LONDON-After thirteen weeks of bitter struggle, the British steel strike has come to an end. The final deal, a 16% pay increase tied to job loss and productivity increases, was a despicable sellout of steelworkers by union officials.
But management and the Conservative Party government of Margaret Thatcher cannot claim victory. The large-scale redundancies [layoffs] demanded by the Tories-which before the strike seemed certain to go through without any problemsnow threaten to become a battle ground. The steel strike raised the temperature of the class struggle in Britain and brought workers from one of the key basic industries out of hibernation.
On the very day of the return to work, two separate disputes broke out, one in South Yorkshire and the other in Port Talbot in South Wales, over the blacking of [refusal to handle] scab transport contractors who had not recognized picket lines. By the second day of the return to work, 20,000 workers were involved in unofficial strike action.
What the Deal Includes
The deal was finally accepted after a so-called independent commission of inquiry upped the management's final offer by 2%. The deal is made up of two parts. Eleven percent is to be paid on existing rates. On average this will mean a £10 wage rise. Financing for this, some £180 million, has to be found almost entirely from future redundancies, given the government's cash limit on subsidies to the nationalized industry. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) has put the job loss figure at 52,000, one-third of the total workforce.
Another 4.5% is dependent upon the successful negotiation of local productivity deals involving massive changes in working practice, manpower flexibility, and speedups. All this will lead to the loss of another 12,000 jobs. This 4.5% will be paid for the first three months to all workers. But after that, it will only continue to be paid if satisfactory local deals are completed. In many cases, therefore, workers will only be awarded 11%-in the face of an inflation rate of 18.5% and rising. Takehome pay will be further affected by the agreement to renegotiate the guaranteed workweek.
Nonetheless, a 16% deal is a far cry from the original management offer of 2%. Steelworkers hardly became the sacrificial lamb the Tories intended them to be. The lesson the Tories gave to the rest of the class will not be such as to intimidate the strong sectors like the miners. This was the whole point of the exercise. Weaker groups of workers will, of course, be looking at the length of strike action necessary to even get in reach of the going rate. Undoubtedly, many groups of workers will think twice before they go into struggle over small questions.
The situation inside the steel industry has been completely transformed. There was widespread anger at the acceptance of the deal. Pickets lobbying the union headquarters when the deal was accepted, chased the executive members who had voted for the deal round the building and physically assaulted them. The police had to be called. The near unanimous view of the active strikers was to oppose the deal. But these were only a minority of the total workforce, which had, by and large, re mained passive during the strike and subject to the pressure of the capitalist media. This had of course been encouraged by Bill Sirs, leader of the largest union, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC), and other steel union leaders.
Accordingly, local leaders generally took the view that a united return to work was the best way to preserve fighting capacity. In face of the executive's decision on the deal-endorsed by the delegate-based negotiating committee of the biggest union, the ISTC-the militant areas felt that they would get isolated and picked off, pitting steelworker against steelworker. Better to wait for new struggles.
Even so, it took local leaders in South Yorkshire, a key militant stronghold, all their prestige to win a small majority for a return to work at the mass meeting called to consider the question.
What Tories Were After
The fact of a thirteen-week strike by the steelworkers-the longest national strike since the Second World War-was completely unexpected, not least by the Tories. Their idea, hatched while in opposition by Nicholas Ridley, a leading Tory MP [Member of Parliament], was to pick a group of workers as an example to the rest of the class. What they had learned from the previous Tory administration of Edward Heath in the early 70s was that they could not immediately take on the core militant sectors without encouraging the sort of conflagration that Heath had touched off with the miners and that finally brought down his government.
Therefore, Thatcher's policy was to compromise with the core unions in this round. Thus, miners won 21% without any struggle. British Oxygen workers got over 30% similarly. Such wage increases cannot go on if the Tories are to put British capitalism back on an expansionary basis. A swinging defeat for the steelworkers was swinging dereat for the Steelworkers was felt to be necessary preparation to be able to take on and defeat a sector like the miners in the next wages round.
The ISTC seemed to be well chosen. Bill Sirs, its general secretary, was reknowned for his "moderation." The ISTC had only held four conferences in its history, the first in 1976. Even then these conferences were only advisory.
There had been no national steel strike since the British general strike in 1926. Over the past two years, the union leadership had agreed to 40,000 redundancies, and in the last wages round had accepted 8% when everyone else was gaining 15% and inflation was 17%.
British steel workers are by far the lowest paid in the whole of Europe. They had fallen to seventeenth in the British wages league if overtime is counted, and only sixtieth out of 120 in basic pay.
On the eve of the strike, Sirs announced that there would be no fight against a further 53,000 redundancies demanded by the British Steel Corporation.
The initial BSC offer of 2% on top of the massive redundancies was the spark that brought this colossus into motion. Despite its leadership, the strike was 100% solid from day one. Workers from those plants like Shotton, Corby, and Consett-which were facing virtual total closure-came out solid, even though they appeared to have nothing to gain by the strike.
Within days the whole of British steel was at a standstill. During the course of the next weeks, a massive flying picket operation was organized towards other sectors of industry, particularly steel stockholders [stockpilers], docks, and private industry. Such actions were against the policy, and in many cases the explicit instructions, of the national ISTC leadership. They were against the picketing of stockholders and other "secondary" targets. Sirs at first refused to call out his members in the private steel industry, although this sector accounts for 26% of production. Sirs was so bankrupt, that he not only gave four weeks notice of intention to strike, allowing a massive buildup of stocks by steel users, but he gave no concrete target for the strike. It was the determination of the rank and file that took the strike forward.
Local Strike Leaderships
It was the local strike leaderships that actually formulated the strike aims: 20% with no strings. In this, the South Yorkshire strike committees came to the fore. The policy of the strike committees was that no steel should move. Flying pickets were dispatched all over the country, financed primarily by the local strike committees. The extent of the flying pickets, the scope of the targets, and the number of pickets involved far exceeded the previous highest level of struggle, set by the miners in 1972.
It was typical that the South Yorkshire divisional strike committee took on militant miners leader Arthur Scargill, architect of the 1972 miners operation, as its adviser. The level of rank-and-file selforganization in the strike was remarkable. This was coupled with a widespread distrust of the union leadership, which led to the popularization of the demand for Sirs' resignation.
A key early focus was the private steel firm Hadfields, owned by the big international conglomerate Lonrho. The mobilization by the South Yorkshire strike committee of thousands of steelworkers, backed by thousands of miners and local engineers, succeeded in closing the plant. The lack of determination by the national leadership and its failure to formulate a policy that could involve the private sector meant that the Hadfields management was able to exploit the workers' fear of redundancy and get them back to work a couple of weeks later. But up to this point, it was a series of actions such as these, led by an emerging rank-and-file leadership, that kept the strike advancing.
The policy of Sirs, on the other hand, was to attempt to find a compromise with the management at every turn. It was Sirs, with the backing of Trades Union Congress (TUC) boss, Len Murray, who only one week into the strike actually proposed the form of the final sell-out formula-8% plus 5% local productivity.
Very quickly, it became obvious that a new strike leadership had to be forged. The delegate-based national negotiating committee was somewhat responsive to rankand-file demands. For instance, the 2% plus 12% pay-for-jobs deal offered by management and recommended by Sirs in the fifth week of the strike was thrown out after a meeting of only twenty minutes. But this body could not act as a day-to-day leadership.
It was the South Yorkshire strike committee that by and large played this role, almost immediately forming themselves into a divisional committee under a coordinated command. It decided on national targets and on organizing and financing the flying pickets. It was also somewhat of a model in developing rank-and-file and community involvement in the strike. It organized a whole series of rallies and demonstrations to keep the mass of workers involved and informed. Its strike committees were often elected and subject to mass meetings. But clearly a committee based on one region did not have the authority to openly go for the leadership of the whole strike. Many things had to be done behind the scenes.
This laid the basis for the emergence of the unofficial national strike committee. Again, the initiative came from South Yorkshire. Its first meeting was held in the seventh week of the dispute, in some secrecy, with representatives from most areas. From then on, it held regular weekly meetings. Its objective was to make good nationally the determination to stop all steel moving, to extend the action to major steel users, and to popularize the strike objective of 20% with no strings. It was this body that decided to close Fords Dagenham, the largest plant in Britain. In the final week of the strike, the Dagenham plant was under serious threat of imminent closure. This body also took the initiative in organizing lobbies of the official national leadership meetings to try to prevent sell-outs.
A tremendous amount was achieved in building this body in the course of the strike. The coordination effected and the contacts made will now be turned to organizing to remove the sell-out leadership. But the fact of the previous non-existent organization of the rank and file and the lack of implantation of a revolutionary organization nationally, together with its late formation, prevented the national strike comfrom challenging the national mittee leadership.
Strike in South Wales
In the other militant area, South Wales, the picture was more complicated. The threatened redundancies in the Port Talbot and Llanwern plants had actually galvanized the whole of the movement in the area. The 11,000 redundancies threatened at these two plants would actually reverberate throughout the whole of South Wales, taking the toll in lost rail, docks, and mining jobs to 45,000. The whole region will therefore be devastated.
For this reason, the strike in Wales took on a class-wide character from the very beginning. Thus, on January 28 200,000 workers from all trades participated in a one-day general strike. The dynamic was developing to an all-out general strike, led by the miners, due to begin on March 10. But owing to the prevarications of the Welsh TUC and the sabotage of the national TUC, a ballot of the miners rejected the proposal for indefinite strike action despite a positive recommendation by the local leadership of the National Union of Miners. This decision, together with the decision of the Hadfields private sector workers to return to work, were the first major blows to the strike.
But the situation in South Wales graphically revealed the underlying dynamics of this strike. It continually threatened to engulf the whole movement in a general strike against the Tory government. The only reason it didn't, and the only reason the strike took so long to really bite, was due entirely to the sabotage of the tradeunion leaderships.
Challenge to Tories
There is little doubt that rank-and-file workers had the greatest sympathy with the strike. They could see that the struggle was essentially against the Tory government, despite Industry Secretary Sir Kieth Joseph's phony policy of "non-intervention."
The hatred for this government is profound. Mass action on a broad front has been escalating against the anti-workingclass attacks of this government since the middle of last year.
At the end of November last year, 50,000 people demonstrated against the government's cuts in social expenditure. Mobilization against the anti-abortion rights Corrie Bill was so broad and extensive-even involving a 40,000-strong TUC-led demonstration-that the proposal was dropped, despite the formal parliamentary majority of the Tories. In the middle of the steel strike, the TUC called a demonstration against Tory anti-union laws to which 80,000 workers responded. The TUC has been forced to call a day of action against the government on May 14, which looks set to become a one-day general strike. And an emergency recall conference of the Labour Party has been called to plan action against the Tory attacks, despite the determined opposition of Labour leader James Callaghan.
The dynamic of the situation is clearly towards confrontation with the Tory government. Union leaders are doing everything to divert the movement into harmless channels. But in order to do this, it by and large has to put itself at the head of the movement the better to keep control.
Labor Solidarity
From the start of the steel strike, miners, railworkers and dockers in militant ports offered solidarity to the steelworkers and implemented blacking. But the TUC refused to organize solidarity across the board. The real situation was seen in the docks. Dockers in the militant ports of Liverpool and Hull responded immediately. But action in other ports was patchy. So, when an issue presented itself in the port of Liverpool, 6,000 Liverpool dockers walked out declaring their solidarity with the steelworkers.
The day the steel strike was called off was to have been the start of an all-out national dock strike in solidarity with the steelworkers, decided upon by a national delegate conference of dock workers. Such action could clearly have been organized from the beginning except for the refusal of the national leadership of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), the main dockers union.
The TGWU leadership was the main problem, too, with another key sector-the lorry [truck] drivers. For the first crucial week, only a clear instruction not to cross so-called primary pickets (the steel plants given. The decision to themselves) was pickets of stockholders cross other steel and major users ("secondary" pickets) was left up to the "conscience" of the drivers. This was interpreted by most local bureaucrats as an invitation to cross picket lines, thus sabotaging effective picketing. It was only in the ninth week that a clearer instruction went out.
The result was the long delay before the steel strike affected manufacturing industry. The bosses were in no way as inhibited. They organized a massive operation to share the available stockpiled steel and, aided and abetted by BSC management, kept imports rolling in through unregistered ports. Nonetheless, it was clear that in the last two weeks the strike was biting.
Major users like Fords and British Leyland were threatened with closure. And a national dock strike was on the agenda.
This was the reason for the indecent haste with which the "independent" inquiry reported. The dynamic was towards a general strike, which would have brought down the government.
Need for Class-Struggle Strategy
The steel strike brought the overall strategy of the reformist ISTC leaders into sharp relief. The strategy of Bill Sirs and the rest of the ISTC leadership has as its starting point the need for British steel to compete on "equal terms" with its main competitors in the world market. The whole thrust of the ISTC campaign was to indict the bad management of the BSC for its lack of an aggressive export drive. The union officials' call for a government subsidy to the steel industry, therefore, is quite within the framework of a "rationalization" of BSC that involves massive attacks on the hard-won rights of steelworkers and the sort of job loss envisaged by BSC management.
It is true that the BSC management is bad. Bureaucratic management in both the public and private sector will breed inefficiency—only workers control of production by an informed workforce and within the framework of a workers plan for the whole industry can eliminate waste and inefficiency in large-scale production. But the colossal waste of resources exhibited by BSC management arises not from incompetence but from the chaos of the capitalist market. To demand import controls to deal with this is to continue to join with the bosses in trying to resolve their problem at the expense of workers-this time foreign workers. But the needs of steelworkers, as revealed in the strike, was shown to be solidarity with foreign workers.
The new class-struggle leadership that is beginning to form out of the experience of the strike must center its strategy on safeguarding jobs. Steelworkers had no say over the anarchy of the capitalist market, so they should not be made to pay for it. The Tory cash limits must be smashed and a subsidy to save jobs forced on the government. The starting point must be safeguarding the guaranteed forty-hour week. This should be extended to a total policy of worksharing with no loss of pay.
The shop stewards committees that have been established in South Yorkshire must be extended nationally, and a national combine committee formed committed to a class-struggle strategy to save jobs. But equally, the fight must go on inside the ISTC. The Liaison committee for the reform of the ISTC, which already existed before the strike, can now be placed on a higher level, integrating class-struggle policies into the fight for democratic control of the union. This is now the task.
April 3, 1980