While last year’s cuts had a dramatic and serious impact on local authority services and jobs, this year’s cuts will have a more profound effect. Services that were cut to the bone last time around face even more cuts, some may even disappear. Already Connexions and the Youth Service have been devastated.

These measures will not only cost jobs and slash the capacity of councils to deliver vital services, it is increasingly likely that managements will try and force through cuts in wages and conditions.  Already Plymouth’s Tory Council have decided to de-recognise UNISON after the branch refused to sign up to a deal that would result in some groups of workers losing up to 20% of their wages. In Southampton, UNISON and UNITE members are involved in ongoing industrial action to oppose the Tory pay cut proposals. Birmingham Council workers are engaged in work to rule action to oppose the introduction of new contracts and the branch took strike action on June 30th.

Pressure

The pressure and conflict within the local authorities is mounting. As well as the areas where strike action has already taken place or is mooted, branches are dealing with the implications of cuts, “outsourcing,” reviews restructures and job losses, particularly in schools domiciliary care and nursery provision.

How then, under these conditions, should we be working within the union? At present branches are under enormous pressure and are fighting fires on many fronts at the same time. Services which have been affected by job cuts and cuts in funding will be going through restructures, management will be conducting reviews and senior managers will be looking at budgets for next year. The role of a good shop steward or branch officer under these conditions has to be to take an intransigent class position and question everything. We have to fight every redundancy and any threat of cuts in terms and conditions.

This pressure will begin to have an impact higher up in the union. The leadership will face demands to give a national lead. However, as the current national negotiations over pensions illustrate, they are in no hurry to mobilise the membership. While the union leadership on a national level might be prevaricating over industrial action or looking for deals and compromises with the government and the employers, the immediacy of the issues that we face on a day to day basis mean that the class struggle starts here. It is completely insufficient to merely blame the leadership, the bureaucracy or in the case of some misguided activists to walk out of the union altogether.

Resign

With that in mind we cannot agree with the decision of Socialist Party members and some of the activists around them to resign from UNISON in Greenwich. We can sympathise with them over the way that the UNISON leadership undemocratically banned Glen Kelly and three other Socialist Party members over the ‘three wise monkeys’ leaflet issue at the 2007 UNISON conference. We also understand that the UNISON officials have played a shameful role in Bromley, even going as far as trying to get facility time withdrawn from the Branch Chair Kathy Smith who was elected onto the UNISON NEC recently.

The decision of the SP comrades reveals a certain impatience and echoes examples from the past where honest groups of activists left their unions in the search for a more “radical” union. These include Pilkington’s Glass, the Blue Union on the docks and the EPIU. In the past, the Militant tendency argued against splitting the unions. The SP, who leaders wrecked the tendency, seem to have forgotten this. In this case, the comrades have moved unions to join UNITE and, in doing so, have cut some of the best activists away from the members. This won’t defeat the UNISON bureaucracy, nor will it serve the members in the long run.

Tribunal

It is a short cut, which weakens the left’s position within the union. The witch-hunted SP members have recently won their industrial tribunal against the union. UNISON are appealing the decision, but it is quite likely that the decision will be upheld. In other words the victimized 4 will have been vindicated. Unfortunately, this decision to abandon the union simply strengthens the rightwing and plays into their hands. One report claims that in Bromley, Onay Kasab one of the 4, joined both UNITE and the GMB shortly after he was banned from office. He has since been expelled from UNISON for allegedly “poaching” members from UNISON to join UNITE.

Trade union work is hard, involving a huge amount of routine work defending members. It requires stamina but, above all for socialists and Marxists, it requires a political perspective and a political programme. At present the key demand has to be to resist the cuts and to place demands on the leadership of the movement, not only to develop national action but also to support the branches that are in struggle. That will involve an industrial action strategy to stop the Con Dem attacks, in particular a one-day public sector general strike. Alongside this also is the question of democracy in the union, opposition to witch-hunts, undemocratic suspensions and bans.

The struggle of the working class will ultimately solve the problem of democracy in UNISON. The impact of the cuts will force many young workers and previously inactive members into activity. The rightwing normally rests on the inactive layers and uses its position to police the activists. Under the current conditions this position is going to be more difficult to sustain. Members are up in arms about pensions, desperate to protect their pay levels, anxious about their jobs and angry with the government. Already in many branches new layers of shop stewards and activists are coming forward. The task of transforming UNISON isn’t helped if experienced activists walk away.

• End the witch-hunts
• For a fighting democratic UNISON
• For a 24 hour public sector general strike