As we go to press, construction workers at Total's Lindsey refinery are deciding whether to accept a deal which provides that the 647 workers dismissed for going on unofficial strike over the sacking of 51 of them will be reinstated unconditionally and that the 51 will be offered employment at another part of the same site.
A victory for solidarity action
Achieving this has required 18 days of strike at Lindsey and a wave of solidarity strikes across the industry - in refineries, shipyards, power plants, among others. It has taken countless protests as well as moves to prepare for a demonstration at Total's headquarters in Paris.
Of course, neither the Lindsey strikers, nor those who walked out in solidarity up and down the country, allowed themselves to be stopped by the anti-strike legislation. And they were proved right. No matter how much the bosses control the courts - and they certainly do - there is nothing they can do against thousands of workers taking action on such a large scale, short of putting every single strike activist in jail - which would have been the surest way to turn the dispute into a national strike, which the oil and utility giants just could not afford.
The strikers broke the law? But how else can the working class deal with the lawlessness of employers, who think they can do whatever they like with our jobs and wages and get away with it? When the law gives every right to the exploiters and none to the exploited, it is only right for workers to take their fate into their own hands and treat the legal system for what it is - an instrument designed by the bosses, for the bosses!
Ultimately, the strikers forced Total into retreat because the bosses had no means to control their strike, nor to predict how far it might spread. It was because they made themselves feared by the bosses that the strikers won - which is precisely what the class struggle is really about.
Controlling our strikes
But the small print of the deal recommended by the Unite and GMB leaders should ring alarm bells.
This deal only provides for 4 weeks employment for the strikers - not much, even for short-term contract workers. In fact, despite the power of the strike, this deal does nothing to even begin to tackle the strikers' most urgent problems.
Currently around one-third of an estimated 30,000 contract workers are out of a job. Yet the average working week remains at 44 hours, not counting overtime. If hours were less, more could be employed. Wouldn't it be high time that all available work was shared among all contract workers instead, without loss of pay? Wouldn't this be the only possible guarantee against the bosses boosting profits by slashing labour costs?
But this is not a demand that the union leaders, who have been trailing behind this dispute all along, are willing to raise. Instead, like so many others, such as the CWU in Royal Mail, for instance, their main concern is to remain the bosses' partners in organising their job-slashing attacks. So the Lindsey deal provides for a permanent outside full-time official (not accountable to the workforce) to assist the refinery bosses in dealing with "employment issues".
Had the strikers themselves taken control, not just of their walkouts, but also of the negotiations with the companies, the outcome might have been very different and the gains far more significant.
The shape of the struggles to come
The Lindsey strike could be a sort of blueprint for the struggles to come. Today, we are confronted with a collective offensive of the capitalist class, with a high degree of coordination (and "solidarity" funded out of our taxes!) provided by the politicians and their legal system. This offensive can only be met effectively by a collective, co-ordinated counter-offensive from our ranks.
But we will have to go further than the Lindsey strikers have. Not only will it be necessary to ignore a law which is designed to keep our hands tied in front of the bosses' attacks, but we will also have to find the means to really use our collective strength against the bosses' collective offensive.
On that account, the memory of the miners' courageous fight in 1984-85 should be a reminder. "The workers united will never be defeated" was their motto - but their leaders stopped short of proposing to achieve this unity on the ground, beyond the coal industry. But should workers really be united as a class, across all industries, in challenging the bosses' attacks, then, yes, they will never be defeated!