The attack on the public sector workers by the communes and Laender (regional states) in most parts of Germany is much more than the “usual” annual or bi-annual bargaining round.
Although the public and service sector trade union Verdi is treating the dispute as a purely economic battle, it is, in fact, a major political attack by the bosses’ state. Obviously, for the workers involved, their working week shall, if they lose the strike, increase from 38.5 to 40 hours, without any increase in income.
But, behind this, German capitalism is attempting to inflict on the largest trade union in Germany a political defeat, similar to the one it imposed on IG Metall in the strike for the 35 hour week in East Germany in 2003. In this important sense, it is an attack on the working class as a whole, whose outcome will shape the class struggle and alter the balance of forces in Germany in the months, maybe years ahead.
Battle lines are drawn
The strike started two weeks ago in Baden-Wuerttemberg, and has now been spread to the rest of West Germany, apart of Bremen and Hessen, and to one region in the East (Saxony).
About 40.000 workers have been involved in the strike up until now; many thousands more have joined them in demonstrations and visited the picket lines. After years of retreat and more than a decade of stagnating wages, many workers want to fight. In many towns quite large numbers have joined or rejoined the union before and during the first strike days.
Moreover, the manufacturing sector’s bargaining round is about to start, and there are also a number of factory occupations against closures.
In addition, there were sizeable demonstrations against the European Union’s proposed Bolkestein directive on 11th February (50,000 in Berlin, for example), and on 14th February in Strasbourg, with about 100,000 participants, many from Germany.
This shows that there is a real chance to repel the current attack on the working week, by combining the forces of different sectors in struggle, and connecting it to other sharp attacks (e.g. the raising of the age of retirement, further massive attacks on unemployed youth, etc.)
Verdi’s leadership
In the current situation the Verdi leadership is playing to the “left". The union’s chairman, Frank Bsirske, and other leaders have given radical speeches. But no workers should be in any doubt that they are also prepared to sell out or strike a shoddy compromise, should they get offered one (e.g. via SPD negotiators on the regional states’ side).
In order to get to that stage, Bsirske and co. have made clear, from the very beginning, that they would agree to more flexibilisation, if they could maintain the 38.5 hour week.
Compared with this narrow, trade union approach, the states and the bosses are positively clear-sighted. They have made it clear that they see the dispute as a political one. They don’t want to make any major concessions, but to defeat Verdi.
Also, the states (local governments or city councils) have already started to try to break the strike, by forcing the unemployed to scab: threatening to scrap their benefits, if they refuse to “work” as scabs. In a number of towns, the police have attacked picket lines, in order to open the gates for scabs.
The states’ strategy is certainly encouraged by Verdi’s own tactics – or, rather, lack of them. First of all, nationally, Verdi wants to prevent scabbing by purely legal means. It has no strategy of how to defend picket lines.
Equally important, up until now, the union’s official strike literature has confined itself to only the workers directly affected. Such a “strategy” almost invites the bosses and their press to try to rally workers in other sectors – particularly those who have suffered enormous losses themselves over the past decades, i.e. the non-unionised, the unemployed, workers from the East, contract workers, etc. – to side against the “privileged” public sector workers.
Such a strategy can only be countered, if the strikers and their union start from the point of view that their struggle is a political one, part of a broader struggle against a general onslaught on the working class.
For that that the demands for defending the 38 hour week have to be generalised also to those sectors where longer hours have already been pushed through. The struggle has to be combined with other workers struggles.
And, even if the immediate focus for generalisation is other German workers, the struggle should be posed as part of an international one, where the French workers in particular face an attack on their working hours.
With such an approach, the pickets could be defended not only at the workplace gates, but in factories and the dole offices, among the millions not covered by collective agreements or still in education – wherever workers and youth live, work and discuss politics. This way, the strikers could find a rich seam support amongst other workers.
Against the bosses’ attempts to use the unemployed as scabs, a campaign is needed, reaching out to the unemployed already in the dole offices (where they are “recruited” as scabs), and organising them to refuse to scab and to fight for their own demands. In return, the strikers should similarly demand the scrapping of the Haartz IV laws, and inscribe “Work or full pay!” on their Verdi banners.
Rank and file must organise
From the experience of past years, especially recently, however, it is clear that Verdi’s leadership will not chose such a path. Therefore, it is necessary, not only to put demands on these leaders, but also to agitate, propagandise and start to organise a rank and file movement of the workers in struggle and their supporters.
We urgently need a rank and file movement, which fights for effective action:
. for an all out indefinite strike
. combine the strike with other struggles and build towards a mass national mobilisation against the government’s attacks
. elect strike committees, recallable by and accountable to all striking workers
. for the election and accountability of all negotiators
. form solidarity committees in every town and city to support the struggle, and build links with other sectors.
Fighting for such a rank and file movement is a major task, not only of the left in the unions. It is necessary to use the strike to rally those forces in the WASG and PDS, who want to set up a new, fighting working class party to support such a strategy now.
The public sector dispute in Germany demonstrates that the ruling class wants to speed up the attacks. Already, the government’s attacks on pensions and on the young unemployed have been brought forward, because chancellor Angela Merkel and former SPD leader, Minister of Labour Franz Muentefering, have grown more confident in their agenda since the formation of the Grand Coalition. A defeat or sell out could further shift the balance of forces towards the capitalists.
A successful mass strike, on the other hand, could also mark the beginning of the end of Merkel’s government, and bring the working class onto the offensive. While the leadership of Verdi, left to its own devices, would scarcely dare to make such a challenge, rank and file strikers and their supporters, armed with a strategy to win, and linking up with other workers in struggle, the unemployed and unorganised, as well as other European workers threatened with longer working hours, can and should.