Though Cowards Flinch

There is something about the anaemic, lawyerly way in which self-described liberals are attacking the strikers at Lindsey as racist or xenophobic which enrages me. This is one of the two lines of attack in evidence at Liberal Conspiracy in any of the numerous articles on the subject. The other is that this strike raises the potential of a nasty reciprocation by foreign companies, nations or workers should the strikers in the UK actually succeed. At the risk of repeating our good friend at Bickerstaffe Record, I want to take issue here.

Proponents of such lines of reasoning are offering no solutions to the problem. Instead they’re trying to explain away the problem by claiming that the jobs in question weren’t “British jobs” anyway as they had never before been offered to a UK company. Such sophistry is unlikely to cure the strikers of their anger that others are getting work on a basis which undercuts terms and conditions of the regular workforce in Britain.

As far as ‘prejudice’ and anger go in politics, I’m prepared to countenance this one. It may seem racist because Italians are being offered the work, and thus it is a foreign workforce which might suffer. To say this demonstrates a plain ignorance of the global nature of capitalism; workers aren’t just moved within countries in order to acquire cheap labour, they’re moved between continents – but that doesn’t change the purpose of moving those workers.

I am against ‘cheap’ labour. I do not buy into the liberal-economic arguments of Hayek and his successors that globalisation will lower prices for everyone and that the invisible hand of the market will be the great leveller. Workers should be entitled to struggle for the highest wages they can get, and when companies threaten to move overseas, workers should stage work-ins to prevent this terroristic deployment of capital flight.

Bearing in mind the degree of working class unity required to fight organised capital on this, it demonstrates political illiteracy of the highest order to ignore the damage done to unity and organisation when one group of workers is permitted to undercut another. Organising all workers, all around the world, in this common fight will change the situational logic that suggests the fight to be racist or xenophobic in any way.

It bears remembering that this is not a recent thing, nor is it a phenomenon limited to the crossing of national boundaries. Outsourcing happens every day in all sectors of UK industry, and it happens because one section of the working class is persuaded by the threat of unemployment to undercut another. It happens whether the undercut or the undercutters are of the same race, ethnicity, gender, religion or whatever.

Should we give up protesting outsourcing? I think not. Allowing one section of the working class to undercut another, when their interests ultimately lie together, is folly. That their interests do lie together are amply demonstrated by the victory of the Lindsey workers. Alongside the Italian workers, all of whom will keep their jobs, an additional 102 jobs have been created – and next time, if union organisers are smart, the Italian workers will be participants in the strike.

If it so happens that, from time to time, in this battle against outsourcing, different ethnicities clash, different religions or cultures or races or nationalities clash, then it should be the job of socialists to explain why these factors aren’t what we’re fighting against. Whether the influx of Eastern Europeans to Western Europe or Mexicans to America, the fight to stop outsourcing is not racist of itself, but it is necessary.

Equally it would be silly to think that there were not some prejudices on the picket lines. One doesn’t need to look far to find prejudice, and it can be found in all levels of society – from the highest qualified professionals to the lowliest trainee bricky. This prejudice was not in control of the struggle, again as evidenced by the actions of the workers and the unions, and even if it was, it doesn’t de-legitimate the grievances expressed, it just makes handling them that bit more complex.

One of the things I would like to know is this: of all the people on the picket lines, were they all Caucasian, British-born males? I can’t say for certain either way, but I would like to know how the caricatures of xenophobic strikers would have stood up against a black or Asian-descended British man or woman standing on the picket lines to fight for their jobs. Or how the caricatures would have reacted had the Italian workers themselves been on the picket lines, as the Polish workers were in Dublin last month.

Certainly it’s tempting to see in the caricaturists a flight to invert the nationalist narratives our own press endorsed, when they point to the La Repubblica article linked to above. The proper response to a lumpen reaction from Italian workers around the sites in Italy where British workers are employed is not to cast our hands up and say, “I told you it would all end in tears!” That is to surrender the right to be called ‘activist’.

The proper response is instead to resolve that their attitudes should be corrected by organising them to fight for jobs on the same basis as the British workers have done at Lindsey. By so fighting, they’ll realise in the course of struggle that the opposition are not the workers, it is the companies, the outsourcing and, in the final analysis, capitalism itself. This is a conclusion from which most liberals recoil of course.

We should also be awake to the possibility that any potentially lumpen reaction is created by the Italian and British media and governments. Listening to Pat McFadden, business minister, today in Parliament, I was struck by how deliberate his attempts to misconstrue the struggle. It’s nothing to do with freedom of movement, but I imagine one would find a lot less movement if workers in Italy could expect the same terms as British workers when they come to work in Britain.

So, contra the coverage of nearly every media outlet, this was not about discrimination against British workers, it was actually about creating a level playing field for all workers. Both sides, Italian and British, were the victims of discrimination: one set were given less jobs than they might otherwise have had, the others worse terms and conditions than workers ought to get in the UK. The grievances of one were settled without job loss and the next step should be to correct the grievances of the other.

I’ve seen a few rebuttal attempts on this point; claims that both sets of workers are earning the same amount – but on a lot of these sites, foreign workers will have deductions from their pay for board and keep, on which the company that originally employed them will make a profit. There is no union oversight of any of this and anyone familiar with Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier will know just how wily management can be in recouping their losses.

Addressing all of this will be the task of union organisers and worker-activists on the ground, on behalf of Italian, Portuguese and British workers. Only by working together can they hope to wring a better deal out of the company in the long term.

Last but not least, it’s important to note the positive environment for struggle created by this strike. As at Staythorpe powerstation, where workers have stayed out, the focus is less on the foreign workers than on the decimation of a community by a shameless attempt to ignore a local source of highly skilled labour. Arguably it is important to retain these skills and force the company to pay extra, though means of industrial dispute.

If the workers at Lindsey can fight for jobs and get them, whilst managing to hang on to the jobs for Portuguese and Italians being imported, then workers elsewhere can do it too. Meanwhile, we need to be increasing our efforts of organisation in this area, because next time the company in question will be wise and will attempt to back the unions into a corner by forcing them to choose either British workers or foreign workers.

In that, they’ll get every help from the media, many sections of which have been ‘selecting’ the banners and posters they want to cover, to meet a specific angle on the strike. We need to be ready to resist all this with a plan to widen industrial action next time, because, as one of the union organisers at Lindsey said, the fight isn’t finished, just round one.