WITH nearly 600,000 members, plus their families, the trade unions are by far the largest civic organisation in Scotland.
In tandem with standing up for the working class against job insecurity, poverty pay, repressive anti-union laws and decimated public services, unions need to champion the fundamental democratic right of the Scottish people to decide their own future, rather than have it dictated by Boris Johnson and his rightwing cabal.
The Tories have no mandate to rule and ruin Scotland. They were roundly rejected by a big Scottish majority, for the 17th successive general election. The last time they got a Scottish majority was in 1955, the year our youngest pensioners were born.
Yet we’re saddled with a government aiming to ban the right to strike, parcel up our NHS for US multinationals in Trump trade deals, and escalate their incitement of racist divisions to conquer us for even worse pay and casualised jobs.
Confronted by the growing divergence between what Scottish people want and what we get via Westminster Tory rule, the declaration in support of IndyRef2 by the Scottish Tades Union Congress (STUC) general secretary, Grahame Smith, is both extremely welcome and profoundly important.
It should trigger a review of their position on the national question by all 48 Scottish Trade STUC-affiliated unions, with democratic debate amongst the membership.
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Defending the right of the Scottish people to choose - including a second independence referendum - is elementary democracy.
But like other co-founders of Trade Unionists for Independence in 2013, I believe workers need to go further, and become advocates for independence.
There is a world of difference between upholding the democratic right to choose independence, and advocating a working-class socialist case for independence; in essence, an independent socialist Scotland. The STUC and individual unions should stamp their imprint on the kind of Scotland we aspire to be. Independence for a purpose. To swap systems rather than swap flags. Not to swap Westminster austerity for a decade of post-independence austerity as threatened in the SNP government’s Growth Commission Report, but to bring about a fundamental transfer of wealth and power to working class people – those who make the wealth, rather than those who take the wealth.
To transform the lives of the vast majority, by harnessing the vast natural and human resources of the fifth-richest economy on Earth to the benefit of people and planet, not the profits of a handful of billionaires and millionaires.
A Scotland free of poverty; independent of the growing, grotesque inequality; united against racist divisions and ruthless exploitation for private profit ... all of which are the ugly offspring of that monstrous mother of a system: capitalism.
That vision should include a legally-enforced Scottish national minimum wage of at least two-thirds the median male wage (about £12-an-hour currently), rising with inflation; a 4-day week for 5 days’ pay; free public transport; removal of Trident and all nuclear pollution; democratic public ownership of all forms of energy, transport, construction and banking, to lay the foundations of a Socialist Green New Deal that could combat poverty and pollution alike.
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The STUC, and indeed most unions, already have most of these polices on paper, as agreed by successive congresses. They now need to be transformed into living, fighting campaigns, popularised into becoming the property of masses of workers and their families, agitated for in the workplaces, community halls and on the streets.
That’s why I wrote to Scottish unions the week after Boris Johnson was elected, suggesting an STUC-led mass demo in defence of workers’ rights, our NHS and our right to choose Scotland’s future.
The trade union movement needs to link here-and-now struggles on workers’ rights and conditions with the national right to choose.
In doing so, they have ready-made allies in the Scottish Socialist Party, who for 21 years have stood up for the working class against capitalist exploiters of all nationalities, and argued for independence as an integral part of the struggle for a socialist Scotland.
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