On the afternoon of September 27, as British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer prepared to deliver a speech at the party’s conference in Liverpool, a group of dockworkers from the nearby port marched on the conference, chanting, “If you won’t stand on the picket you’re a scab!”
The dockers had been on strike for a week at that point, and the Labour Party had been in town since September 25, but Starmer would not visit the strikers. Plenty of other Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) had. On the previous morning, I visited the lines myself, having interviewed several of the strikers previously, and crossed paths with Labour MPs Zarah Sultana and Richard Burgon, former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and the previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. But Starmer, in his bid to push Labour back to the center, had even refused to join striking transport workers in his home London constituency, and had removed a member of his shadow cabinet for appearing on a picket and speaking to the media in favor of the strikers.
The strikers’ anger at Starmer was particularly poignant because this summer and fall saw strikes across the country. Waves of workers—most of them the essential workers who kept laboring through the pandemic’s worst days—demanded raises in keeping with spiraling inflation, and with equally spiking corporate profits. As the Conservative Party slid into utter meltdown, crashing the currency and spooking global markets with policies apparently too market-friendly, the Labour Party attempted to ignore the demands of those who should be their base. Working people took matters into their own hands, organizing around the cost of living crisis in workplaces and in the streets, and chalked up wins as the political parties stumbled.
The Liverpool port wasn’t even the only port on strike—workers at the port of Felixstowe, Britain’s largest container port, were on their second multiday strike the day the Liverpool dockers marched on Starmer. The two ports are owned and operated by two private companies, but the workers are members of the same union, Unite, which also represented striking bus drivers in London and Kent, Northern Ireland Housing Executive staff (who remain on strike), aerospace manufacturing workers at Honeywell, and hospitality workers in Scotland, who won back pay and a say in how their tips would be distributed, among others.
Listing all the strikes would take up more space than this column allows—Emiliano Mellino’s The Week In Work newsletter keeps a running tally—but to name some of the bigger ones, train workers organized with TSSA, ASLEF, and the RMT built up to coordinated strikes and a nationwide day of action on October 1, and the RMT’s Mick Lynch achieved a celebrity status on the left not seen since Jeremy Corbyn. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) held nationwide strikes at the Royal Mail (despite its name, the mail service is also privatized) and BT (formerly British Telecom), and joined with the RMT and other unions to launch the Enough is Enough campaign, which aims to organize unionized and nonunion workers around the country to fight the cost of living crisis.
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Railway workers from the RMT union join a twenty-four-hour strike on October 1 at King’s Cross station in London.
One of those other unions was the University and College Union (UCU), which, as this column goes to press, was balloting workers around the country for a nationwide strike. Also at press time, the GMB Union was preparing for the first recognized strike ballot at an Amazon facility in Britain, following the wildcat strikes at several facilities I wrote about in the previous issue of The Progressive. Oil refinery workers in Scotland walked off the job in a wildcat strike in August. And perhaps most ominously, the 300,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing, who work in the National Health Service, voted to strike for the first time in the organization’s 106-year history.
The Office for National Statistics, which had stopped counting strike days when COVID-19 hit Britain, began counting again in June, finding that working days lost to strikes were more than four times the monthly average in 2019.
The strikes in Britain are a good reminder both that politics is local and that local politics have global ramifications. Thirty percent of the freight handled at the Liverpool docks is from or heading toward the United States. A few hundred port workers in one city have the potential to snarl global supply chains, and a wave of anger channeled into strikes has the power to change the direction of even a committed right-wing government, which saw its giveaways to capital treated as poison by, er, capital markets.
As James Meadway, former adviser to McDonnell and director of the Progressive Economy Forum, tells The Progressive, “Financial markets respond to general economic circumstances—if they see a government running up a big borrowing bill, but don’t believe they’ll be able to repay it, that’s when they move. In Britain, the steadily rising tide of worker militancy and protests strongly suggests that whatever borrowing the government does now, it is going to find repaying in cuts very difficult in the future.”
In other words, the ongoing strikes are a sign of a British working class unlikely to put up with another season of austerity—no matter what the latest in a string of chancellors promises. And the planned energy bill strikes, organized under the banner “Don’t Pay UK,” didn’t hurt, either—the biggest energy company considered organized nonpayment of bills an “existential” threat, potentially costing £265 million (about $300 million) per month, according to documents leaked to OpenDemocracy.
What does this tell us about our own situation in the United States? Whatever the results of the midterm elections, there is plenty of politics to be done between appointments at the ballot box. Years of crisis, austerity, and more crisis may seem to have worn people down, but they’ve also created potentially explosive situations, as our own recent waves of union organizing and strikes remind us. Working people will continue to shoulder the burden of decisions made far above their heads for only so long. While the unions in Britain tend to be nationwide—particularly in current or formerly nationalized industries from health care to rail to mail—local disputes, like those at the ports or at Amazon facilities, of which we have plenty, can also hold a lot of power.
And the most power will come from coordinating those actions, maximizing leverage on the economy’s weak points, battered still further by almost three years of COVID-19. “This has to be the start of building a new social movement, led by trade unions, led by community organizations who we work closely with, led by anybody who practices the values of collectivism,” Dave Ward, general secretary of CWU, told me in August. While even the Labour Party—which, he noted, was founded by the unions, and not the other way around—seems to have given up on “little L” labor, the unions are building bigger coalitions and holding rallies around the country.
Powerful unions, and powerful social movements, don’t always win by allying with political parties. At times, they win by creating their own pole of attraction, such that politicians realize that the way to win is to court their favor. And a public that has taken the brunt of escalating, overlapping crises—and, perhaps, learned something about the worthlessness of promises from rightwing populist leaders—is ripe for recruiting to such movements from below.