Broad lefts and rank-and-file groups

In his speech at the TUC (10 September) Ed Miliband said: “I want to make each and every affiliated trade union member a real part of their local party. Making a real choice to be a part of our party. So they can have a real voice in it...We could become a Labour Party not of 200,000 people, but 500,000 or many more”. This is a shift from the 9 July speech about “opting-in”, where he said only that unionists paying the political levy to Labour should have to “opt in” to pay, rather than just not “opting out”. What Miliband seems to propose now is a drive to get affiliated unionists to become...

Friday, April 2 Arrive at the NUT Conference in Brighton expecting a lively and constructive weekend. Teachers are deeply angry about the Green Paper proposals for performance related pay. Yet it is hard to think about anything but the unfolding crisis in Kosova. The previous week I had been to an involved discussion on the issue. This conflict is not reducible to the well-worn slogans - 'the main enemy is at home', 'stop the war', etc. Politics starts immediately with a Socialist Teachers Alliance (STA) meeting. The main issue is, rightly, the Green Paper, but I am approached by some comrades...

This article was written in response to a piece in Socialist Review. The author has also requested that it be published there. We host it in our website in the interests of furthering the debate. The move of Senate House cleaners, other outsourced staff, and their supporters to leave Unison en masse and form a University of London branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), after the annulment of their elections, has sparked heated debate within trade union circles, especially among Unison activists. Sandy Nicoll, branch secretary of SOAS Unison, contributed to this debate...

Members of the Independent Left network within the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) are standing in the upcoming National Executive Committee elections alongside members of the Independent Socialists. They are standing on a platform of transforming the PCS to make it a rank-and-file-led union with radical, imaginative industrial strategies. For more information on the platform and the candidates, see here .

At this year’s National Union of Teachers conference (29 March – 2 April, Liverpool), delegates debated what strategy the NUT should adopt in response to Michael Gove’s attacks on teachers’ pay, due to come into effect in September 2012. The NUT Executive’s priority motion promised a rolling programme of industrial action alongside NASUWT (Britain’s other major teaching union), leading up to national action sometime in the autumn. But the proposal was devoid of strategy or even any concrete commitments about when action would take place. This is despite existing NUT policy which should commit...

The teachers' rank-and-file network LANAC held its second steering committee on 9 March in Coventry. There were just over 20 delegates from 18 branches and it was a meeting which prepared the ground for LANAC's second intervention at NUT Conference. The main discussion followed a report on the pay campaign from NEC member, Patrick Murphy, and centred on the approach which should be taken to this dispute at Conference. Whatever the details delegates agreed that LANAC should present an alternative to the strategy of the union leadership which would call for a programme of action to start early...

Workers’ Liberty members in Unite will be critically supporting Len McCluskey, the candidate of Unite United Left (in which we are involved), in the forthcoming general secretary election. There have been some positive improvements within Unite under McCluskey’s leadership. A culture of greater democracy and debate has been encouraged, and the move towards industrial reorganisation and workplace branches is positive. On the whole the union is more prepared than in the past to back its members in taking action, and providing resources to help organise direct action in support of industrial...

Vic Turner carried aloft as the Pentonville Five are released From Workers' Liberty magazine 41, July 1997 Part two, on the role of the left, here It is July 1972. With the union leaders safely in talks with Tory Prime Minister] Heath and knuckling under to his Industrial Relations Act (IRA), the Tories now went for the real union power on the docks: the rank and file. They were going to make an example of five dockers from east London to cauterise resistance to the long-term running down of the docks, to stop the unofficial blacking (refusal to unload) of lorries and picketing at the...

This Saturday December 8th the network of NUT branches (known as divisions or associations) which was established in response to the retreat in the pensions struggle earlier in the year will hold its second national conference in Leicester. Local Associations for National Action (LANAC) emerged in March last year after the NUT National Executive voted to call off a planned national strike due to take place on March 28th despite 73% of members voting for the strike in a union survey. As feared by the activists and branches that launched the network, that was the end of pensions action for the...

Teachers’ national action over a number of issues, including workload, continues, with the industrial action escalating to strikes in a number of schools. Teachers at Stratford Academy, where management has imposed a 15% pay cut on workers taking part in action, struck for three days from 13 November, with more strikes on the way. A parents’ group has been formed to support the teachers and demand that school management withdraws the pay cut. At Bishop Challoner school in East London, teachers have voted overwhelmingly to strike against victimisation of National Union of Teachers reps, under...