What grangemouth can tell us about the current state of the labour movement?

Quite a lot I’d argue. A big defeat that much of the left I’d argue has not really understood how big it was. Only time will tell of course but we do need to analyse the role of unions in this and how things may develop and play out in time. Unite who seems to be full of more hot air than actual punch of late unfortunately. So what will the Grangemouth dispute show in the long run? That unites is this so called fighting member lead left union? I doubt it somehow. For me it will confirm something which I’ve been thinking for a while now that trade unions have their place within capitalism now and firmly know their place in terms of what they can and can’t do. Unite knew going into this dispute that this could be a really key battle on the UK labour movement in this current age of austerity and privatisation. More and more I have sympathy with the anarchist critique of trade unions that its not the fact that unions sell us out constantly yes they do more often than not but that their structures mean that this is necessary and that maintaining relations with the boss’s and the employer is key. Unions for some time now have had to and have in many case’s apart from some like the RMT have willingly agreed to this thing they called union partnership with the employer where the union officials will know how far they can go and as to keep their seat at the negotiating table and to keep in with the boss’s as ultimately well paid union officials have more in common with the boss’s of course they are set the task of maintaining order and limiting struggle to the boundaries the boss’s set which are made perfectly clear before hand, As for the Grangemouth dispute was it always going to be a sell out? Well possibly with unites and its leading body of bureaucrats looking to get Ed Miliband and his labour party elected in 2015 a certain limit has to be held by unite who is as we know is Britain’s biggest trade union and still to this day the Labour Party’s biggest donor funding it to the tune of millions f our members hard earned pounds a year. Unite and its leading officials will want to see a labour government elected in 2015 so any unorganised struggles must be clamped down on to ensure to present a sensible face to capitalism and the labour party that they can be trusted to keep the workers in their place. To take future labour cuts, wage freezes and no repeal of any anti trade union laws. Of course Unite will accept this I hear you say why? No they won’t surely? Well the labour link is important and its not important for workers but it is important for unite and its leading layer to keep that link with the labour party higher ranks the two share a common goal of thinking they can manage capitalism better than the Tories. Of course there can be no “better” managing of capitalism it is a system based on the exploitation of labour for the production of surplus value and profit of course and for as long as it exists this will always be the way. So no amount of Ed Milibands responsible capitalism which really is a load of old guff can deflect from capitalisms aims of developing the productive forces and the ability to create and extract more profit from our unpaid labour. So what can we do as workers to fight back on the ground? Well I’d suggest that the boss’s are likely to take the Grangemouth sell out by Unite as a signal that the labour movement in the UK is weak which they probably already knew having forced through huge cuts and privatisation already with little opposition apart from a few big march’s and a big one day public sector strike in 2011 which in all honesty do little to worry the ruling class if we are brutally honest. What we do need is a proper genuine rank-and-file movement from below. Not the broad lefts which many on the left organise in today like the United Left which in affect is a election machine for the unite bureaucracy as we have seen with the last few elections in Unite if you are a in United Left you have the force of the unite bureaucracy behind you and are more or less a shoe in. The right wing in Unite is all but gone. Not tat we can be complacent there either it may return one day and there is already many talking of the right signing up to United Left to get elected. So do be careful there. But United Left a broad left is not a rank-and-file organisation organised from the bottom up. Ok it may have shop floor workers in it but is not worker lead in many ways. The NSSN could have been a really good rank-and-file organisation but I am not sure it is fully interested in organising workers across sectors and building solidarity. It may give lip service to supporting workers but more often than not in my experience the NSSN has been a mouth piece for left union bureaucrats to get on a platform and sound militant for a few hours while on the ground little in the way of organising is done. The NSSN does a lot of good in publicising disputes with its E Bulletin which I subscribe to but under the full control of the socialist part now I am not convinced it will be anything more than a recruitment front for that party unfortunately. I see very little independent rank-and-file voices on its steering committee for example. Most are Socialist party members who may well be workers themselves but I know for a fact some are not and some are paid employees of the socialist party itself. So I do firmly believe there is still the crying need for a rank-and-file network of works inside and outside of unions to link up struggles and build solidarity. To not push the ego’s of union leaders even if they do claim to be on the left. A bureaucrat is a bureaucrat whether they are left or right. Maybe a left one is more sympathetic to our struggles but they still have a role to play in the structures of the union and the wider capitalist society to maintain the order of things. The labour movement is far from dead but it is hugely weakened and venerable due to the lack of fight from all levels not just the leadership. We can affect change by organising ourselves from below. We do not need to wait for leaders to tell us to act or to fightback we can start today in ourworkplaces’s and beyond. Grangemouth doesn’t have to be remembered as yet another defeat on the long long list we have it could be turning point if we learn the lessons. The real lessons.

Should workers support state intervention ?

Whenever there is a crisis and a huge number of workers are in danger of loosing their jobs such as with Grangemouth last week the thing that comes from the left is to simply nationalise the company in question but very rarely the question of workers control is raised. Simply shouting "public ownership" is the answer to all our woes is wholely inadequate in my opinion. Much like with the big 6 energy companies who are ripping us all off at present the answer from the left is to "nationalise" them everytime. Yet all this is calling for is state capitalism. But would this be benificial to us in any way ? State capitalism was the way of things after the Second World War with many industries being brought into public ownership like the Coal and water industries for example more followed with a national health care system known today as the NHS of course. But the labour government at the time saw it fit to keep the boss's in charge of these state backed companies which meant they were no more democratic or accountable than before. Ok they had huge government funding but remained with teh same boss's as they did d before. This was not socialism and was rightly called state capitalism . "However, that does not answer the question of what we do in the here and now when faced with demands that the welfare state (for the working class, not corporate welfare) and other reforms be rolled back. This attack has been on going since the 1970s, accelerating since 1980. We should be clear that claims to be minimising the state should be taken with a massive pitch of salt as the likes of Reagan were "elected to office promising to downsize government and to 'get the government off the people's back,' even though what he meant was to deregulate big business, and make them free to exploit the workers to increase profits. The state may be influenced by popular struggle but it remains an instrument of capitalist rule. It may intervene in society as a result of people power and by the necessity to keep the system as a whole going, but it is bureaucratic and influenced by the wealthy and big business. Indeed, the onslaught on the welfare state by both Thatcher and Reagan was conducted under a "democratic" mandate although, in fact, these governments took advantage of the lack of real accountability between elections. They took advantage of an aspect of the state if you substitute government ownership for private ownership, "nothing is changed but the stockholders and the management; beyond that, there is not the least difference in the position of the workers." "Privatisation of public services -- whether it is through the direct sale of utilities or through indirect methods such as PFI and PPP -- involves a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the pockets of private business interests. It negates the concept of there being such a thing as 'public service' and subjects everything to the bottom line of profit. In other words it seeks to maximise the profits of a few at the expense of wages and social obligations. Furthermore, privatisation inevitably leads to an attack on wages and working conditions - conditions which have been fought for through years of trade union agitation are done away with at the scratch of a pen." [Gregor Kerr, "Privatisation: the rip-off of public resources", pp. 14-18, Black and Red Revolution, no. 11, p. 16] is important to point out that the 'nationalise it' or 'take it into public ownership' slogan is far too often spun out by people on the left without their taking into account that there is a massive difference between state control/ownership and workers' control/ownership . . . we all know that even if the revenues . . . were still in state ownership, spending it on housing the homeless or reducing hospital waiting lists would not top the agenda of the government. "Put simply, state ownership does not equal workers' ownership . Thus an revolutionary socialist approach to this issue would be to reject both privatisation and nationalisation in favour of socialisation, i.e. placing nationalised firms under workers' self-management. In the terms of public utilities, such as water and power suppliers, they could be self-managed by their workers in association with municipal co-operatives -- based on one member, one vote -- which would be a much better alternative than privatising what is obviously a natural monopoly (which, as experience shows, simply facilitates the fleecing of the public for massive private profit). Christie and Meltzer state the obvious: "It is true that government takes over the control of certain necessary social functions. It does not follow that only the state could assume such control. The postmen are 'civil servants' only because the State makes them such. The railways were not always run by the state, They belonged to the capitalists [and do once more, at least in the UK], and could as easily have been run by the railway workers. " In the long term, of course, the real solution is to abolish capitalism "and both citizens and communities will have no need of the intervention of the State." [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 268] In a free society, social self-defence would not be statist but would be similar in nature to trade unionism, co-operatives and pressure groups -- individuals working together in voluntary associations to ensure a free and just society -- within the context of an egalitarian, decentralised and participatory system which eliminates or reduces the problems in the first place SO in conclusion its all about control and workers control at that . Putting it simply you cannot control waht you dont own. Fighting for democratic workers control from below is the only way forward in my opinion when situations like Grangemouth come up again which no doubt they will do as capitalism fails to develop itself out of a huge rutt. with quotes and extracts from http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionD1#secd15

Unite, Grangemouth and what we can learn from the last week and a bit

So the Grangemouth Oil refinery is to remain open but at what cost to the workers and the labour movement as a whole? Operator Ineos had announced on Wednesday that the plant was to shut, with the loss of 800 jobs, after union members rejected a survival plan. But the decision was reversed after the union agreed to Ineos's conditions. Ineos confirmed it would reopen the plant and the neighbouring oil refinery "with immediate effect", ending a bitter dispute with the Unite union which began over the alleged mistreatment of a Unite official. The company said the move to reopen the plant followed a "dramatic U-turn" by Unite and its "belated recognition" that the company's survival plan was the only way to ensure Grangemouth's long-term future. Jim Ratcliffe, chairman of Ineos, said there had been a "significant change in attitude" from the unions Unite Scottish secretary Pat Rafferty said: "Relief will ring right round the Grangemouth community and across Scotland today. "Hundreds of jobs that would have been lost can now be saved and £300m will be invested into the plant." The main points of the Ineos announcement included: • Ineos will reopen the petrochemical plant and oil refinery at Grangemouth immediately • An undertaking by Ineos to invest £300m at the Grangemouth site on a gas terminal to handle shale gas brought in from America • Workers agreed to a three-year pay freeze • The union agreed not to stage strikes at the plant for three years until the new gas terminal is built • Changes will be made to current staff pension arrangements • Up to 2,000 contractors who were laid off after the complex was shut will be re-hired First Minister Alex Salmond described the announcement as a "tremendous fillip for the workforce and the whole Grangemouth community, following what could have been a potential disaster". He said it had been "a great team effort from all concerned", including the unions and workforce, the management and governments. This shows to me the absolute weakness of the labour movement at this time with Britain’s biggest trade union caving in days after it said it would stand and fight is an absolute disgrace in my opinion. The 1,800 Grangemouth workers have found that neither the Unite union leaders, who they pay for, nor Labour or SNP representatives they voted for, would stand with them, if they decided to mobilise a real fight against Ineos. In an amazing display of solidarity and determination, the majority of the Unite members had voted to strike and reject the company’s blackmail. But within hours of their vote on Wednesday, the message from all sides was that there was no alternative to accepting destruction of living standards and the pensions of any future workers. A media outcry held the workers responsible for the fate of the 10,000 related jobs in the local area. So yesterday, their union leaders simply caved in. Unite general secretary Len McCluskey left earlier negotiations up to local officials but hurried up from London to capitulate in person. Within hours he had unreservedly accepted the company’s terms, “warts and all”. Shocking but true. McCluskey has breathed fire and brimstone since the ConDems coalition took power, threatening strikes, and civil disobedience, even a general strike against austerity, the public sector wage freeze and pension curbs. When it came to the crunch, he had no fight. Hot air and nothing more. I was a socialist party member up until a month or so ago and the party backed Len McCluskey in the last Unite general secretary elections I didn’t agree with backing him and couldn’t bring myself to voting for him in the end. It now turns out that I made a wise decision to note vote for either Len or Hicks. Its looking a little embarrassing now for the SP who had backroom meetings with Red Len to agree to back him now it looks a shameful stitch up from the unite leadership. No doubt Len and unite have one eye on the 2015 general election where they will be backing Ed Miliband and Labour to the hilt so any embarrassment for Red Ed must be avoided it would seem. As for the potential of an independent Scotland being better for workers it is hard to say but for as long as capitalism exists there will not be a better deal for workers in the UK or in an independent Scotland. SNP claims that a capitalist Scotland would be in some way better for Scottish workers have been exploded. Ineos, like all Scotland's key industries from oil to whisky, is not "Scottish". They are run by freebooting global capitalist transnationals with no care for local conditions, except where they impact on profits. The adjacent oil refinery, whose waste product is processed at the threatened plant, is owned by Petroineos, a refining and trading joint venture between Ineos and the Chinese government-owned PetroChina. Its other refinery is at Lavera, near Marseilles. As the recession continues and fracking throws cheaper US coal and gas on to the world market, who knows what will happen to the offshore oil refining business. There is no such thing as security for workers, whatever the status of their country's governance. The Unite members were ready to fight and their union could have organised an occupation to prevent the dismemberment of the plant, but they did not and will not. Independence will not change that. The state will always behave in the interests of the state. Holding hope that someone else can fix things for us is only going to lead to half-measures and the disappointment. It is only by building up our ability to take action together at the heart of the problem that will give us any real measure control of our lives. The way in which the unions and the politicians have behaved is not the victory for common sense that is being billed; it is a stitch-up against all of us as a class. The people on the shop floor know their business better than any union bureaucrat, better than any politician, and better than any boss. We should learn the lessons from this fight and stand in solidarity with workers at Grangemouth and beyond, lending them support where we can and taking their lead on how to fight this struggle and to hell with anyone that stands in their way.

Solidarity with Grangemouth workers

Solidarity with Grangemouth workers The dispute at the Grangemouth oil refinery started with Labour's fight with Unite in Falkirk, and shows us just how broken Britain is. Without a moment's thought to the human cost, Ineos bosses today have announced the closure of the petrochemical plant at Grangemouth with the loss of 800 jobs. They intend to put that arm of their business into liquidation meaning workers may face losing thousands of pounds in redundancy payments. The oil refinery and the jobs of another 600 workers remain in jeopardy, the result of a lockout by billionaire owner Jim Ratcliffe. The next hours and days are vital in ensuring the building of a mass campaign to fight to save the Grangemouth plant and retain the jobs and terms and conditions of the workforce. The announcement by Ineos that they intend to pull out of the Grangemouth petrochemical site with the threatened loss of up to 800 jobs is an act of corporate vandalism. The oil refinery remains shut and the workers effectively locked out. Ineos management and its majority owner, billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, are 100% responsible for this scandal. They have shut down the entire Grangemouth site to force the workers to accept savage cuts in terms and conditions. We should congratulate Unite members and their shop stewards at Grangemouth for their refusal to be bullied. Around 70% of Unite members rejected the 'sign or be sacked' ultimatum from Ineos management. There is still much to fight for and Unites role in all this is not without its faults. In an excellent Open Democracy article published today which I’d recommend all having a read of at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/robin-mcalpine/whats-really-happening-at-grangemouth-and-what-it-tells-us#.Umf_V-lSW5Q "It began when Ed Milliband handed a report on the claimed irregularities on candidate selection in the Falkirk bye-election to the police. Since one of the key organisers maligned – and subsequently cleared – in that action is a shop steward at Ineos, the firm decided that if Ed Milliband can cast aspersions, they can act. Ineos suspended Stevie Deans on the grounds that it was believe he may have used a work email address to carry out some Labour Party business. (God help us all if using a work email for non-work purposes can get you suspended...) I shall refrain from elaborating further for reasons of care on specific allegations; suffice to say, there was more done to provoke the union. Given what can only be described as the political suspension of Deans, what position did Unite have to play? To accept it? To leave open unchallenged the impression that any union activists is fair game with no defence to be mounted? If Ineos did not recognise that these actions – absolutely unrelated either to the subsequent claims about the plant's profitability or the terms and conditions of its employees – was bound to push the union towards some form of response then it is shockingly naïve. And that is an adjective that has never been associated with Ineos. So let us assume that this was an intentional provocation. The union balloted and threatened strike action. The response of Ineos? To close down the plant. Switching off a refinery is a big deal and it may now take more than two weeks to get the plant operating again, if Ineos ever decides to restart. Thing is, the union had called off the action. This plant was not closed down by a union; it was closed down by the owners. Immediately after that they claimed the industrial-action-that-never-was was costing them a fortune. It is at this point that suddenly we are regaled with a PR drive which suggests the company is in severe distress and that employees must take significant cuts to pay and conditions. To cut a long story short, it goes to ACAS, the union claims a deal was close but/so Ineos walked out. It imposed a new contract on workers and told them they had three days (individually, not through the union) to agree the new contract or workers would be sacked and the plant (or half of it) closed down. A majority of workers rejected the deal. So today Ineos decided it was closing the petrochemical half of the plant (the bit it claims is loss-making) and keep the refinery open – but only on condition that workers sign away their right to strike in the future. And accept the imposed contract. That's for the profitable bit of the business, and it is far from clear that the rest of the plant is really as loss-making as is claimed. Ineos is majority owned by Jim Ratcliffe. In 2008 when the company was in some financial distress (possibly the result of finance strategies) it requested a one-year delay in payment of a VAT bill. The UK Government refused, so he paid for the relocation of his entire central staff to move to Switzerland. This is not a man who likes losing. It means that Ineos's financial situation is opaque – even business analysts (no friends of the trade unions) have been raising doubts as to how confident we can be in the claims that individual bits of the business are not profitable. What is certainly the case is that if there is financial distress it's not due to wage bills which make up only 1.6 per cent of costs. Is it worth mentioning that Ineos has avoided tax in Britain since 2010? You may well have assumed that anyway. Of course, this is my interpretation of what has happened and as always it's worth noting that I am not likely to have sympathy with aggressive management techniques. However, I find it virtually impossible to believe that Ineos did not begin with the desire to provoke strike action for which they had prepared extensively (both in terms of business planning and PR strategy) and it is certainly hard to see anything in its behaviour that suggests it wanted a peaceful resolution. And so to the three lessons. First, this is a facility that provides 80 percent of Scotland's fuel – and it is in the power of one man to close it down at will. It is to the great credit of the Scottish Government that (given its limited powers) it has put pressure on the company, has looked to find a buyer if Ineos won't agree to operate the plant and has refused to rule out public ownership. While this last course of action is unlikely, it is another sign of the SNP shifting away from the free-market orthodoxy of British politics. This is not a facility (virtually a monopoly industry) about which we can afford to have no views or opinions about ownership. There is now a serious debate in Scotland about whether our key infrastructure is safe in private, often foreign, hands. The behaviour of Ineos has intensified that debate. Britain is in denial about the importance of the ownership of the economy. It is most obvious in the monopoly utility sector but the Grangemouth dispute shows that it's not just the power and phone lines that keep us moving. Should one man be able to cripple Scotland? The last time he tried to break the unions petrol stations ran dry. The energy companies have put this issue on the agenda UK-wide through their actions. In Scotland at least the questions are spreading further than this. Ownership in Britain is broken. We are one of the few countries in the world where key infrastructure is mainly owned overseas. But not as broken as industrial democracy in Britain. It's not like we're a bit bad; we're truly awful. The European Participation Index (EPI) has calculated the participation of workers in 27 EU and EEA countries by combining the aggregate scores of their plant-level participation, board-level participation, collective bargaining coverage and trade-union density. Britain scores 26th out of 27, second bottom with only Lithuania worse than us. In Denmark (for example) 65 per cent of companies with more than 500 employees have voluntarily committed to having a third of management boards made up of workers and have cooperation committees made up of half-worker, half-management and these manage day-to-day matters in the company. And here's the thing; all the countries in the EU with the best indicators of social and economic development come in the top half of the EPI league table and all the worst performers come from the bottom half. Studies have shown that like-for-like companies are 19 per cent more productive if they are unionised. Britain, of course, lags the average productivity of advanced economies by almost 20 per cent. At some point we will wake up to the fact that Britain is a basket-case when it comes to industrial democracy and our economic performance is poor as a result. Remember, we live in the second-lowest pay economy in the developed world. Finally, if you come from Scotland it is hard once again not to be shocked by the myopia of London. On Sunday when our media was absolutely dominated by a dispute that threatened to cut off 80 per cent of Scotland's fuel (and large proportions of the fuel supply to the North of England too), not a mention was made on the main BBC news bulletins. Apparently the Westminster parlour games of Nick Clegg pretending to be a little bit cross with Free Schools is of greater national significance of the possible collapse of both oil supplies and one of the last major industrial sites left in Scotland. Across the whole piece coverage has been negligible. To my shock, a new news anchor on BBC today asked the correspondent in Grangemouth “there's clearly great anger – is it directed towards the management or the union?” Even the correspondent on the ground looked shocked – it was a question that could only come through the London looking glass. Workers all reported that the manager that broke the information to workers was smirking throughout as he told them they were going to lose their jobs, their houses, their children’s' Christmas. Angry at their union? Does the BBC no longer have any understanding of working people at all? Do they all live in a Spectator-tinged alternative universe? Today at PMQs no mention was made. When there was an emergency question, David Cameron left the chamber. The Scottish Government has been all over this dispute; London appears to have done nothing other than press its 'randomised industrial dispute quote generator'. What is there left to be positive about in the British economy? People genuinely talk as if this might be the future that we may need to accept total dominance of employers with no recourse at all by workers. This is a vision of Britain where we're all like Mexican immigrants waiting at the side of the road for a truck to drive up and its driver to say 'one day of work – you, you and you'. But, as is par for the course in Britain with its far-right media and utter lack of understanding of how the world works beyond our shores, people seem to think we're normal. Yet one more time, the Grangemouth disaster shows one thing above all – Britain is not normal. Not at all. " With thanks to open democracy and their excellent article over at http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/robin-mcalpine/whats-really-happening-at-grangemouth-and-what-it-tells-us#.Umf_V-lSW5Q