Motions for the founding conference – section D priority campaigning

A: For a Left Unity Trade Union Strategy

Left Unity needs to clarify its relationship to organised labour, work within the grassroots of the trade union movement, and develop policies that links the crisis of working class representation to the development of a rank and file trade unionism. Following the Founding Conference, we agree to call a national meeting of Left Unity trade union activists to help develop policies and strategies on how to organise, producing material to distribute in workplaces and branches, and begin the development of a rank and file newspaper that can help build networks of readers and supporters inside the trade union movement.’

Sheffield Left Unity

B: Party Organisation

Inevitably our constitution and organisation will need to be reviewed in the light of our experience as a new organisation. This should take place at our next annual conference.

West London Left Unity

C: Austerity

Left Unity is an anti-austerity party.  We will support and build national, regional and local campaigns against cuts and privatisation of our NHS, our public services and our welfare state.

West London Left Unity

D: Trade Unions

Left Unity members are encouraged to join a trade union. Trade union members are also encouraged to take part in Trades Councils.

West London Left Unity

E: Health Service Campaigns

Left Unity branches will support local campaigns to defend Health Services.

We should take part in a non-sectarian way

We should develop and encourage local support for such campaigns

We should encourage local campaigns to understand the need for a national movement against cuts and privatisation of the NHS

West London Left Unity

F: Branch Activity

Left Unity Branches should aim to produce regular newsletters for distribution to less active members and the public.

Branches should aim to hold periodic public or open meetings

Branch meetings should make a point of taking regular reports and discussion on local campaigns and encouraging members to get involved.

West London Left Unity

G: Housing

One campaigning priority relates to housing. As well as campaigning against housing benefit cuts and the bedroom tax (the latter only affects those in social housing), there are other points taken up. Specifically:

1)     Increased production of social, cooperative and public housing to be done by the public sector and not-for-profit social housing sector; there is clearly significant need for social housing which is not being met.

2)     Reintroduction of rent controls: rents in private housing are rising out of proportion to incomes (which we know are stagnant or falling). A maximum increase can be introduced for which property owners and managers need to demonstrate their necessity in the context of repairing and refitting the rented property.

3)     Protections for the rights of short-term tenants in both public and private housing with respect to length of rental contract and termination of tenancy must be increased. We should call for democratic control of housing policy by tenants on housing estates.

4)     Condition of rental properties with respect to safety and health: properties must have access to adequate heating, running water and electricity. The properties must be consistent with health and safety codes.

Waltham Forest Left Unity

H: Defend the NHS

The spirited demonstration In Manchester on September 29 showed yet again that defence of the NHS is a very popular cause and central to mobilizing against austerity more generally. We welcome the commitment of Labour to repeal the Health and Social Care Act if they are elected but note that the key purchaser- provider split which led to the privatisation of clinical services was introduced under Blair’s government, while contracting out of support services goes even further back that that. Left Unity commits itself to campaigning to defend the NHS and restoring it fully to the public sector. This will be a priority for the organisation over the months ahead.

Islington Left Unity

I: Zero-hour contracts

Conference notes:

• The widespread increase in zero hours contracts and agency work in both the private and public sector, and the link to the ‘extra hours culture’ leading to the restructuring of the workforce, and shifting control further towards employers and away from employees.
• The impact this is having upon wage levels, employment rights, job security and the divisive influence that this has upon the workforce.
• The substantial variation in wages across different sectors of the economy
• The national minimum wage for apprenticeships is £2.68 an hour Apprenticeships in general can be used to undercut wages – which obviously undermines the minimum wage.
• The low level of unionisation in those sections of the workforce most affected by ZHC and agency work
• The success of Hovis workers in preventing the imposition of ZHC/agency work and the success of  unionisation campaigns in the USA
• The success that Die Linke has had in building support for its campaign for a minimum wage in Germany
• The increased attacks on the legal rights of ordinary people

Conference believes:

• young workers are greatly  impacted by ZHC and agency work, creating insecurity, a lack of control and the removal of their  human dignity
• there is a disproportionate impact on women and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups, those with disabilities and LGBT groups
• benefit claimants;  are often forced onto work programmes, workfare schemes, ‘bogus’ training courses and forced off JSA by sanctions; increasing their feelings of punishment, humiliation and disempowerment.
• the ConDem government is continuing to accelerate attacks on those claiming benefits; notably the threat to remove benefit rights from those aged 18 to 25 without any provision for genuine training and apprenticeships leading to real jobs
• the Labour Party is complicit in this and there is scant evidence of any resolve to reverse these attacks
• people should be empowered to work on their causes and campaigns, to gain full ownership of their lives for themselves

Conference agrees:

To launch a ‘Left Unity’ national campaign that aims to work with groups inside and outside the workplace to:

• Develop a high profile identity linking together all groups affected by this restructuring of the workforce –  zero hours workers, agency workers, low paid workers, benefit claimants, young people and un-unionised workers
• Campaign for “training” and “apprenticeships” to be at the level of a living wage
• Campaign for a boycott and an end to workfare
• Produce campaigning materials made available to all branches
• Lobby/target employers to change their employment practices
• Support the unionisation of workers in the private and the public sector

Manchester Central/Manchester South Left Unity

J: Left Unity

We note the following statement of Aims for LU from the Internal Democracy and Constitution Policy Commission Draft Constitution (Working Document 5)

“2) AIMS 
The aims of Left Unity are:

a) to unite the diverse strands of radical and socialist politics in the UK including worker’s organisations and trade unions; ordinary people, grass root organisations and co-operatives rooted in our neighbourhoods and communities; individuals and communities facing poverty, discrimination and social oppression because of gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality, unemployment or under-employment; environmental and green campaigners; campaigners for freedom and democracy; all those who seek to authentically voice and represent the interests of working people”

In concrete terms, we would like to see Left Unity develop strategies which, in the long term, help contribute to there being One Party of the Left which can reach out to all the strands of radical and socialist politics in the UK.  This will entail

a) Discussing methods of involvement including affiliation, whilst not cutting across the principle of OMOV

b) Taking the lead in opening discussions with the major players on the left, including the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), the CPB, Respect and the Alliance for Green Socialism to avoid electoral clashes and move towards electoral pacts – with the initial aim of creating the largest ever left challenge in the 2015 General Election

c) Seeing it as a priority to initiate debate across the left about building One Party of the Left

Rugby Left Unity

K: Internationalism

1. Left Unity is committed to maintaining and deepening the unity of the working class in Britain.

2. Left Unity welcomes its growing membership in Scotland and Wales. Left Unity will do everything it can to encourage members in Scotland and Wales to play a full part in building a party based on the principles of class solidarity, socialism, internationalism and human freedom.

3. Left Unity will not support Scottish or Welsh nationalism, nor will it content itself with the United Kingdom and the quasi-democratic status quo. However, individual members will be free to campaign both for and against Scottish independence in advance of the 2014 referendum.

4. Left Unity recognizes that to effectively fightback against the austerity Tory-Lib Dem government and a crisis-ridden capitalism requires an international strategy that takes the European Union as its starting point.

5. Left Unity will support and seek to take a lead in all moves towards organising the working class on an all-EU basis.

Glasgow Left Unity

L: Edward Snowden

This Founding Conference of Left Unity supports the actions of Edward Snowden and others in revealing the extent of efforts of the US NSA and GCHQ to monitor the online activities of much of the world’s population.

This conference believes that the activity of GCHQ and the NSA is in effect a conspiracy to extract as much material as possible from internet traffic with the principle aim of acting against the working class and the oppressed throughout the world. The mouthpieces of the spooks use the catchall “terrorism” to justify their activities, but clearly the ruling class is far more worried about workers and others organising against repressive regimes and savage attacks on living standards.

This Conference resolves to send a message of support to Edward Snowden and to join the fight for him to be offered asylum and safe haven from the torturers and killers of the US military and security agencies.

This Conference also resolves to campaign for the closure of GCHQ as a dangerous anti-working class institution with a world wide reach. In addition this Conference is in favour of GCHQ’s archives being opened for public inspection and investigation.

Glasgow Left Unity

M: Campaign for a 21 hour week

As a reduction in the working week and the redistribution of work among the unemployed and underemployed are vital for the physical, social and psychological health of our societies, and a ready answer to the crisis facing us, Left Unity adopts the transition to a 21 hour week with no loss of pay as a goal and campaign priority.

To this end Left Unity will:

1. Form a working group to develop plans and proposals for campaigning for a 21 hour week.
2. Aim to publish regular articles on the subject from members in different areas of employment and life
3. Write to unions, professional bodies, academics and campaign groups proposing the organisation of a conference in 2014 to launch a national campaign for a shorter working week.

Southwark Left Unity

N: Climate change

Conference notes that:

The recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is comprised of climate scientists from around the world, is another wake up call on this issue. The report confirms and extends on its previous report in 2007 which concluded that the carbon content of the atmosphere continues to rise as a result of human activity. That as a result of this global temperatures continue to rise, the ice sheets continue to melt, the seas continue to rise, the glaciers continue to retreat, water becomes more scarce, the deserts continue to expand, the acidification of the oceans continues apace. At the same time weather patterns are disrupted resulting in extreme events including hurricanes (Katrina and Sandy for example), floods, droughts and fires which devastate whole regions of the globe and disrupt food production.

Conference therefore resolves:

a) To include this as one of LU’s campaigning priorities

b) To support the Campaign Against Climate Change and its trade union committee.

c) To support the campaign against hydraulic fracking which is not only threatening local communities but is introducing a whole new generation of fossil fuels into the energy system.

Southwark Left Unity

O: An Action Programme for Left Unity

The situation we face

The effects of the Great 2008 Recession still blight Britain. One in ten workers and one in five young people are out of work. Real wages have been in decline since 2007. Public sector wages have been frozen for two years.

Cameron and Clegg’s cabinet of 23 millionaires continues with its slump policies even whilst Osborne is claiming a recovery.

The National Health Service, public education, the entire post-1945 welfare state are under attack.

Benefits for the disabled and the long-term sick have been cut. The degrading fit-for-work tests conducted by Atos have driven people to suicide.

50,000 people face eviction from their homes thanks to the bedroom tax.

Claimants are forced onto work-for-dole schemes to massage the unemployment figures.

Students in higher education face the £9,000 tuition fees.

They have raised our pension funds and raised our retirement age.

They have sabotaged the fight against climate catastrophe by cutting investment in renewable energy and clean technologies by 70 per cent.

But austerity is not just a series of cruel and immoral attacks on the most vulnerable in our communities; it is the capitalist solution to the crisis this system itself has caused.

The bosses’ believe recession and stagnation can be solved only by boosting profit rates and cutting “unnecessary overheads” – i.e. spending on health, welfare and education.

This means sacking hundreds of thousands of workers, freezing wages, pushing millions into temporary and insecure employment (the rise of zero hours contracts).

That is why their “recovery” will be a jobless one, with continued austerity, precarious low wage conditions, and mounting inequality. Put simply it means making the working class pay for their crisis.

Politicians of all parties say there is no alternative; that is a lie. There is a solution but it is the direct opposite of their solution.

IT IS MAKING THEM PAY.

How can we make the capitalists pay?

Obviously this starts from resistance to all these attacks. It means strengthening, increasing and uniting the fightback to the extent that it makes it impossible for Cameron and his cabinet to govern.

To wait for an election in 2015 is to accept another historic defeat for the working class like that Thatcher imposed on us in the 1980s. She destroyed or privatised the industries where the unions were strong. Cameron wants to destroy the welfare state – the remaining bastion of strong trade unionism. But the Tory wreckers and their Lib-Dem hangers on can be stopped.

Around the world we have seen massive protests against the effects of the crisis and the governments, dictatorial or “democratic”, who unload it onto the backs of ordinary peoples. In Greece we have witnessed a long series of one-day and then multi-day general strikes.

The Occupy Movement in the USA and the Indignados in Spain, the square occupations of the Arab Spring and in Greece were copied in many countries. They inspired calls for equality (we are the 99%), direct democracy, the fall of authoritarian regimes and social justice. In the Middle East they fed into full-scale revolutions, as the people demanded the fall of the regimes.

In Britain too we had the school and uni student protests of November-December 2010, the summer riots in 2011, direct action by UK Uncut, local campaigns against hospital closures and the bedroom tax, the strikes by electricians, and most recently the Hovis workers strikes.

These struggles show we do have the capacity to mount an effective fightback. If we are bold enough in our vision and unite our forces we can kick out this government before it is too late.

What’s holding us back?

The reason we have not done this so far lies in the actions, or rather the lack of them, of the official leaders of the union movement. The biggest scandal is that two years after the Coalition announced its intention to break up the National Health Service, only in September 2013, did the TUC or the principal health unions call a mass national demonstration.

For all the their talk of coordinated action they have failed to coordinate and unite our resistance. The pensions struggle of 2011 was sold out after only one day of mass action. Union leaders right and left have tamely allowed the anti-union laws to prevent a class-wide response to a political attack on the entire welfare state.

To prevent such sell-outs or sabotage we need to build a rank and file movement in the unions to take control of all disputes and negotiations, to make officials fully accountable and recallable, and employed on the average pay of their members. Our watchword should be: with the union leaders where possible, without them where necessary.

We need the local People’s Assemblies, trades councils and union branches to create delegate-based action councils which are organising centres against the cuts and provide active solidarity for all those fighting them. They must be bodies made up of delegates sent by workplaces, campaigns, housing estates, schools and colleges.

With such grassroots organisation – building up to a national focus – we can increase and coordinate our struggles all the way to an all-out, indefinite general strike. This cannot be left in the hands of the union leaders – it needs to be controlled and directed locally and nationally by councils of action.

But to ‘coordinate the coordinations’ we need a new type of political party – democratic not bureaucratic, armed with a democratically agreed and developed strategy, a programme. That is what Left Unity is setting out to do.

A programme for resistance

Over the year ahead we will campaign for:

• The TUC and the unions to organise the midweek day of action they promised in Bournemouth and make it a full-scale one-day general strike, to use this mass mobilisation to initiate industrial and direct action up to and including an all-out political mass strike to force the abandonment and reversal all the cuts and the privatisations.

• Solidarity with all wages struggles in the private and public sectors, for an increase in pay to compensate fully for the loss of real wages over the past year, fully indexed against inflation. Stand against zero hours contracts. Raise the minimum wage, pension and social security payments to a level everyone can decently live on.

• A programme of essential public works – including a huge building programme of socially-owned housing, schools, nurseries and local health clinics, providing accessibility for the disabled, phasing out nuclear power and laying the foundations of a sustainable energy and transport policy. No one should be denied work while such crying needs confront us. This programme must be carried through under workers and users’ control and funded by taxing the wealth and the profits of the banks and big corporations.

• Halt and reverse the cuts and privatisations in health, education and welfare. Repeal Lansley’s Act; bring all foundation hospitals back into a fully nationally controlled system. Abolish the academies and free schools, nationalise the public schools, restore EMA at a living level, abolish tuition fees, reinstitute maintenance grants and cancel the student loan debt.

• Halt the attacks on women’s jobs, services and rights; defend and extend high quality childcare provision for all; fight for access to jobs, pay and conditions fully equal to men; strengthen zero tolerance of domestic violence and rape.

• Fight all expressions of homophobia, transphobia, and the bullying, physical and mental violence, it leads to; illegalise all discrimination and grant full and equal civil rights, including marriage.

• End police harassment against ethnic minorities. End stop and search. For the right of all refugees and migrant workers to come, live and work here with full citizenship rights.

• Solidarity with Muslims and other ethnic minorities against abuse and violence; stop the marches of the EDL and other fascist groups by mass mobilisations and by organising militant self-defence of communities and meeting places.

• Make our struggle international – for solidarity actions with those in other countries, like Greece, fighting austerity, unemployment and racism. • Oppose all attempts to take Britain into new wars and invasions on false humanitarian or human rights pretexts; but mobilise material support for all those fighting for freedom in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, etc.

• Fight for the defiance and repeal of all the anti-union laws, and the restoration of legal aid.

• Fight for the right of the Scottish people to decide for independence or not, free from any threats or intimidation, and should they do so the immediate recognition and implementation of their decision.

Beyond Labour

Despite Ed Miliband’s 2013 conference pledges to abolish the bedroom tax, freeze fuel bills and build 200,000 affordable homes a year by 2020, over the past three years the Labour Party has:

• Backed the Tories’ public sector pay freeze

• Denounced the 30 November 2011 pensions strike

• Said it would not reverse the coalition’s cuts and keep to its spending levels for two years

• Supported the Tories’ benefits cap

• Attacked unions who demanded policies in their members’ interest in return for the millions they contribute to Labour.

The Old Labour “socialism” of reducing social inequality has disappeared without a trace; the identification with the unions and the working class has been abandoned; the domination of nakedly pro-capitalist ideas in Labour is total. The representation of the Labour left in parliament, in local government, in the constituencies has shrunk to an all time low.

Labour cannot be converted into an instrument of socialist transition. That is why we need a new party of the working class, a party of struggle against capitalism, based on those fighting in the here, and now. A party that can win working people to the only real solution that is in their interests – a socialist solution.

That solution starts today from making the rich pay for saving our services, for creating jobs and a future for the young and a decent retirement for the old. But it goes on to the socialist transformation of society: organising production on a rational basis, planned democratically by us, to meet social need not private greed.

Putting a socialist solution back on the agenda is not mainly a question of elections – it must be a do-it-yourself solution – carried out by the direct action of millions not just voted for. In the words of Karl Marx, “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself”. That is the foundation of what Left Unity is fighting for. Join us.

This motion is backed by all the signatories to the Class Struggle Platform.