FORUM: Communications are key for unions
Published: 7 July, 2011
by DONNACHA DELONG
TRADE unions knew how to fight 100 years ago – in Britain industrial action that began in the Welsh mines spread across the country to national strikes in 1911 and 1912 in the period known as the Great Unrest.
They aimed to get rid of managers and owners and to take control of industry themselves – they were syndicalists.
Unions knew how to fight because they knew what they were fighting for. Working-class organisations had created their own media. The Yiddish Der Arbeiter Fraint (The Workers’ Friend), which was revived under Rudolf Rocker’s editorship, was an essential tool in building the Jewish trade unions of the East End up to 1912. In Ireland, there was the Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, the paper of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union.
In England, there was Tom Mann’s short-lived Industrial Syndicalist, followed by the Industrial Syndicalist Education League’s The Syndicalist in 1911 and, most enduring of all, The Daily Herald – an independent newspaper until it was handed over to the TUC in 1922.
After the First World War trade unions in Britain concentrated on defending the interests of their members in the existing structures of the capitalist economy and most left the Labour Party to manage politics in Westminster.
Though a strong left-wing press survived the Second World War, it went into gradual decline. The Daily Herald was sold in 1964 and rebranded the Sun by new owners.
In Europe, syndicalism remained a strong element on the left after WWI, but the state-oriented socialism of the Bolsheviks and fascism all but destroyed the movement.
People across Europe are now facing an organised and sustained onslaught on everything the unions built.
In the UK, this didn’t start with the creation of the current Coalition government.
They are continuing the work of previous Labour governments, albeit more swiftly and more aggressively.
On March 26 the trade union movement organised the (www.guardian.co.uk/society/blog/2011/mar/26/march-for-the-alternative-li...) largest trade union-organised demonstration in British history and, on June 30 (www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/15/civil-servants-vote-strike-actio...) co-ordinated strike action by major unions sent a strong message to the government.
However, the unions have so far not been able to make their case to the wider public, trailing behind students and UK Uncut. In part, this is because there are far fewer union members than there have been in decades and they are concentrated in the public sector. It is also because the unions are no longer venues for serious debate of the sort that animated working people before the First World War. Marches and strikes do not speak for themselves. The media showed little interest in exploring the concerns of the hundreds of thousands who marched peaceably in March. Most focused on a relative handful of people in balaclavas.
A campaign to stop the cuts may be simple, but it is not enough.
Successive Labour administrations privatised public services, deregulated finance and ignored tax avoidance. Unions need to stop deferring to Labour. We should be moving forward. Like our forerunners a century ago, we should be trying to bring about a new world.
Now, as then, communications are key. Unions that provide their members with the means to understand the current economic situation offer something that the mainstream media and the large political parties no longer provide – a coherent account of reality. They need spread this information more widely than their membership.
Survey after survey has shown that the number one reason people don’t join trade unions is because no one asked them. If we can sort out our communications and start engaging openly and effectively with the wider public, maybe they’ll come and ask us.
• Donnacha DeLong is a London-based journalist and trade union activist
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