The Public Sector Strike on Thursday was massive and well executed. It was the largest best-coordinated strike since at least 2015. Trade unionists should be congratulated for their clarity, commitment, and organisation. It reinvigorated the confidence of workers in long-simmering disputes and showed how to get beyond the politics of austerity and wage declines by uniting the fights.
Workers’ demands got excellent coverage. Media could not keep the issue limited to Stormont or the Secretary of State. Instead the state of our services was central. Picket organisers and strikers kept raising their long-running issues of service provision, pay, pensions, staffing, and conditions in all media reports- each issue stemming from the dysfunction of a system which puts austerity in authority, sectarianism over solutions, and profit before people.
The Public Sector Strike was a giant success because it shut down the public service. It indicates the way to win for workers. It did get huge coverage. This put enormous pressure on DUP and Secretary of State but they moved but barely… We have to go bigger.
PREPARE
Workers need to strike again and longer. Some workers are continuing their fight through strike action today as they have done in the weeks leading up to the strike. There’s no option for them.
Our unions and communities need to prepare for more coordinated actions like the 18th, which can be sustained for a week or two weeks or more. It’s a shift away from accepting austerity but the strikes on Thursday show that restoring Stormont can not be the objective. Restoring the executive was never the answer that workers need.
TRADE UNIONS ARE THE FIGHT
Stormont has not worked as a defense against austerity. Trade unions are that defense.
DUP must end the sectarian boycott. Trade unions show how we can work together.
Secretary of State must stop punishing workers and release the money now. Trade unions are how we as workers organise to fight for pay parity, pay increases, safe staffing and build the power we need to get beyond tailing the Tories.
NIPSA have pointed out that even the 3.3bn it isn’t enough money to fix staffing and pay. It’s clear that trade unions listening to their workers will go on and build the next strike day based on their members’ needs. But workers can’t wait and organising and industrial action is ongoing.
WORKERS AND COMMUNTIES
Strikes give workers’ needs attention: pay, staffing, services. They make it clear: workers and their families can’t afford a give-with-one-hand-take-with-the-other solution that includes more Tory austerity. Heaton-Harris has indicated taking away bus passes and demanding water charges. These are some of the ways the 3.3 billion will be taken back if strikes aren’t deeply and seriously sustained.
Communities and workers need to plan for longer more sustained strikes which put workers back in the centre of the political picture like they were on Thursday. We need consistent growing coordination between shop stewards and the communites to build on the coordination that union leaders have showed was possible around the political impasse and turn the focus on to the real needs of workers: in their jobs for staffing, and in their lives for pay and pensions. That means we will need more community support to help us prepare for longer strikes that will put workers, not politicians, in control of the future.
STRIKES CONTINUE
Industrial Action committees in Health and Education are meeting on Monday but Unison has said they are not backing down. It’s not an option for members.
NIPSA reiterated yesterday they are currently in dispute in the civil service, health service and the Education Authority. They are taking industrial action in all these areas.
Right now, Unite members are striking. Today, Thursday and Friday in Education Authority with workers are on pickets joined by Roads Workers in the Dept for Infrastructure (DfI). See below for more. Get into your next People Before Profit meeting and talk about how to build the strike support needed for sustained action and how to build power in your union for workers.
Education Authority Workers – Education Strikes
24-26 Jan
Drivers and Transport Staff under Translink – Transport Strikes
Feb 1 and three more dates to be confirmed.
Roads Workers – DfI Strikes
Action Ongoing Across the North
Further Education Workers – FE Strikes
Action Ongoing
PICKET REPORTS 18/1/24
People Before Profit is ready to build that support. Our branches had members at picket across the north standing with striking workers. Reports below:
LURGAN & CRAIGAVON
Lurgan branch members Pádraig Cairns and Danielle Mincher-Cairns visited pickets across Lurgan and Craigavon to show their solidarity.
Branch members Rory Clifford, Martin O’Neill and Alejandra Borg proudly took part in industrial action outside their workplaces to fight for a fair wage.
Massive pickets at Lismore Comprehensive School and Brownlow Integrated School, Craigavon Area Hospital, Craigavon Translink Depot and Marlborough House showed the commitment of local workers to brave the elements in the fight for what they are owed.
NEWRY
Our activists there visited Further Education workers at the Southern Regional College, transport workers at Newry Buscentre, and healthcare workers at Daisy Hill Hospital.
They talked about how they felt ‘angry that politicians are getting paid and not working when they’re working but not getting paid properly.’ There were repeated calls for those boycotting Stormont to lose their pay.
Incidentally many asked how they could support People Before Profit.
MID ULSTER
Members in Mid Ulster attended rallies in places like Cookstown and met picketers at schools hospitals civil service offices and transport depots.
They passed out our leaflet, supporting the workers and backing the idea of a longer strike to acheive real wins for workers with or without Stormont. The strike is for the workers’ pay not about Stormont.
DERRY
In Derry we saw a massive rally with a tremendous march through the city down the hill into Guildhall Square. Cllr Shaun Harkin coordinated much of the support across the city and the region for our trade union activists. He visited pickets in across the city with our members and activists.
One member, Damian Doherty, is a long-time bus driver and shop steward leading this strike and secretary of the Translink Branch of Unite. The workers in Translink have been organising a persistent fair fight for fair pay for transport workers. He gave an excellent speech to the main rally calling for workers to be put in the drivers seat saying Chris Heaton-Harris is like an ‘absentee landlord, [he] does not care about our public services or public service providers. He has decided to use us as pawns in his attempt to get Stormont back up and running. We say to him, ‘We will not be used as a bartering chip. We demand you release the funds you say you have that will allow us the fair, deserved and justified pay rise you are cruelly denying so many families’.
Legendary Eamonn McCann lit up the podium in front of the workers with fiery quotes from Rage Against the Machine and warm reminders of his father’s experience fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers on his street like so many of Derry families’ histories whose stories are wove into the tapestry of the city’s great trade union history of workers’ struggles.
Members followed the rally with a serious discussion in Sandinos (and a seriously well-needed pint) on a worker strategy for the strikes.
BELFAST
The rally in Belfast may have seemed where the centre of the action was with trade union officials coming in from London etc but it was the marches in from across the city like the one Gerry Carroll was on in from West Belfast that showed the size and power of this monumental strike. Our student branch marched in with workers from City Hospital and we cheered as the Unite and GMB members we knew in Translink from Milewater came in from the depot to build the already swelling thousands in front of City Hall.
Workers came in from the sunny cold streets to an after-rally meeting addressed by striking People Before Profit members in Education, Civil Service, and Health who gave us clear workplace view on why the strikes must continue. Gerry Carroll MLA closed the meeting saluting the strikers, encouraging workers to join People Before Profit and build the party and its support and energise the unions to unite the strikes with the political fight and win an alternative Ireland the works for workers: a sustainable socialist Ireland for all.
