WINTER 2025
ISSUE 1

₁ Editors: This piece came out of a longer conversation with a veteran worker in a UK factory that produces, among other things, parts for munitions. It is a summary of this worker’s experience and perspectives in his own words.

I see the Palestine question right now as providing an opportunity to rebuild a rank-and-file approach to trade unionism today.¹ In any workplace, but especially in the arms industry, this fight can be waged. In Britain today, the traditions of rank-and-file organizing and action that marked many of the class struggles of the twentieth century, from World War I to the First Gulf War have faded from view. But the struggle over Palestine requires that we reconnect with these examples. And today’s struggle over Palestine contains our best chance at doing that.

Being prepared to fight over Palestine solidarity means having guts. It means a lesser likelihood of being browbeaten by management when it comes to fighting over “bread and butter” issues. If you maintain a political approach to building shop stewards’ organization, it means being less likely to get sucked into the embrace of the kind of union-management partnership that has plagued the manufacturing sector for 30 years. It means that you are going to have more independence to fight on the shop floor, rather than worrying about the viability of arms production from management’s point of view. Because why would you if you are opposed to the shit you’re building, right?

But the level of preparation to fight over political issues also depends on the momentum you have built in your own workplace and sector. The seemingly insoluble problems in most arms plants in Britain today can be attributed to this culture of union-management partnership. This means that unions such as mine have been declawed, unable to live up to the rank-and-file traditions of previous moments of anti-imperialist solidarity. In the last couple of years, however, we’ve seen signs of a reversal of this trend. Militant young stewards are coming into the fray and helping to rebuild the basic structure of union membership and organization in the plant. We now have a couple young reps who do Palestine solidarity work. While we are only at the start of that process, we are assuming a more combative and political posture in the union, reminiscent of previous fights and victories.

During the Gulf War in the early 1990s, I was part of a small group in the plant that adopted an active and public anti-war position and we managed to take action to stop the flow of munitions. The union nationally had an anti-war stance and we built on the back of that, putting out leaflets and stickers inside the plant. But we really started to get traction when the company announced major layoffs coinciding with their initiative to mobilize for maximum production for the war effort. Our earlier tactics were not by themselves effective at mucking up the war work. But having done the preparatory work of winning a solid core of workers to an anti-war position meant that by the time management announced redundancies, we were able to convince the majority of workers not just to refuse overtime but to do whatever was necessary not to help the employer in their war effort. In effect, our early anti-war work had helped consolidate a common sense among a small group so that when confronted with a bread and butter issue that impacted larger groups of members directly, we could intervene with our analysis.

When the layoffs came, we told workers: “We’re expendable in the eyes of management. Despite patting us on the back, offering us unlimited overtime, and telling us that the workers are the most important thing in the place, they don’t care about us. That’s why they’re starting to sack us by the hundreds.” We brought overtime to a halt and tried, to the best of our ability, undertaking a strike from the inside. We slowed everything down inside the plant without taking official strike action because we were not in a position to do that. We had managers coming in overnight trying to fix the equipment, making a mess of it, and breaking things, which of course compounded their problems. This demonstrated to workers that they have real power. 

We had also gained momentum through a successful struggle for a shorter work week in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before the Gulf War kicked off, we had moved from a five-day work week to four-and-a-half days. But with the Cold War ending, the arms industry moved to rationalize production in the same way they rationalize everything else after their authority over production is challenged. After we won the shorter week, and with the end of the Cold War, they began with layoffs and reductions. They also moved to close down the most militant sites where the union was best organized and most powerful and elsewhere tried to incorporate the senior shop stewards into bargaining arrangements that made them less reliant on membership to win decent deals. On the back of the victory for the shorter work week, the redundancies, reductions, rationalization, and the deepening of the union-management partnership changed the workplace culture across the sector, disconnecting workers from their traditions of militant independence from both management and the trade union bureaucracy.

Photograph by Andrew Wiard. National Union of Railwaymen’s General Secretary, Jimmy Knapp, with Zola Zembe of the South African Congress of Trade Unions at a protest on April 6, 1987.

One consequence of 30 years of retreat and the partnership approach becoming really embedded amongst senior reps is an inbuilt conservatism. Nowadays, the dominant culture is politically engaged in a defense of nuclear weapons and our right to build them. Furthermore, none of the senior reps want to see anything done by the British government – or their employers for that matter – that stops work on anything going to Israel. That’s the general position, and it’s very hard to break out of. A quite encouraging debate around Palestine among senior union reps in the sector has begun, however, and there’s been some positions taken that are better than the national union position. But even this is hard won.

Recently, there were two young individuals who wanted to resign because of the protests at our site. They worried about being complicit in the Israeli genocide as a result of their employment in the plant. It’s fine when people come down to blockade and protest the plant. I understand why that happens. But if you’re not campaigning around Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in your own workplace, schools, hospitals, wherever it is you work, it’s more or less a cop out. We argued with the protestors who were blaming the workers and accusing them of complicity in genocide. We told them it was making it harder for us to build Palestine solidarity inside the plant and making it harder for them to win people to the wider solidarity movement too. These tensions remain, but at times it has been possible to work something out with protestors on the outside. In one plant, where better coordination was achieved, the shift was ended before lunchtime because of the protests. Both workers and protestors were satisfied with the outcome, especially because the workers were paid for a full day’s work. This willingness to connect with workers is important. Otherwise, protestors risk driving workers into the arms of management.

Because of the experience of what was achieved in the 1990s regarding the Gulf War, we were able to keep these younger workers. We were able to show that not only are you not complicit, but that you can be part of the solution by staying in the war machine and actually organizing a core of political militants to halt the flow of weapons. Furthermore, you can set an agenda that is impossible to undertake from the outside if you leave. 

I remember the conversation well with one of the lads. 

Look, the easiest thing for you to do is to quit, and your friends will stop hassling you about being complicit. The easiest thing to do is to tell your mates you’ve left the plant and then go and get another job and join the pro-Palestine demonstrations. The hardest thing to do is to stay and start to work with us to build that anti-imperial core inside the plant that can take the kind of action we took previously. But if you do decide to stick around, you can explain to your mates that you’re actually taking the tough position, trying to stay because that is what’s required to put an end to this.

Going through that argument helped us convince the two workers that wanted to leave to stay and take an active role in helping us rebuild that small core group. One of them is now a shop steward and the other is an activist in the branch. That is the approach we take whenever we meet people like that, but there are others who simply leave without ever having that conversation. What we need to do is rebuild that tradition of internationalism and solidarity, through the struggle for Palestine, at every workplace in Britain. An example I gave to the workers was the anti-apartheid movement regarding South Africa. That was a massive campaign in Britain. Trade unionists across Britain boycotted goods going to South Africa and coming from South Africa. And there was a commitment that went right up to industrial action against apartheid in some of these plants.

But the unfortunate fact is that there doesn’t seem to be many people around who can even have this conversation with the younger generation of workers. So many of those who were part of these earlier struggles or have knowledge of them have gone, retired, or have left the movement. We need to share that knowledge in our current organizing. We have to educate people about the tradition, for instance, with examples from World War I and World War II, the movement against the fascist coup in Chile of 1973, and our own example from the early 1990s. During the Second Gulf War, the War on Iraq, there were train drivers in Scotland who refused to ship munitions.

Trade unionists here played a role in earlier struggles, too, such as when the working class in Britain opposed the Confederacy during the Civil War and defended people’s right to fight slavery. Another example I want to mention is the fight in 1973 at Rolls Royce, which is documented in the 2018 film, Nae Pasaran. The struggle occurred at the high point of British industrial power, where workers in the UK were confident enough to fight over anything at all. When they refused to handle those engines, management couldn’t do anything about it because they knew the union was 100 percent committed. People were calling the issue one of human rights, and for some, especially the socialists involved, it was about trying to fight the fascist dictatorship in Chile. Interestingly, the senior shop steward who led it was a Christian. For him, it was abhorrent, the way people were being massacred by Pinochet and his ilk. So you had the ability for a Christian to lead this anti-imperialist action, with socialist and communists and so on in the shop stewards’ committee, but that overlap was only possible because you had such a high degree of organization and confidence amongst the workers there. 

We need to recreate that political tradition across the working class in Britain and beyond. There is currently a motion at the aerospace and shipbuilding conference which argues that shop stewards’ committees in the industry should actively campaign around BDS. It is not related to arms production per se, but it is related to, for example, pushing management to boycott existing contracts with Hewlett-Packard, whose laptops are manufactured in Israel. Now, BDS is not typically thought of as a labor issue. But there needs to be that active BDS initiative across the movement, not just in the arms industry, but everywhere. 

It is not just a discussion for arms workers. It is a discussion to be had across the class, to revive the type of movement we had against apartheid in South Africa in order to forge a new common sense around political action today. The surest way to something like that is when workers refuse to pick up the tools. In the hospitality sector within Unite, there has been some good work done in small workplaces, cafes and bars, getting employers to refuse and stop using Israeli products. It has been tiny as yet, but young bar workers who are organized in the union and are political and pro-Palestine. Doing whatever you can where you can is hugely significant.

There are a few other recent examples that we need to recognize and publicize. There was an interesting episode at a shipyard that builds battleships, where there have been pro-Palestine protests and even blockades. Perhaps unlike other worksites, there has been tremendous sympathy from rank-and-file workers there. These shipyards have eight or nine different entrances, and the protestors typically blockade one of the entrances to work and the police work with management to circumvent the protest. But here, the workers told the protestors, “By the way, they’re going to open this other gate up, so you’ll want to get over there before the police do.” This situation repeated a couple times, a kind of cat and mouse game with the workers updating the protesters about the movements of the police and management. 

What was interesting about all this was that most of these workers were migrants, temporary workers who were not necessarily in the union. Because management cannot get enough welders in the UK, they have begun recruiting workers from overseas. These workers are treated quite badly in the shipyard. They work under hazardous conditions and live in poor accommodations. They have no allegiance to the company at all, and thus they were a great source of information for the blockaders, helping to shut the shipyard down that day. That is definitely one example of an informal outlet for workers’ grievances in the shipyard, but it also demonstrates their sympathy with the Palestinians and their opposition to the employer that they work for profiting from the genocide. There are a number of people in that shipyard who want to organize around Palestinian solidarity now. 

It’s probably no accident that these migrant workers have taken the lead in the shipyard. I think the employers learned after the massive strikes of World War I by engineers and arms workers that you need to pay these people decent wages to stop this kind of trouble from spreading in the sector. But at the same time, we’ve been able to organize around pay to push management beyond where they wanted to go. This has more to do with the fact that in Britain today there is a real skill shortage when it comes to engineers. It’s a combination of the fallout from Brexit and the fact that the companies haven’t really been training young people in apprenticeships, and consequently there’s a real dearth of engineers. Then there’s the growing number of conflicts in the world – the military contracts are just huge. 

It’s the same in the United States. The arms industry is booming and they just can’t get enough workers. That strengthens our bargaining power, and despite the poor leadership and the decades of retreat and defeat, we’re in quite a powerful position. So, I’ve been waging an argument inside the union that we need to fight for the next stage of the shorter work week. We’re currently on four-and-a-half days, 37 hours. The initial demand was 35 hours. That exists in France and Germany, for instance, and that’s been the model. That kind of fight could help change the dynamics inside the sector, after 30 years. Now is the time to fight for a real victory.

It’s about always having a forward momentum. Having a target is crucial. The trends of 30 years of defeat and shrinking union density have started to turn in the last two years as a result. It is growth, more combativity, and that political edge that characterize this dynamic. It sounds like I’m blowing my trumpet here, but it has to be that way if you want to have the ability to engage in difficult political issues. You can only do it with a confident workforce.