Joyce McMillan: Strike a blow with creative action

ON WEDNESDAY of this week, the general secretary of the public service union PCS, Mark Serwotka, took to the media to announce that following a substantial ballot majority for strike action against government cuts in pensions, his members across the lower ranks of the civil service would be staging a mass one-day walkout, on Thursday 30 June.

The action is timed to coincide with one-day strikes and demonstrations already planned by school and university teachers; and given the current political situation in Britain - where government strategy boils down to making the poor, the sick and the low-paid pay the price for a financial crisis caused by the rich - it's an event that should be greeted with joy and some relief, by those who were beginning to wonder just what it would take, in the way of outrage and injustice, to rouse the British people from their political slumbers.

In fact, though, Mark Serwotka's announcement has brought nothing but a sense of weary foreboding, even to those who care about the rights and conditions of ordinary workers in the UK. On the right, of course, it has been met with the usual 18th-century rumblings about how the government will withdraw the right to strike altogether, if workers insist on having the cheek to exercise it; there really is nothing more shameful in the whole class-ridden field of British politics than this continued Tory bickering and sniping over a basic civil right, first established in law almost 200 years ago.

What's noticeable, though, is how little enthusiasm the idea of imminent strike action seems to arouse on what remains of the left. There is, of course, a hard-core of left-wing activists and union leaders for whom strike action remains an article of faith, the cornerstone of union power, and an occasion of real political excitement. For everyone else though - from the Labour leader Ed Milliband, to the hard-pressed millions who will have to make alternative arrangements because key public services have been withdrawn - the strike will be little but a nuisance.

Its chances of improving public perceptions of the trade union movement are close to zero, and will diminish with every day the action continues, beyond the initial 24-hour walkout. And like every public-service strike, it will hand a massive propaganda opportunity to the right-wing media, which will not hold back on tragic stories of innocent service users abandoned by heartless workers interested only in their own pay and pensions.

So why are the unions doing it? Almost literally, it seems, because they cannot think of anything else to do; or because those who lead them are so rigidly bound up in early-20th century socialist thinking that they have not even tried to analyse the situation in which they now find themselves.The idea of strike action emerged, after all, from a locally-based manufacturing and agricultural economy which was dedicated to the production of goods and raw materials; under those conditions, any strike which led to a break in production had an almost immediate impact on the income-flow of the management against which the action was directed, while taking many weeks to impact seriously on consumers.

In a modern service economy, though - and particularly in public service - the situation is reversed. If workers withdraw their labour, the management and government do not suffer at all, in the initial phase; and even in the longer term, they are often able to direct political blame for the strike away from themselves. The blameless users of the service, though, suffer immediate and sometimes drastic deprivation.

In practical terms, in other words - and despite the words on their placards - modern public service workers who withdraw their labour are striking not against the government, but against the most vulnerable of their fellow citizens; and it is little wonder that such strike action has become a profoundly unsuccessful political and economic weapon, when we consider how poorly targeted it is, and how incapable of inflicting any discomfiture at all on those against whom it is directed.

So what should the public service unions be doing, in the year 2011? They should be rethinking entirely the concept of "industrial action" for our time; and they should be facing the truth that in this sector of the economy, ordinary strike action is at best beside the point, and at worst disastrous.

Where services that people desperately need are cut, they should be encouraging their members to "work in", rather than to down tools.Where public service workers are being made redundant, they should be organising them into politically-aware work crews who insist on continuing to serve their communities, while all the while campaigning for a restoration of proper paid jobs.

Where they have the technical capacity to continue to deliver services while refusing to process payments for them, they should take that option.

And where government tries to punish them for this kind of trade union activity, they should square up for the fight; for unlike strike action in a public service, these activities will be popular, and will seem eminently sensible to everyone who cares for decent public services in this country.

Now of course there are reasons - technical, legal, financial - why unions do not pursue these routes; they have, in a sense, become obsessed by the battle for the right to hold strikes, within an increasingly restrictive legal framework.

You do not have to oppose the right to strike, though, to grasp that across huge swathes of a modern service economy, it has become irrelevant as a way of defending workers' interests.

And if there is ever to be revival of serious left-wing politics in the UK - or in any part of it - then a rethink of the role and strategies of trade unionism will be part of that revival; a rethink which moves away from the misery of the bus that doesn't come, the nursery with locked doors, and the disrupted university exam, towards something fresh, brilliant and creative, that demonstrates the value of public service work not by refusing to do it, but by celebrating, loving and enjoying it, in full public view.