Good article by Seumas Milne in the Guardian

The return of the strike
From factories to universities, those at the sharp end of the economic slump are rediscovering the power of direct action


Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 May 2009 10.00 BST
Success seems to be catching. While politicians and the media remain transfixed by the scandal of MPs' expense scams, those at the sharp end of the economic slump are getting on with defending their interests – and scoring some significant, if little-noticed, victories in the process.

Last week, thousands of engineering construction workers staged unofficial strikes across the country after the Dutch contractor Hertel refused to take on locally based workers at ExxonMobil and Total's South Hook liquefied natural gas terminal in Wales – and insisted on bringing in its own Polish workforce to undercut union agreements. Within 24 hours of the walkouts spreading to half a dozen energy plants throughout Britain, the employer had backed down and the strikes were called off.

The latest stoppages followed the pattern set earlier this year, when unofficial industrial action closed down refineries and power stations all over Britain in protest against the attempt by a Sicilian contractor to ship in a non-union Italian and Portuguese workforce in place of local workers at Total's Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire. As at South Hook, the employer caved in and found new work on the contract for locally based labour without loss to the Italian and Portuguese.

This was the strike, widely, but wrongly, reported as anti-foreigner because some pickets held "British jobs for British workers" placards. In fact, as has become clearer since, both disputes were aimed at halting the exploitation of EU directives and European court judgements to attack the terms and conditions of all organised workers in Britain, British and migrant alike. And both were successful.

So were the hundreds of workers who occupied three Visteon factories at Enfield, Basildon and Belfast in April when the spun-off Ford supplier's UK subsidiary went bust. Nearly 600 workers were thrown out of a job with less than an hour's notice and not even a week's pay. Earlier this month, after weeks of sit-ins, pickets, eviction orders and police raids, the employer – with Ford at its shoulder – coughed up substantial redundancy payoffs and compensation to settle the dispute. No wonder the corporate human resources journal Personneltoday warned "employers should beware – if successful today, Visteon workers stand to set a very public and very dangerous precedent".

But of course it's not just in industry that direct action and sit-ins have been delivering results since the current crisis became critical. From January to March, British universities saw the largest wave of student occupations since the 1960s. Then, Vietnam was the trigger; this year, it was the carnage inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza. Students ended up staging occupations at 35 universities, from Sussex to Glasgow, and most won concessions from the authorities: from scholarships for Palestinian students to disinvestment from companies linked to the Israeli occupation.

Now, none of this may yet have reached the level of industrial or student activism in, say, France. But after years in which the message has been that militancy doesn't pay, even relatively small-scale breakthroughs can be infectious. And with the prospect of many months of heavy job losses to come and a political class that still seems intent on business as usual, more action in the workplace is going to be essential.