Just when it seemed that workforces across the country might be accepting the privations of the slump, a determination to protect jobs and pay has been gathering strength with marked success in several sectors. It’s true that where companies have been struggling for survival, as in the case of BA, management have imposed conditions on pay or pensions or productivity which would never have been tolerated a year or more ago, but which have now been enforced crudely by fear of loss of job. The request to the BA workforce to work for a month without pay was only accepted for this reason, not because of any supposed new solidarity between employer and employees. The idea that the chief executive Willie Walsh’s ‘sacrifice’ of one month of his £743,000 salary inspired some of his staff on £200 a week to do the same is the stuff of CBI dreams. It wholly misses the point of the far more significant developments in industrial relations that have been taking place elsewhere and tell a very different story.

At the Lindsey oil refinery the success of the unions in getting reinstated not only the original 51 workers made redundant, but also all the 647 who came out in support of them, demonstrates several crucial lessons. One is that even in a deep recession and even in a highly contractualised and fragmented industry, the employers don’t necessarily have the whiphand if a well-organised workforce takes determined action in mutual support of dismissed workers. Another is that such action can succeed also in the face of EU Directives where these are widely perceived as partisan and anti-union. The Lindsey walk-out was portrayed, wrongly and perhaps deliberately so, as anti-foreigner; rather it was aimed at stopping the exploitation of ECJ judgements (Laval and other cases) by employers to lower the terms and conditions of all workers in the industry, British and migrant equally, which is why (crucially) hundreds of Polish workers joined the strike.
A third vital lesson is that the Thatcherite anti-trade union suite of laws which New Labour maintained almost intact is now to a large degree on ice. All of the walk-outs at Lindsey and at many other power stations and refineries were illegal, but no employer even hinted at using the law to curb the strikes. The implications of that will be writ large in future months and years. But there is one other lesson too which is highly significant: the way to negate anti-democratic and discriminatory legislation is not to await change wrought by a feeble and even hostile Labour Party, but to take direct action in the workplace in defence of basic rights. If they had waited for solidarity action, banned by Thatcher’s laws, to be repealed, they would still be waiting. As it is, it is now effectively suspended.
Nor are these seismic movements in the industrial landscape confined to tightly organised sectors like energy and rail. Cases are multiplying around the country where action against lockouts and closures has saved jobs or secured better pay-offs. If politically Labour remains content with what Blair proclaimed to be “the most restrictive union laws in the western world”, and if industrially workers are able to sidestep such laws through their own organised resistance outside the political process, workers and unions will soon be asking what exactly the Labour Party is for.

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