FEATURE Continued from page 1 t’s a story that is repeated sev- eral times over, in public transport, at British Gas and elsewhere as the British labour movement has sought to defend Britain’s public sector from privatization. And the idea that she has proceeded with her plans despite the opposition is part of the Thatcher image, creating the idea that the “Iron Lady” will move fearlessly to do what is good for Britain despite “special interests”, especially the trade unions. It’s an image that the Tory government in Britain has maintained through eight years and nearly £20 bil- lion in privatized public assets. Presented through the prism of a press which gives a rosy colour to virtually everything the government does, the pri- vatization program appears to be very popular, with any opposition swept away by the flood of share applications. The image also carries over into the media in this country where criticism of privatization is rarely ever heard. But as a poll taken in October of last year by NOP Market Research demon- strated, Thatcher does not now enjoy majority public support for her privatiza- tion program, if indeed she ever did. And there is an increasingly effective fightback against her government's sell- off of public assets — although the skirmishes over the past several years have demonstrated that some of the old approaches in the trade union movement don’t work any more. Not surprisingly, there are echoes of Thatcher in the propaganda of the Social Credit government which is hammering away on the theme that the trade union movement is opposing privatization only from the narrow viewpoint of the jobs of its members. Oliver Litwin, the director of the N.M. Rotchschild merchant bank who has been advising the Socred government on its privatization program, has main- tained the same theme, telling the “We've won back some contracts but we're a long way from winning the battle on a political level.’ government that they “shouldn’t talk to the unions.” Clearly, the moves choreo- graphed at 10 Downing Street in Lon- don have been carefully studied in Victoria. _ But the Thatcher government of 1987 IS not the same as it was in 1979 and 1983. And for trade unionists, commun- ity groups and the thousands of people whose services will be affected by the Socreds’ privatization program, there are some valuable lessons in what has taken place in Britain. British unionists and political activists agree that the government’s sale of shares in public enterprises created a sense of popular support for privatiza- ion as thousands of people lined up to buy shares in many of the first compan- ies that went on the block. 6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 28, 1987 “Every time a share offering in a pub- lic company was made, people were queuing up as soon as the banks opened,” said Pete Carter, the industrial secretary for the Communist Party of Great Britain. “The share offerings to workers were all oversubscribed.” He emphasized that share ownership was a “complex issue.” “Certainly, the workers who have shares don’t have enough, even collec- tively, to have any impact at all on how the company is run,” he said. “But it has _ tended to identify them with the corpo- rate owners to some extent.” In addition, he said, share ownership has led to a “big push on quality circles and co-operative partnership” and has tended to-separate the interests of private sector workers from those of their broth- ers and sisters in the public sector who face a different kind of privatization — contracting-out. A government bill which introduced mandatory competitive tendering in the National Health Service as well as government action to sell off public ser- vices sparked the first major wave of industrial action against privatization. Wild noted that there were a series of one-day strikes in 1983-84 by individual public sector unions, including the National Union of Public Employees (NUPBE), the National Association of Local Government Offices (NALGO) and others. “But they should have been out together,” he emphasized, noting that co-ordinated action by the unions “would have been a signal to the Thatcher government that we were in this together.” He noted that the trade union move- ment as a whole had not adopted a gen- eral strategy and a co-ordinated campaign against privatization. Roy Jones, an industrial reporter with the labour daily Morning Star, pointed out in an interview that it is not a tradi- tion in the British labour movement for the TUC to act as a co-ordinating body. In recent years that policy has worked to the labour movement’s detriment in the fight against the government’s attack on the trade union movement generally and particularly in the fight against privatiza- tion. British trade unions have faced sharply declining membership as a result of the massive de-industrialization of Bnitain, the shift to non-union workers which has accompanied privatization and the proliferation of part-time, tem- porary work, much of it in the low- wage, non-union sector. The formidable difficulties facing the labour movement prompted the TUC at its September congress in Blackpool to set up a special 20-member review com- mittee to chart a new course for the trade union movement. Although no major changes in direction are expected, the establishment of the committee is seen as a recognition that the labour movement needs to overcome its prob- lems of sectionalism and develop a uni- fied, co-ordinated approach to Thatcherism. But if there is a still overall co- ordination lacking, several public sector unions have developed joint campaigns, many of them assisted by the TUC. The various unions in the National Health Service established a Joint Anti- Privatization Research Group which has campaigned vigorously against contracting-out of cleaning, catering and laundry services in British hospitals. Together with the TUC, it has published comprehensive lists of contractors’ fail- ures, which show how competitive tend- ering of hospital services has reduced the quality of services but has not brought the promised efficiency and cost reduc- tion. The battle campal in Brita fighting an uphi * Rie: ee IAN NATIONAL UNION OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES —<—<—$$s The unions’ work has not yet altered the government policy but it has figured prominently in the mounting opposition, expressed in’ public opinion polls, against further privatization of health services. Joint union action has also been suc- cessful in many cases in fending off pri- vatization in local government services, according to unionists active in that area. In fact, the unions’ effectiveness in con- vincing local councils that direct labour is better than contracting-out, prompted the Thatcher government to introduce the Local Government Bill (1987) which would force local councils to put certain services out for private tender.