Flying pickets could have tipped balance in our favour

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The majesty of the Establishment can auickly vanish. accept the given halance of forces, but went out to seek solidarity it amounted to "are you for or against the survival of BL?" The vote was not surprisingly 7-1 in favour -helped by the fact that the TGWU leaflets calling for a "No" vote were not available until after the ballot!

Small wonder that today as BR management prepare the ground for their own ballot of the workforce, the parallel with BL is being cited as an encouragement.

The scene has been set on the railways: there is unending talk about the financial plight of the rail system, the need for huge new government finance and the certainty of closures if this is not forthcoming.

Union leaders - especially Sid Weighell and Tom Jenkins of the TSSA - have already accepted this tale of woe at face value and agreed that their members should bear the cost of baling out BR. Nor has the ASLEF leadership offered any serious challenge to this view: indeed ASLEF's "alternative" proposals to flexible rostering themselves offer to slash jobs and conditions in the name of saving money for its industry.

But there is another factor that should not be forgotten when we assess the Edwardes tactic and its echo on BR. At no point have any of the most extreme threats issued by management been implemented.

When Edwardes threatened that any worker who did not clock in on April 8, 1980 would be sacked, he was defied by 19,000 TGWU workers in the Midlands.

The strikers were not sacked. They were sold out by Michael Edwardes, given his own conducted tour of BL finances, and his own look "over the precipice" He came out and announced total surrender 1o Edwardes.

And when last November Lawardes threatencd that strike action against his 3.8% pay offer would bring the. :closure of the Cars Division and the sacking of all 58,000 BI: car workers, he was again rebuffed. M ISS meetings voted 8-1 for itrike action -and the strike actually began before union officials once again staged an llth-hour sell-out.

Despite all the tough talk beforehand, nobody was sacked, and no plants closed as a result of the strike. At each stage Edwardes' threats have been sufficient to put the fear of death into the hearts of the union bureaucrats.

We have, therefore, still not seen whether Edwardes or the Tories would actually go to the extent of shutting down the last remnants of the British car industry. Still less can it be assumed that British Rail could simply close down - throwing hundreds of thousands out of work and causing long-term chaos in national transport arrangements.

Union leaders however in general identify more closely with the problem of the employers with whom they negotiate than with the membership, whose militancy and political awareness they regard as a threat to their own positions of privilege and influence.

We have seen in the last ten years of economic crisis that the most powerful arguemployer the hands of ment in an impending bankruptcy and closure.

In the face of such threats, reformist union leaders whose whole political horizon restricted secking the best possible conditions within the existing system. have answer to offer. They simply throw in the towel and concede jobs by the thousand. sacrificing living standards working conditions. in the hopes of making the firm in question "viable" capitalist lerms.

It is vital on the rail and throughout the trade union movement that a new leadership is built which is prepared to challenge this position dosend the interests it the defend the interests of the working class.

by Martin Thomas

WHEN British Rail delivered their sacking threat, the TUC leaders' spines immediately turned to jelly.

How could the workers win? On one side were stacked all the forces of the ruling class. The British Rail Board was determined and doubtless willing to see the railways shut down for a good long while. The Tory government was 100% behind them - indeed, pushing them on.

The media backed the bosses. So did the police, the courts, the whole edifice of capitalist power.

Side

On the other side -24,000 workers, in a declining industry. So the TUC leaders scurried to find a compromise. But was their perception of the balance of forces real? Or was it moulded, biased, and conditioned by their mortal fear of freewheeling working class mobilisation which escapes their control?

Remember 1972, when the miners humiliated the Heath government? The government was fresh from victories against the post workers and the power workers. The mines had long been a declining industry; and before that decline started, in 1926, Britain's bosses had shown their ability to stick out nine months of miners' strike.

Change

Yet the miners won spectacularly - because they did not accept the existing balance of forces, but went out to change it.

They did it with flying pickets. Lines of miners outside power stations and depots magnified the strike's power many times over.

Flying pickets were not a new invention in Britain in 1972. They had been pioneered in the US in the 1930s. Yet they had been unknown in Britain for decades.

Once rediscovered by the miners, the flying picket tacSaltley 1972: the miners didn' tic was quickly copied by other workers. It was important in the mass strike movement of July 1972 which forced the Tories to release five docker pickets jailed under the Industrial Relations Act. It was crucial in the building workers' strike of summer 1972.

In the ten years since then it has become almost commonplace - despite the Tories' legal threats. The NHS workers have used fly. ing pickets to help generate solidarity action on a scale seldom seen.

For flying pickets are the bridge via which a sectional strike can cease to be just a sectional strike; and can become a self-multiplying self-expanding class mobilisation.

A king is a king only because everyone thinks he is a king.

• Likewise, to a large extent, the capitalist class is powerful because people think it is powerful. Once workers lose the habit of obedience, and begin to learn self-confidence, the majesty of the Established Order can crumble very quickly. (In Quebec in 1972, when workers responded to the arrest of union leaders by a general strike, the bosses even had trouble tinaing prison guards to lock up the unionists! The secretary of the guards' union advised the guards to refuse).

Train drivers' flying pickets had already crippled BR's. attempt to keep a viable service running with scab labour. Spreading further afield, to the pits, the docks, the steelworks, the container drivers, the post offices, they could have turned the tables on the government. Each success for the flying pickets makes further successes easier, as confidence grows.

With a leadership worthy of the name, the labour movement would have little to fear from threats like BR's. But even against and despite the leadership, mass and flying, pickets can win struggles by reaching out directly to the rank and file.

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 22 July, 1982 Page 10