In his inaugural address to the nation Paul Nowak, the new TUC General Secretary’s made much of the fact that he started stacking shelves in Asda at the age of 17, and had been a hotel porter and worked in a call centre, but failed to mention he has been a Congress House bureaucrat, since 2000, or for the great bulk of his working life.
Apart from his less than inspiring comments on the proposed anti-union laws he made the standard complaints about workers being: “on course for two decades of lost pay – the longest squeeze on earnings in modern history”, deploring low pay and saying that “ministers, unions and employers should work together on a proper industrial strategy, delivering good green jobs, training and skills across the country”. So, as might be expected the TUC is on course for more class collaboration instead of actually rousing the working class to action.
He repeated the tired old slogan that the TUC should be concerned with securing: “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” but we should heed Engels’s 1881 demand that it should be replaced by a very different motto: “Possession of the Means of Work, Raw Material, Factories, Machinery, By the Working People Themselves”.
On another recent occasion Nowak said that that unions including the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) were unlikely secure the 19 per cent they are demanding but meekly said that: “I would hope that there would be a compromise reachable — in order to get to a compromise you need to sit down and negotiate and that’s what the government is point blank refusing to do.” Such inspiring leadership is what we have come to expect from the TUC.
No comments:
Post a Comment