Ranks and file workers organising a flying picket during the 1972 miners’ strike
Trade unions are an essential tool of workers’ struggle under capitalism.
They can organise the collective withdrawal of work, potentially bringing a firm, a sector or even the whole economy to a grinding halt.
The main divide in every workplace is between workers and bosses. As workers realise they need to organise to win better wages and stop the boss pushing them around, they set up trade unions. Everyone should be an active union member.
But there’s also a crucial division within unions between the ordinary union members and the full time officials, the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy forms a separate social layer to the rest of the workers because it exists to balance between workers and bosses. It seeks to do deals within capitalism rather than confronting the system.
Full-time union officials don’t face the same management pressure on their lives, or the threat of employers’ job cuts and wage curbs. They are usually paid far more than the workers they represent. Without workers’ organisation and at least occasional militancy, the officials would have no leverage when they talk to bosses.
When there’s pressure from below, from the workers at the base, officials can be pushed to call strikes. But all the bureaucracy’s tendencies are compromising and conservative. It is ready to hold back the most active elements and limit strikes so they do not “get out of control”.
The union leaders fear to confront, for example, the anti-union laws in case the union faces fines and disruption. This feature of unions has repeatedly led the most determined workers to organise networks inside the unions independent of the bureaucracy.
They can demand more democracy, put the heat on the officials and at best organise “unofficial” action even when the union machine doesn’t want to. War A powerful example came during the First World War.
In 1915 bosses at the Glasgow armament factories tried to destroy the engineers’ hard-won working practices and conditions.
The ASE union leaders sided with the wartime coalition government—which included a Labour minister. So the engineers organised their own structures and 10,000 workers walked out on unofficial strike.
Their Clyde Workers’ Committee laid down principles that echo today. “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act immediately when they misrepresent them.”
This was the first rank and file movement in Britain, and the example spread. In 1917, the Sheffield Workers’ Committee led an unofficial strike of 200,000. Rank and file structures have appeared almost always when there is a sustained period of militant struggle.
In the 1960s nearly all strikes were unofficial. The victorious miners’ strike of 1972 was driven by rank and file organisation and innovations such as “flying pickets” that went from workplace to workplace to shut them down.
In contrast, the year-long 1984-5 miners’ strike saw much less of a challenge to the bureaucracy, partly because the union was led by the left winger Arthur Scargill.
Building the rank and file today means agitating for action, pushing beyond the compromises of the union leaders and building solidarity with other struggles.
When there are strikes, workers must press for escalation but also deepen the structures of workers’ control of the strike and widen participation through strike committees.
Rank and file action also involves consistently raising what are sometimes seen as “outside” issues.
These include anti-racism, combating women’s and LGBT+ oppression, Palestine, climate change and anti-imperialism. We need workplace militancy and political organisation to cement workers’ unity and combat oppression.
English nationalism is never progressive, nor is waving the flag
They were mourning. And waving red flags of revenge
A vital organ of revolutionary politics
Many people turn to religion to soothe them in what appears to be a heartless world
