live and work in Scotland."

UNISON should take account of the recommendations of the UNISON migrant workers project and in particular should consider the following recommendations:

i) UNISON should identify areas where there is significant employment of migrant workers in public services and seek to ensure that UNISON's recruitment approach in those areas matches the needs of those workers;

ii) UNISON should build upon the work done by the TUC and HSE in producing basic workers' rights information targeted at migrant workers. Key recruitment materials should be produced in languages other than English, on a phased and planned basis, and UNISON should develop a standard application form to be available in a variety of languages, in hard copy and online formats.

iii) UNISON should ensure that it is able to provide initial advice to migrant workers who are employed in public services on immigration, accommodation and access to and eligibility for social amenities. Training should be provided to both lay activists and full time officials to enable them to offer this advice;

iv) UNISON should provide services tailored to migrant workers working in public services and in membership in UNISON, including specifically legal advice on immigration, assistance with opening a bank account, low commission overseas money transfer and the production of an advice pack on tax, national insurance, pensions and benefits;

v) UNISON already plays a significant role in providing training in English as a Second Language (ESL) through Lifelong Learning. UNISON should publicise this work and ensure that it is coordinated with recruitment of migrant workers;

vi) UNISON should actively promote our anti-racist and anti-discrimination work amongst migrant workers. And, in line with the 2005-2006 national objectives, should promote respect for asylum seekers and humane immigration rules. Campaigning to ensure that migrant workers are treated both fairly and with respect in the workplace;

vii) branches should be encouraged to set up migrant workers' networks, where appropriate, and guidelines issued as to how such networks should relate to existing branch structures such as self-organised groups.


Conference therefore agrees:

A) in order to put these principles into effect, we call upon the government to grant an amnesty for any worker in the UK currently working without the knowledge of the authorities, in order to put an end to employer-led tax fraud and exploitation of migrant workers;

B) we instruct the National Executive Council to communicate this demand to government, and to seek the support of the TUC and of other trade unions;


C) we urge UNISON Labour Link to raise this demand within the Labour party;

D) we call upon all branches to set out to recruit and organise migrant workers in public services, and instruct the National Executive Council to issue guidance to branches and regions drawing upon the recommendations of the UNISON migrant workers' research project.

Carried as Amended


and say no more...

Mikey

The Nationalism of the CPB (ML) number 2

class power

WORKERS, NOV 2005 ISSUE

This article is an edited version of a talk entitled "Migration and Class Power", given at a CPBML public meeting in London on 20 October.

As a class, we have got ourselves into an awful mess. Of course, it's not all of our own making. For over three decades, we have been subjected to an unrelenting, escalating ruling class assault: more than 30 years of reaction and counter-revolution from our ruling class, which has pressed down on our daily lives, shattered our trade union culture and traditions, circumscribed our hopes and strangled our aspirations.

With only some exceptions, notably the strategic offensive undertaken by the engineers and others in the 1970s against the Industrial Relations Act and the miners' stalwart but ultimately gladiatorial defence of their industry in 1984–85, our class has not attempted to fend off, let alone repulse, these regressive attacks.

We have seen, in the mere span of a person's lifetime, the situation in Britain turned dramatically upside down. From the days of the early 1970s when the media (superficial as always) could clamour "Who rules Britain?" to now, when capitalism is naked and callous in its operations, trade unions are studiously ignored and Big Business is slavishly kow-towed to.

In the 1960s and early 1970s it was possible for Mao Tse-tung to talk about revolution being the main trend. And though with hindsight perhaps it was a slight embellishment, you still had a Soviet Union: not as revolutionary a force as it once was, showing signs of fraying round the edges and with capitulationist talk emerging at times from the likes of Kruschev and Kosygin, but still exerting a restraining influence on the world of capitalism.

The extent of migration

What is the scale of the recent migration into Britain? Official figures reveal the following:
1997
285,000
1998
332,000
1999
354,000
2000
364,000
Obviously the figures do not count any illegal immigration.

In these 4 years alone, before the accession of the new EU countries, immigration at 1,335,000 exceeded emigration by about 400,000. Since those years immigration has continued to rise. Take the months between May and December 2004: according to Home Office estimates about 130,000 nationals from eight of the new member states alone applied to work in Britain; about 123,000 of them successfully obtained work permits.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 223,000 more people came into Britain than left in 2004 (more than double the annual average from 1997 to 2000). Some 583,000 entered the country. Separate figures predict the population may increase by up to 7.2 million over the next ten years.

The number of migrants from Eastern Europe EU member states has risen dramatically, due to the government's open door policy. The Home Office admits that 14,000 are now arriving every month from Eastern Europe (170,000 a year).

It is estimated that anywhere up to 200,000 illegal Turkish Kurds have entered Britain recently. Of course, if Turkey joins the EU, then that will all become legal immigration.

Employment

Post-1945 there was not a commitment to full employment: it was there in reality – or at least capitalism's definition of full employment, with no more than half a million people out of work at any time. Even at the start of the 1970s, the unemployment rate (as calculated at the time, so divide by half to equate with current figures) was around 3%.

We were in a position to defeat the Labour Party's 1969 attempt to control unions, In Place of Strife and, in the early 1970s, the Tories' Industrial Relations Act. If today it was a truce, tomorrow it could be war.

Workers are thinking beings, and depending on how they think they may then decide to act or not. Workers do not act spontaneously, nor do they act responsively, as a result of cause and effect. Actions and struggle depend on us knowing our circumstances.

In recent years there has been a marked lessening of working class confidence, clarity of thought and class organisation. Material factors were at work, the greatest of which was the rundown and destruction of our industrial manufacturing base.

From 1968 we saw an end to full employment and the re-creation of the reserve army of the unemployed; anti-trade union legislation and reduction of trade union strength; deindustrialisation; and the removal of manufacturing heartlands. Along with this came membership of the European Economic Community (now the EU), privatisation and, at the end of the 1970s, Thatcherism.

The latest weapon in the armoury of capitalism is a massive increase in the numbers of people migrating to Britain. It is not accidental; it is not without purpose. The EU requires free movement of capital and labour. This measure benefits capital, while making labour weaker, more insecure.

The migration attack

Speaking in Bradford in June, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, put it starkly: "Immigration has reduced wage inflation. The inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from Eastern Europe, has probably led to a diminution of inflationary pressure on the labour market."

Cheap mass labour from Eastern Europe has been used to keep wages stagnant or reduce them. The real purpose of an open-door immigration policy is revealed for what it is: to undermine the wages and conditions of British workers.

Apart from Ireland, only Britain (courtesy of Jack Straw and the Labour Government) decided from 1 August 2004 to give unrestricted access to workers from the new Eastern European member states, even though transitional arrangements allowed restrictions for up to seven years.

Many of the EU's original 15 member states, including Germany, France and Italy, still have tough limits on economic migration from the ten countries which joined the EU last May. Even by the EU's regulations, countries can apply their own national migration legislation until at least 2006 and also impose entry quotas in certain professions. In contrast, the United Kingdom and Ireland have moved quickly to remove barriers in their labour markets.

Britain already has millions unemployed, however much the government attempts to reclassify them. This massive influx of labour, often concentrated in our leading urban conurbations, particularly London, will have a significant impact on our wages and conditions and on our creaking services already struggling to cope with needs and reduced financial budgets. In fact, the impact is already there in many areas.

Much of our infrastructure was already under great stress and struggling to cope – schools, hospitals, transport – and now it has this sudden, unexpected demographic change thrown into the equation. It is evident in London as you go about daily life.


Take schools as an example. In June 2005, the Association of London Government published a report entitled "Breaking Point: Examining the disruption caused by pupil mobility". It points out that government does not provide any additional resources for schools with high pupil movement.

High pupil turnover is heavily concentrated in specific geographical locations (usually where housing is cheaper – generally poorer areas) and in specific schools. One of the key factors in pupil mobility is international migration. Many of these children do not speak English or do not have fluency in the language.

The report notes that the failure to fund pupil turnover means that schools, particularly those with the additional challenges of high deprivation, do not have the capacity to meet the true level of need associated with mobile pupils or existing pupils with diverse multiple disadvantages. Most rely heavily on staff to provide support for new pupils by working additional unpaid hours – which in part reflects a dilution of teaching and learning support to all children in that school.

Research undertaken by London Metropolitan University in 2002 concluded there were approximately 80,000 asylum-seeking and refugee children in British schools, with an estimated 62,666 in schools and nurseries in London. In seven London education authorities, refugee children comprise more than 10% of the school roll: a significant concentration. Teachers feel overwhelmed by the numbers of children without English from so many backgrounds.

These levels of migration if allowed to continue will put massive strain not just on the fabric of British society but also on its mental complexion too. A nation must retain the right to control entry if it is to maintain the glue that holds it together. We wish to retain an integrated society.

Most migrants to Britain are aged under 34. Research suggests that many are university educated, prompting real concerns about a brain drain in the countries they have left.

Those coming are attempting to escape hardship elsewhere. Do they really think it's going to be easy here? Do they imagine a land flowing with milk and honey? They are in for a rude awakening. We cannot tolerate being dragged backwards by certain other groups of migrants. There is, for example, no place in Britain for African ritual murders, for devilry exorcism with its maltreatment of children. We tamed our religion a long time ago, and we shall not let religion persecute workers again. What it means to be British Are nations outmoded? Capitalism says so. Once capitalism was the spur to the building of nations, sweeping aside the localism and feudal land structures.
Now it prefers to create larger economic bases such as the EU, giving power to the larger corporations, weakening working class power. Yet as workers we only have Britain, so we have to save it. How do we see the composition of a nation? Immigrants to Britain who are serious about staying have the same choice as any other British worker: either join with other workers to improve wages and conditions, preserve liberties and quality of life or ally with capitalists. True integration has nothing to do with appreciation of the national cricket team and warm beer (though many more will be supporting England rather than Pakistan or Bangladesh or the West Indies after this summer). From 1750 to 1840 our class was torn from the land, drawn to the factories and the towns and thrown into conditions in which survival was a daily achievement. They could look to no one else but themselves for protection and alleviation. Without stars, without do-gooders and without political parties, our class founded its own bodies to defend and further the interests of its own.
The whole force of the employers' state was brought to bear upon these emerging working class organisations which, despite imprisonment, transportation to Australia, penury, acts of parliament, spies, provocateurs and even death itself, were never vanquished. In these years, the British working class first discovered for the world this absolute truth: the necessity of working class solidarity, of combination of labour against capital, of trade unionism.
In contemporary times, have we started to forget, discard, shun or just fail to apply what we knew – the vital local pride; skills; communities; brotherhoods of workers; the culture of mutual support? Guidance for the future The Labour Party now is trying to preserve capitalism in absolute decline by elevating the rights of capital above all other interests. It must be pushed aside. We must treat the Labour Party with the disdain it deserves – do not waste efforts over it. Certainly do not attempt to resurrect it as a true labour party. Do we really want to re-run the setback and disillusionment and betrayal of the last 100 years? Let it wither on the vine.
It can go the way of the Liberal party after the First World War and seemingly what has happened to the Conservative Party after the debacle of Thatcherism. Let the decline be terminal for them all. And then our class has to face squarely the conclusion that there is no way out of their predicament courtesy of one of the bourgeois parties or through capitalism's representative democracy. But how to do for ourselves when trade unions have been allowed to degenerate? Look at class for what it is, not what we want it to be. Rebuild class organisation again. Explore the experience of the British working class organisation. Start with the local. The greatest gift that the British have made to the world is in ideas: our thinking, our attitude to life.
These are largely based on our response to the material changes of industry, manufacture and science – raising collective forms of survival in the simple but stubborn form of organisation: trade unions. We have a way of life to lose; we have a future to gain. Those going – 360,000 emigrated in 2004 – have a lack of belief in Britain. Good riddance! The ones left will be those with sterner resolution, more mettle, the root and branch. Cul-de-sacs and the open road Workers must do for themselves: we are many, they are few. There are but two classes and class is everything. Without clarity about it we do not know who we are or what we are doing.
We must be in charge of our professions and protect and develop skill. We are in a guerrilla war against the capitalist enemy who for the past few decades has analysed our strengths, largely in manufacture, largely in trade unions, and been undermining and destroying these sources of our strength, letting our life-blood trickle out bit by bit. How do we break out of their encirclement? We need to know what we are defending and when. Choose terrain favourable to ourselves, employ active and passive defence, conserve our strength, and await an opportunity to defeat the enemy.
Do not underestimate, do not overestimate the enemy: the ruling class only has apparent strength due largely to our lack of activity. Developments will occur: if we don't respond, then the response of the capitalists will simply get more intense. Don't wait, or there will be worse ahead

The Nationalism of the CPB (ML)

Below are two wacky articles. The first (bottom) is from the CPB (ML) on immigration. This is very right weing indeed and I do not share their views at all.

There is a reply from Lalkar, another Stalinist rag above it entitled The Nationalism of the CPBML.

The CPBML apart from being a joke, are a very dangerous joke in that they have significant forces within many unions like the successor to NATFHE and UNISON. Many of their forces are secreted into the apparatus where they spend their time witch-hunting the left.

They need to be exposed to the cold light of day and some fresh air.

Mikey

The Nationalism of the CPBML

In the October 2006 issue of Workers, organ of the Communist Party of Britain Marxist Leninist (CPBML) (*see note at end of paragraph), there is an article entitled “Let’s have a working class debate on immigration.” The article, bewailing the high numbers of immigrants, states that “due to the increased supply of labour, wages in several unskilled and low-skilled job sectors have fallen, hitting the indigenous working class. The extra demand for housing has forced prices and rents even higher, and in many cities students now find it almost impossible to get part-time jobs to help them through college.” These two sentences in the opening paragraph mirror all the worst bourgeois influences that are drip-fed daily to workers in order to divide them along the lines of colour and/or nationality/race (and currently religion), i.e., workers from ‘outside’ lower your wages, take your jobs, put up your rents, deny your children a decent education, etc., etc. [*Not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), CPGB-ML, who are supportive of this paper and its views and in return whose policies are supported by this paper]

But is an “increase in the supply of labour” to be explained solely by citing immigration figures? Even if one only wants to ‘play with numbers’ this is one-sided and takes no account of people leaving the country, death rates or those entering the benefits system through disability. Also, do not every pair of workers, indigenous or otherwise, who have more than two children under this simplified accounting system add to the expansion of the class?

Yet no one is seriously suggesting curbs on procreation. What of technology? While not increasing the number of workers it can reduce the number jobs. Are we to follow General Ludd again? Then, of course, there is capital taken abroad, where it will be used to manufacture commodities cheaply (to be fair the CPBML do address this particular point later in the article but only in the sense that in taking British capital abroad the bourgeoisie are robbing British workers of work). The point, which the CPBML miss totally, is quite simple for those who choose to see it: it is the owner of the means of production who will decide who will work, with what technology, for what wages, where the work will be sited and what level of unemployment (surplus labour, indigenous or foreign) will be best for his maximum profit. That is not always an easy thing to explain in a country where the working class movement is so pitifully weak ideologically, yet that is what communists must do.

It is the height of treachery to our class (remembering that the working class stretches far beyond Britain’s boundaries), blatant racism, opportunism and pro-imperialism to opt instead for a policy of blaming the immigrant for all British workers’ woes, even if this will strike a chord with the basest instincts of many workers.

While we are on the subject of the “indigenous working class” just who are they? At what point does an immigrant family become an indigenous family?, if the answer to that question is never than even someone with the flimsiest grasp of British history would have to draw the conclusion that there are very few members of the indigenous working class about. The question of house prices, rents, etc., being the fault of immigrants is pure bunk. Immigrants tend to be shoved into the lowest quality (if any at all) housing, unless, of course, one subscribes to the somewhat popular, but totally incorrect, view that “they come over here with nothing and are given the best houses and thousands of pounds” that can be heard in any working class area and is merely a reflection of the anti-working class pap that fills the pages of the gutter press. Workers do say these things and, if not shown the errors of these views, will tend to believe them. But that is no excuse for the CPBML to pander to these views or worse, to try to give these racist views credibility.

Another point about housing is that if immigrants really are causing rents and prices to rise then one must suppose that this is due to a housing shortage, which would be alleviated by, yes, you guessed it, building more homes which would create jobs wouldn’t it? The last part of the first quote from this grubby article concerns the seeming inability of students to get “part time jobs to help them through college”. Quite apart from the fact that students would be far better off if they were allowed to concentrate on their studies (a proper non-repayable grant is the very least communists should be asking for), surely, if the CPBML’s argument about immigrants bringing down wages is correct than wouldn’t masses of students seeking part time work also bring about the same thing? It is just a short step from there to arguing that if women stayed at home there would be more jobs at higher rates.

In fact, this flawed theory can be used against any group, anything at all it seems except the political system of imperialism. The article goes on to tell us that “three quarters of the population now wants far stricter limits on immigration numbers” adding that “…a further 11 per cent say there should be no more immigration.” No prizes for guessing to which of these two groups members of the CPBML belong, but pointing out the level of ignorance and backwardness in the working class, the atrocious level of disunity, should not be cause for celebration or smugness. The fact that this level of ignorance exists does not make it either right or desirable, it only goes to show the staggering amount of work that real communists have to do to bring education, enlightenment and unity to the working class in this country. Communists must not be afraid to take a minority position that is correct merely because it is unpopular with the working class at present. The article goes on from those figures to state that “This popular pressure against unlimited and uncontrolled immigration may force the Government to impose limits on migrants from Romania and Bulgaria when the two countries join the EU on 1 January.”

The picture is being painted of the Government trying to follow EU diktat (the article states further on that “the British Parliament has no real control over issues such as immigration and so a first step to controlling it would have to be withdrawal from the European Union.”) and yet having to impose controls and limits due to “this popular pressure”. This notion is very far from the truth. The Government is actually responsible for much of the “popular” anti-immigration feeling that is expressed, as a working class divided along national and racial lines is no threat to imperialism, and the government can also claim that “popular pressure” led it into the limits and controls - controls that will not stop immigration but will illegalise much of it. It is illegal workers that are necessarily pliant, unorganised and cheap, it is illegal workers that help make the maximum profit. Lift the illegality off their shoulders and you have workers who will organise and strive for higher wages and conditions.

That the Government does foster much of the anti-immigrant feelings can be seen from the words of two Ministers quoted in the article: “Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, told the BBC that migration would be ‘properly controlled’. Home Secretary, John Reid, said, ‘I don’t believe in the free movement of labour: I believe the situation should be managed. You hear the same thing from the ethnic minorities. There’s nothing racist about it.” The point that the Workers article is trying to make is that these utterances by these two Ministers are only being made by them as a result of “popular pressure” against immigration. But many more such quotes can be found from the majority of the Government members and many of them much more candid in their opposition to immigration.

If the CPBML care to look they will find that there is nothing new in this (see the article in the March/April and May/June 2006 issues of LALKAR entitled ‘Capitalism and Immigration’). All bourgeois politicians have indulged in attacks on immigrants and immigration for years. It is necessary for them to have a scapegoat to blame for the ills of the political system that we live under and the immigrant, present throughout history, has always served as such a scapegoat. The article ploughs on, stating that “immigration is and has always been a mechanism for depressing wages and undermining working class organisation.” And further that “West Indian immigrants who came here in the fifties and sixties were invited to take the low-paid jobs that British workers could not afford to take.

This helped to maintain the low wages of those jobs, although to the credit of the unions these workers did become organised.” It has to be pointed out that wages and conditions for employees of British Rail, one of the main recruiters from the West Indies at that time, went from strength to strength as the workforce organised not solely “to the credit of the unions” but because these workers saw the need to organise to better their wages and conditions (which have taken a hammering since the disuniting effect of privatisation).

The idea that immigrants can only have a negative effect on wages, etc., is strange in a year when we remember the 30th anniversary of the Grunwick dispute where immigrants, many first generation, organised themselves and fought courageously for reinstatement and union recognition, being defeated only through the treachery of trade union leaders and the Labour Government of the day. Yet, even in defeat, these immigrants achieved higher wages and better conditions for those left inside the Grunwicks plants.

While on the subject of trades unions the following quote from the article is instructive of the way that the CPBML not only condones racism among workers but justifies and encourages it: “sometimes unions such as the Knitwear and Hosiery Workers Union, as it was then, would insist that highly skilled knitting jobs be ring-fenced for British workers in order to maintain wage rates while low-paid, less skilled jobs jobs would be reserved for immigrants who would be outside the union. This is history – workers’ defence of their skills and livelihood in a bad situation.”

This cannot be passed off lightly (as the CPBML try to) as “workers’ defence of their skills and livelihood in a bad situation”. For a start at that time ‘British’ was a euphemism for white; a white Canadian immigrant would have been allowed to join their union and would have been accepted in the skilled job. The workers at Imperial Typewriters at that time were at least more honest, if no less racist, when they went on strike demanding work for whites only.

Yes this is our history but it is nothing to be proud of and it is certainly nothing that should be repeated. The next ‘gem’ that is doled out by the Workers article serves further to defeat its own arguments. Showing their concern for foreigners and foreign countries it says “of course migrants aspire to a better life, but they should fight for it in their own country – or how will it ever make progress. Poland’s economy, for example, is being hamstrung by a shortage of workers. Even drafting in convicts to do essential work is not plugging the gap. And the situation in some African countries is even worse”. Re this ‘advice’ to immigrants to go back to their own country and fight for improvements there, it is a good job that the CPBML were not around when that immigrant Karl Marx arrived on these shores! If, as the article suggests, our industrial strength channelled through our trade unions is what makes Britain better for workers, and trade union strength is expressed in its unity and organisation, just how much unity and organisation is created by telling foreign workers to go home! The arguments made by the CPBML in this quote totally ignore the reality of imperialism and treat countries as equals when they clearly are not. The picture is presented of immigrants coming here to live because we British workers have made life in our country so wonderful through our organisation and principled struggle. What nonsense! An imperialist country does not only export capital, it sucks the very life from the weaker countries that it holds in bondage and pays a portion (albeit a very small portion) of that wealth created by the super-exploitation of vassal countries to its own workers to keep them mollified and create feelings of superiority and national chauvinism.

If we then look at the CPBML’s concern for the economies of “Poland” and “some African countries”, it needs only to point out that the basis of the article is that immigrants swell the labour force and consequently wages go down. Yet now we are told that a shortage of workers has “hamstrung” the Polish economy. Surely, if we subscribe to the CPBML’s simplistic view of economics, then a shortage of labour should push up wages creating a rush of immigrants to that country? But of course the Polish bourgeoisie are only a subject bourgeoisie whose position is dependent upon the rape of their country by imperialism (although they harbour dreams of becoming an imperialist power themselves). The real power lies with the imperialist countries that feed off of the Polish workers and take away the wealth of that country. Of course immigrants flock to the imperialist countries; they are following their own wealth. The working class of imperialist countries by ignoring the super-exploitation of foreign workers (and in some cases condoning it) side with their imperialists and turn on fellow workers who are foreign, seeing them as a threat, a rival for work, while treating their own bourgeoisie as kith and kin. We suggest a very thorough and repeated reading of Lenin’s ‘Imperialism’ to CPBML members if they really want to understand this question of immigration and the connection with imperialist exploitation of weaker countries and the source of Britain’s wealth. So as not to appear racist (heaven forbid anyone should think that of them), the CPBML include this paragraph in the article: “People who squeak that racism is the core of the opposition to an unfettered movement of labour need to look at some of the consequences. White teachers from Commonwealth countries get preference over mature Londoners (Black and White) who would otherwise be fast-tracked into teaching. Some of the inner London boroughs have unemployment levels (mainly black people) of over 8 per cent, yet jobs are going to EU migrants (mainly white). What can be more racist in our context than denying someone indigenous work by importing overseas labour?” At a time when there are shortages of teachers in this country due less to the level of wages then the actual very stressful conditions of work, it is a red herring to cite an increased use of trained teachers from certain commonwealth countries or anywhere else. Also, does anyone really believe that the percentage rate of unemployment (necessary to capitalist economics) would fall if all immigration ceased? And yet again we ask, as the plight of black British workers has been raised, at what point does the CPBML turn immigrant families into indigenous families?

This question has to be constantly asked as it is on the basis of indigenous worker versus immigrant worker that the CPBML, Labour Party, Conservative Party, Lib-Dems, UK Independence Party and the British National Party are trying to turn worker against worker. Just where does this twisted logic that they put forward stop? Should someone from Barnsley be allowed to apply for a job in Brighton if someone living in Brighton is prepared to do it? If people from the South of England start to migrate North for the cheaper housing, should we drive them back at Watford Gap telling them to go and fight for cheaper housing in the South? When British dockyards, with the full backing of their workforces, compete with each other for shipbuilding contracts and try to win work to their area away from other workers in Britain does this not usually involve bringing down wages and conditions? The anti-immigrant argument, apart from freeing the bourgeoisie of all responsibility for the things that they actually have control over, is not just silly but very dangerous. There are many nationalities within Britain many of whom suffer discrimination whether they be first generation immigrants or born here. The type of arguments and nationalistic sentiments expressed by the CPBML encourage further attacks on all of these workers and must be challenged.

Continuing, the CPBML give us a “few ideas to throw into the debate about what should be done.” These “ideas” include “restrict the free movement of labour to Britain from Romania and Bulgaria,…insist that all immigrant workers require permits, which would only be issued if the employers agreed to take on and train local workers to replace immigrant labour when they qualified or became indentured…the immigrant labour would the be required to leave the country when this process was complete,…secure our borders. The concept of an amnesty for illegal immigrants is foolish if we don’t have control of our borders, as it would be followed by another wave of immigration.” Much more is included on ‘work permits’ and under what conditions “immigrants would be required to leave the country” and, it has to be said, that a brief run through the BNP website could find nothing worse than this Workers article - either in terms of policy or emotive language (for what else does “another wave of immigration” mean if not to strongly suggest being flooded, overcome etc?).

On the security of borders, the article, a bit further on, states that “to secure our borders we should bring British troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan to help create a border, security and customs force along with existing agencies and maybe a strong unit to enforce anti-slavery and immigration laws.” Bringing British troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan certainly won’t be challenged in this paper but what about the British troops in Ireland and elsewhere around the globe doing imperialism’s dirty work? And what of these repatriated troops? Do we really want this huge collection of armed racist thugs, for that is in reality what the British army is, given the job of roaming our borders and streets to deal with immigrant workers in the fashion that they have become accustomed to dealing with foreign workers in Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan? It must be confessed that the article also calls for withdrawal from the EU (mainly on the grounds that the organisation involves foreigners telling us what to do rather than trying to undermine an imperialist bloc) and does put forward the notion of controlling “the export of capital” although this cannot be done without challenging the very ‘right’ of imperialism to exist, i.e., through socialist revolution (a fact the article itself alludes to) - something which cannot be achieved by turning workers against each other on the grounds of place of birth etc.

The article also brings up the subject of slavery, referred to in the previous quote, in the following paragraph: “If a ship repair yard employer on Tyneside brings in a Polish workforce on the National Minimum Wage rather than the rate for the job, houses them in cabins inside the yard, and rotates them every ten weeks for a new workforce to prevent unionisation, that’s slavery. People smugglers, gangsters and gang masters, and the new breed of employment agencies are the new slave traders, and illegal immigrants working in sweatshop conditions are the new slaves.” The first point to be made is that if these Polish workers have to be housed “in cabins within the yard” isolated and rotated “every ten weeks” in order to “prevent unionisation”, that rather blows a hole in the CPBML argument that immigrants bring down wages and conditions through lack of organisation doesn’t it? Surely the article is telling us that these workers, given the chance, will organise and fight for higher wages and better conditions?

If this is the case, isn’t it the job of communists, socialists, trade unionists etc., to find ways of giving them that chance rather than just telling them to go home and make things better there? The second point is that the “people smugglers, gangsters and gang masters” etc., rightly condemned as dealing in slavery, only have power over their slaves while they are made ‘illegal’. As soon as the illegal status is lifted from these workers, having no fear of deportation, they will organise industrially and fit in with the ‘indigenous’ workers. Our common enemy is imperialism. Imperialism needs ‘illegal’ immigration as this really does provide slave labour helping to secure ‘maximum profit’ and we must stand with our fellow workers against British imperialism and fight against making foreign workers (our real kith and kin) illegal! We have a job to do to educate all workers to realise the need to destroy imperialism and build socialism. We have to recognise the role that struggles like the ones waged by the Iraqi and Afghan resistance play in helping to undermine our imperialists and making them a bit weaker, along with others who stand up to our imperialists throughout the world in Ireland and Zimbabwe, to name two, and the magnificent stance of the people of the DPRK who stand in opposition to all imperialists at the sharpest point. When we make things hotter here we will also be helping those struggles, but the struggle against imperialism in this country will remain dormant and a sham while ever we play the bosses’ game and turn workers against each other.

The CPBML should either join us in the work of trying to unite all workers against imperialism or at least have the honesty to rename themselves the British National Workers’ Party which would be a true reflection of their despicable position.

Since the Workers’ article was published the government have announced restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers holding down ‘legal’ jobs here, which drives those workers straight into the hands of those organising illegal work (slavery). In a new twist, the Home Secretary, John Reid, has announced that ‘illegal’ workers can be fined up to a thousand pounds if caught, which punishes the slave for being a slave while at the same time making the grip of the ‘slave-owner’ upon the ‘slave’ even tighter. Government sources say that they have bowed to the pressure of the media. The CPBML will say that the Government have bowed to “popular pressure”. In reality the Government have been ‘led’ to exactly where they wanted to be. When two million people marched against the invasion of Iraq, there was no bowing to “popular pressure”, or any pressure from sections of the media that echoed (for their own reasons) that opposition. A campaign must be built around the slogans that ‘no worker should be declared illegal for wanting to work’ and ‘imperialism is the main enemy of all workers’. It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling social facilities, not to say incessant wars - not workers, be they ‘indigenous’ or foreign.

FOOTNOTE

[1.] Not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), CPGB-ML, who are supportive of this paper and its views and in return whose policies are supported by this paper.

MP Frank Field has called for a debate on immigration. Jack Dromey, Deputy General Secretary of the T&GWU, has called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Here's a contribution to that debate from a working class and trade union perspective...

Let's have a working class debate on immigration

WORKERS,

OCT 2006 ISSUE

The government forecast that there would be 15,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe in the year after their entry to the European Union on 1 January 2004. The actual number was 300,000, followed by another 300,000 in 2005. Due to the increased supply of labour, wages in several unskilled and low-skilled job sectors have fallen, hitting the indigenous working class. The extra demand for housing has forced prices and rents ever higher, and in many cities students now find it almost impossible to get part-time jobs to help them through college.
Consequently, three-quarters of the population now wants far stricter limits on immigrant numbers, according to an Ipsos MORI poll carried out on behalf of the Sunday Times between 11 and 13 August: 63 per cent say immigration laws should be "much tougher", up from 58 per cent 18 months ago, while a further 11 per cent say there should be no more immigration. 77 per cent think the government should set a strict limit on the number of immigrants allowed into Britain each year. Just 14 per cent of people strongly agree that immigration is "generally good" for Britain, with double that number taking the opposite view. Incidentally, the same poll also revealed widespread impatience with Tony Blair, with almost half of the nearly 1,000 people questioned believing that he should resign immediately. This popular pressure against unlimited and uncontrolled immigration may force the government to impose limits on migrants from Romania and Bulgaria when the two countries join the EU in 1 January. The government predicts that 350,000 Romanians will come to Britain next year. Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, told the BBC that migration would be "properly controlled". Home Secretary John Reid said, "I don't believe in the free movement of labour: I believe the situation should be managed. You hear the same from ethnic minorities. There's nothing racist about it." But the Home Office insists that no final decision has been made and the Foreign Office is lobbying hard for no limits to be introduced. Whose decision is it? The point is, who decides? In a democracy, the majority should decide, even if some think they are wrong. What does it say about Britain, if the government imposes its view, against the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of the British people? Immigration is and always has been a mechanism for depressing wages and undermining working class organisation. That is why the government and the CBI have declared that immigration is a good thing. To its shame, the TUC has endorsed their sentiments despite unemployment approaching 2 million and the decline in average earnings, including bonuses (National Office of Statistics June 2006). And removing skilled labour from other economies does nothing for the development of those nations denuded of those skills; nor does it assist in the development of an organised working class in those countries. In the past 12 months both the South African Health Minister and the Pakistani ambassador to Britain have put in pleas to Britain to stop seizing their nurses and computer programmers respectively. Their polite requests have been ignored. The West Indian immigrants who came here in the fifties and sixties were invited to take the low-paid jobs that British workers could not afford to take. This helped to maintain the low wages of those jobs, although to the credit of the unions, these workers did become organised. The immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who came to fill jobs in the textile industry were by and large confined to the lower-paid jobs. Sometimes unions such as the Knitwear and Hosiery Workers Union, as it was then, would insist that highly skilled knitting jobs be ring-fenced for British workers in order to maintain wage rates while lower-paid, less skilled jobs would be reserved for immigrants who would be outside the union. This is history – workers' defence of their skills and livelihood in a bad situation. There has always been a relationship between immigration and wage rates. Today, that relationship is no different but much more critical. Our borders are open, immigration is on a gigantic scale and we face an influx of cheap Romanian and Bulgarian labour from January 2007. Better life? Of course migrants aspire to a better life, but they should fight for it in their own country – or how will it ever make progress. Poland's economy, for example, is being hamstrung by a shortage of workers. Even drafting in convicts to do essential work is not plugging the gap. And the situation in some African countries is even more dire. Young men who abandon their country make things worse, not better. And we in Britain need to fight for progress here. Further, British working people should not be cast as racists or against people from other nations. The question of training our own people is fundamental. Employers moan at the lack of skills – quite understandably – but seek the cheap way forward. The same is occurring in the public sector. For example, local government will sponsor overseas workers to gain British recognised qualifications – running courses in London for Australian, New Zealand and South African teachers to boost their qualifications to British standards while completely failing to produce courses that could raise Londoners with qualifications just short of the required level. People who squeak that racism is the core of the opposition to an unfettered movement of labour need to look at some of the consequences. White teachers from Commonwealth countries get preference over mature Londoners (black and white) who would otherwise be fast-tracked into teaching. Some of the inner London boroughs have unemployment levels (mainly black people) of over 8 per cent, yet jobs are going to EU migrants (mainly white). What can be more racist in our context than denying someone indigenous work by importing overseas labour? Here are a few ideas to throw into the debate about what should be done:
Restrict the free movement of labour to Britain from Romania and Bulgaria if these countries join the EU on 1 January. Better still, don't let them join.
Control the export of capital. Because of the deliberately engineered skills shortage – abolition of apprenticeship, etc – manufacturing employers are threatening to move production abroad to Eastern Europe or China if their workforce refuses to accept Polish, Lithuanian or other East European skilled workers whom they want to employ on the National Minimum Wage instead of the skilled rate. How might we deal with this? Well, one way would be to put in place controls on the export of capital to prevent them carrying out their threat. We could then insist that all immigrant workers require work permits, which would only be issued if the employers agreed to take on and train local workers to replace immigrant labour when they qualified or became indentured, and on condition that the employer paid the rate for the job. Government funds could assist this training. The immigrant labour would then be required to leave the country when this process was complete.
Prove no one can be recruited here. In the case of unskilled immigrant labour, perhaps the work permits would only be issued after the employer could prove that it had exhausted all means of local recruitment including substantially increasing pay. The employer would be required to pay the immigrant labour the highest rate of pay on which it had failed to recruit local labour. The immigrant labour contracts would be limited to a defined duration when the employer would be forced to try and recruit local labour again. If the employer is contracted to a public service, the contract would be terminated if the employer failed to recruit local non-immigrant labour on the second attempt. Immigrant labour would be required to leave the country at the end of any work permit unless it was proven that it was impossible to recruit local labour on established rates of pay, in which case they could stay as British citizens and British workers.
Secure our borders. The concept of an amnesty for illegal immigrants is foolish if we don't have control over our own borders, as it would simply be followed by another wave of immigration. The first step must be to secure and control our borders. Every sovereign country has the right to know and control who comes in and who goes out of the country. Then maybe we should tackle the problem for what it is – 21st century slavery. If a ship repair yard employer on Tyneside brings in a Polish workforce on the National Minimum Wage rather than the rate for the job, houses them in cabins inside the yard, and rotates them every ten weeks for a new workforce to prevent unionisation, that's slavery. People smugglers, gangsters and gang masters, and the new breed of employment agencies are the new slave traders, and illegal immigrants working in sweatshop conditions are the new slaves. Let's outlaw new slavery in all its forms with punitive sentences appropriate to slavery. Any employer paying below the National Minimum Wage should be treated similarly. After this, we could put the illegal immigrants to the same test as skilled or unskilled immigrants referred to above. Those who choose not to work, or are involved in the black market or crime to survive, will have to leave the country. Basic ideas to protect Britain These are very basic ideas designed to protect British manufacturing, British workers and wage rates. To secure our borders we should bring British troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan to help create a border, security and customs force along with existing agencies and maybe a strong unit to enforce anti-slavery and immigration laws. That surely should be within the power of a sovereign state. Unfortunately, all of this would be incompatible with EU laws and policy. In fact, the expanded EU was solely about free movement of labour and capital to help capitalism survive. This means that the British parliament has no real control over issues such as immigration and so the first step to controlling it would have to be withdrawal from the European Union. The notion, shared by those on the ultra left through to the leadership of the TUC, that everyone in the world has a right to come here to work must be quashed: it is anti working class. If we decide to do these necessary things, we decide to take charge of the state ourselves as a class.

Single Status: from the Socialist

The following article is nicked from The Socialist, weekly newspaper of the Socialist party, one of the two successor organisations to the Militant Tendency.

Mikey

TRIBUNAL RULING MEANS FURTHER PROBLEMS FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT’S SINGLE STATUS AGREEMENT


An Employment Tribunal ruling on equal pay has panicked both employers and trade union leaders throughout local government. But it is a trade union, in this case the GMB, that has been found guilty of discrimination and victimisation on gender lines against its own members!
The decision, on behalf of low-paid women workers in Middlesbrough, which will be appealed, may, according to press reports, cost the GMB £1 million.
Unison activists in the Socialist Party examine the implications and pitfalls that unions face.
Paralysis
The ruling, which runs to 140 pages, and incidentally shows the employment tribunal panel were not intrinsically ‘anti-union’, has sent shockwaves through local government.
The fear of the wider implications of the ruling, and concerns at the prospects in similar cases being brought against them has given rise to an awed paralysis at the tops of the other unions. Whilst the case was against the GMB the tribunal’s full rulings does not cast these ‘other unions’ in a better light.
Mass Privatisation
Many local authority leaders are threatening wholesale privatisation of services as a consequence. Whatever happens in the future, it is now widely accepted that the Single Status Agreement is under severe strain, and privately union officials are often heard making statements to the effect that local authorities cannot afford to pay equal pay, so that mass privatisation is inevitable. Collective bargaining in what is currently the largest trade union organised sector of the British economy may well be at risk.
Single Status
Single Status, in existence since 1997, seeks to bring together Manual and Non-Manual workers, previously covered by separate agreements, under one agreement. Whilst this aim has the support of all socialists, the manner in which it attempts to do this was opposed by Socialist Party members in UNISON at the time. They played a key role via the Campaign for a Fighting Democratic UNISON (CFDU) in leading opposition to the Agreement.
Single Status does not seek to combine the strengths of the old agreements into a new one, but rather jettisons key elements of these agreements such as national gradings, overtime payments, weekend and evening pay rates, taking them out of the national agreement and leaving them to be defended (or not) on a branch by branch basis. Wild promises were made by the union bureaucracies to persuade members to accept the Agreement. They saw it a panacea – an answer to unequal pay for women members and, also wrongly, an answer to low pay.
In practice its implementation has been characterised by cuts in pay and conditions of service and a rash of localised disputes (Coventry, Hull and elsewhere). UNISON’s bureaucracy were so incensed at the CFDU’s campaign against Single Status that they launched a ferocious political witch hunt against CFDU supporters, which was extended to others on the left. The history since 1997, and in particular these recent events, clearly demonstrates how correct the Socialist Party and others on the left were to oppose Single Status.
Job Evaluation
The Middlesbrough Tribunal ruling revolves around the implementation of Job Evaluation (JE). This is a complicated procedure by which each job is evaluated and given a number of points, after which a new grading structure for each authority is determined, replacing the old mixed system of national gradings, and national grades applied on a locally determined basis. The JE scheme is intrinsic to the Agreement. It is allegedly Equal Value Based meaning it has been structured to overcome clearly recognised discriminatory pay anomalies amongst occupations traditionally worked by women, such as home and other carer posts in comparison to those, such as road-workers, who are predominantly male.
A large percentage of the workforce is in clerical and administrative posts. Whilst low pay is endemic in local government, many white-collar workers have traditionally benefited from higher comparative wages to those sections of the manual workforce where women predominate. With no extra funding, councils have sought to tackle unequal pay not by increasing substantially the wages of these ‘former manual workers’ but by seeking to effectively lower the pay of others. Many women in clerical and admin jobs suffer from JE and face pay cuts, a reflection of the lack of familiarity of the bureaucracy with the nature of the membership as a whole. For them women members are nearly all perceived as carers, so they have been catered for in the scheme. The vast majority of women members, low paid clerical workers, have been ignored, and are now suffering.
JE poses a host of problems to local negotiators;
Protection for members whose posts are downgraded
Payment of back pay for members whose posts are regraded as a result of the exercise (and in particular where JE identifies gender-based discrimination)
Establishing future pay grades
The most contentious point, according to law, is that bonus schemes, predominantly appearing in male-dominated workgroups, hinder equal pay. Astonishingly, in the unions’ advice to members in 1998 was the statement "Existing local bonus schemes and bonus arrangements are local agreements and therefore not affected by this agreement". Even then, this was a legally ‘dodgy’ argument to say the least!
As the ruling clearly demonstrates, and has been known for some time, the existence of such schemes, which can account for 40-50% of workers’ take-home pay, is discriminatory. Union negotiators, whilst trying to keep to the correct principle of ‘no losers’ cannot argue for continued protection for existing workers on bonus schemes, if it can be proved that this continuation also continues the discriminatory element.
Despite the 6-year protection in the Health Service under Agenda for Change, local government negotiators have been warned not to seek more than 2 years for protection for workers losing their bonus schemes.
Post-JE negotiations inevitably focus on these elements, along with attempting to defend the conditions of service which have been removed from national pay bargaining provisions. (The 2004 local government pay settlement, which the Socialist Party campaigned against, has worsened the situation with even more elements moved from the national bargaining arena to a local level). Single Status almost inevitably raises the wages bill of each council, and the Government has refused to give councils extra funding to meet these commitments.
The scene is set for major conflicts. Prior to Single Status Councils were being hit on a weekly basis with a series of equal pay rulings at the Employment Tribunal. They signed the Single Status Agreement in an attempt to take this pressure off, but have done nothing in the meantime to increase funding to pay for the costs of rectifying equal pay anomalies.
No Win No Fee Lawyers
Into this scenario stepped No Win No Fee lawyers, seizing their chance to make money. Under anti-discrimination law anybody found to have suffered gender-based pay discrimination can expect to get six years back pay. In a number of instances agreements have been reached which give discriminated-against workers less than six years back pay, but which involve better protection for downgraded workers, and/or a better grading structure than might otherwise be expected. On the basis that the discrimination element is the only element that can be pursued at the Employment Tribunal, ET cases can be lodged against the employer and the union, which in the case of Middlesbrough have been upheld.
Thus in future no local negotiators will feel able to settle with less than six years back pay for discriminated against groups, and employers will refuse or severely limit what is available to protect downgraded posts, and will insist on lower grades in the overall structure. The estimated costs of such protection are behind the mood of panic in local authorities, and the wild threats of privatisation.
Poor Performance
The ET ruling suggests the performance of the GMB and by implication, other unions, in the Middlesbrough case has been particularly poor, having all the hallmarks of unions, led not by members but by bureaucracy. The Tribunal makes some damning comments about the GMB’s handling of the situation, and the ET accuses the union of being less than honest with its members, and scaring them into agreeing the package with threats of privatisation.
The Tribunal also highlights the role of a trade union bureaucracy in the collective bargaining process as "selling a line" on an agreement, (as opposed to explaining its full implications so that the members can make an informed choice on it). The prospect of providing full, transparent and honest information to members before they decide whether or not to accept any proposed agreements will worry many trade union bureaucracies!
Yet the Tribunal ruling opens the door to this kind of approach by indicating that if the women in Middlesbrough had been informed they could expect higher back pay from a tribunal case, been given a realistic assessment of their chances of success with such a case and the reasons why they were being recommended to accept less than six years back pay, (in terms of better protection for downgraded colleagues and/or a better grading structure), the union could have defended itself against the allegation of discrimination.
Threats
Local authority trade unionists need to determine how to proceed given the ramifications of the Middlesbrough ruling, clearly distinguishing between the best interests of their members and the doom and gloom sounds of panic emanating from the national bureaucracies of their unions.
Whilst under New Labour the threat of privatisation of all public services is an ever-present aim such moves, in order to dodge the costs of implementing the Single Status Agreement will not be as simple as is now being suggested. Under law workers transferred to a different employer have their full Contracts of Employment, including collective agreements, transferred with them. Few private employers would be willing to take over a group of workers in the knowledge that they would have to pay them six years back pay. Conversely there would be little point in the local authorities paying them the back pay and then privatising the services.
It must also be born in mind that in Middlesbrough, despite the threats of doom if the Single Status package was not accepted, and the subsequent ET ruling, no affected services have been privatised, and the council has found the money to fund the back pay! At the risk of complacency it does appear that too much weight was placed on the council’s pleading of poverty. In fact, the ruling criticises the unions for not demanding the council use ‘other resources’ rather than their pay budget, to fund equal pay.
Divisive and Reactionary
As trade unionists see the chickens come home to roost on the Single Status Agreement, and witness undemocratic, poor performing union bureaucrats get a kick in the pants from the Employment Tribunal, a wry smile or two from them is understandable. But the overall effect of the intervention of lawyers into the collective bargaining arena in this way is dangerous.
All workers are entitled to a decent deal at work, and not just those who are able to pursue their cases at law (an extremely limited right under capitalism). Rulings such as this, which undermine collective bargaining in the workplace, are ultimately reactionary and divisive. To move to a situation where the worker with the best lawyer gets the best deal would leave million of workers with no adequate protection or representation at all, and moves away from the important principle of the collective approach that is intrinsic to trade unionism itself.
No Win No Fee -v- No Fight No Win!
The problems illustrated by the Middlesbrough ruling are inherent in the Single Status Agreement itself, which held out the illusion to over a million local government workers that their pay and grading problems at work, including historic problems of discriminatory pay, could be solved without a fight.
This ruling illustrates that relying solely on legal means will not provide an answer to either equal pay or low pay. History has taught us that it is only through struggle will workers achieve an end to such discrimination and exploitation.
As the Single Status Agreement continues to unravel, workers are increasingly left with the stark fact that despite the rash promises of the union bureaucracies when Single Status was introduced, there are no easy ways to sort out their pay and grading problems, and they will have to be prepared to fight for fair treatment at work. Local authorities must be told now that threats of privatisation and cuts in pay and jobs will be met by industrial action.
The New Labour Government should understand that they must ensure that local government is adequately funded if it is not to develop into the kind of battleground that the national Health Service is currently becoming, where massive job losses are announced on a daily basis…and public support for the Government collapses as a result.