
The first consequence is such a big, visible action can only embolden further such action. With ballots live for civil servants, teachers, railway workers, HE workers, nurses, and dozens of smaller scale disputes flaring up week after week in the private sector, as the cost of living bites workers have no choice but to defend what we have and demand back what's been taken. This can only spread further, seeing as Sunak is is refusing to negotiate. Inflation and affordability aren't the issue. We've seen how these don't matter when occasion affords an excuse to shower their well-heeled support with state money.. No, Sunak wants to be seen as a strong leader and needs to keep a lid on the politics of expectations. Doing the sensible thing and hammering out compromise deals with trade unions, even if their demands are nowhere near met, is fatal to a Tory project working to delegitimise and render ineffective all forms of collective action.
Yet, despite this, not only is the strike wave growing, public support is growing. This doesn't matter so much for workers in dispute per se. The object of striking is to be disruptive and make life unliveable for the employer for the duration. This, ultimately, is all that matters. Yet with some 300,000 teachers taking action and the huge inconvenience for millions of parents, polling shows their sympathies lie with them as opposed to the government and that this has increased as the strike wave has picked up speed. The reasoning isn't hard to fathom. Parents speak to teachers. They know what goes on in their kids' schools. They can see how hard pressed they are for resources, and have an inkling about the ridiculous (unpaid) workload that comes with the job. Likewise, because of the spread of the strike action, we are approaching that crucial point where every family and social circle has someone who has either been on strike during this wave, came out today, or will be looking to very soon. Whatever Tory MPs say in the Commons or the lines they push in interviews, or rubbish written by the shrinking right wing press, social proximity cuts through their lies.
Herein lies the danger for establishment politics. For decades, Tory rhetoric has relied on supposing the unions are some sort of excrescence; a barely-acceptable set of institutions who don't have any place in the modern workplace and are divorced from and separate to the workers they organise. For much of the same period, Labour's attitude has been little different. This has left an opening. The combination of the inflation crisis, and that unions are the only organisations talking about solutions is turning heads. Last time, political neglect of entirely normal aspirations resulted in Corbynism. This time, ignoring the fact working people want a wage or salary they can live on is legitimising trade unions and militant action. Sunak's short-sightedness is not keeping the labour movement in a box, he's antagonising it, setting up a dynamic where disputes can only grow and grow - especially when it's he, the Prime Minister who dodged a leadership contest of his own members, who's lacking legitimacy.
There are medium term consequences here for Labour as well. Keir Starmer has spoken favourably about trade unions pretty consistently, even though he won't be drawn on the specifics of industrial disputes or offer striking workers the smallest amount of encouragement. His silence about today's actions are typical. However, by not saying anything positive he's already teaching trade unionists, especially those new to the movement and taking their first striking steps, a valuable lesson: that Labour, and particularly its leadership cannot be trusted. While most sections of the labour movement will support Starmer without enthusiasm to get shot of the Tories, the aloof positioning, the "we're not a party of protest" posturing is placing a wedge between the enlightened legislators of which he is the personification, and the increasingly class conscious workers voting for him. That means when the time comes for conflicts between unions and his government, and they will surely happen, large numbers of workplace activists as well as union officialdom won't feel the need to pull their punches as Labour-loyal unions have done in the past.
In other words, the strike wave has every possibility of opening politics up by normalising trade unions as aggregators of workers' voices, by framing industrial action as a reasonable and legitimate response to unreasonable and unacceptable establishment politics, and crucially create a spur for workers - us - to look to our own capacities rather than waiting on a great socialist messiah to save us. Today was significant not just because it hit several statistical milestones. We could be at the beginning of something new - and exciting.
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