#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #UK #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en)#UK, surrey ACG: Wildcat strikes: a very basic introduction. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 A number of wildcat strikes broke out in the UK during August. ---- The wave of

wildcat action kicked off at Cranswick Continental Foods in Pilsworth. Next,
wildcat strikes broke out at several Amazon warehouses including Tilbury,
Rugeley, Coventry, Bristol, Dartford, Coalville, Belvedere, Hemel Hempstead and
Chesterfield. ---- There were also more wildcat strikes at Grangemouth oil
refinery. Chemical plant workers also took wildcat action at several sites across
Teesside and at Humber Refinery in North Lincolnshire as well as at Valero
refinery in Milford Haven. Train drivers at Avanti West Coast brought some
services to a halt by refusing shifts.
But what makes a strike ‘wildcat'?
Wildcat strikes are a form of autonomous direct action. Autonomous because they
are not officially sanctioned by and are likely to be outside of the control of
the unions and left-wing political parties. Direct because they short circuit the
mediating and representative role of the trade unions.
As the recent wildcat strikes spread like wildfire, media outlets were keen to
describe the danger to businesses.

Share Talk website wrote:
"Businesses cannot plan for wildcat strikes, making it difficult to manage them.
These strikes are dangerous for employees who abandon the legal protections
granted to them in collective bargaining."

The Evening Standard asked:
"What is a wildcat strike?" Wildcat strikes don't have the permission of their
union, and workers don't go through the typical process a union does when
arranging industrial action, which sometimes challenges their union's authority."

Computer Weekly stated:
"Amazon workers also have staged wildcat strikes (meaning they were conducted
without the involvement or support of a union) in Rugeley, Coventry, Swindon,
Rugby, Doncaster, Bristol, Dartford, Belvedere, Hemel Hempstead and Chesterfield"

A couple of dictionary definitions of wildcat strikes are:
Wildcat strike: a strike that is started by a group of workers without the
approval of their union.
Merriam-webster dictionary.

Wildcat strike: a sudden strike (= act of refusing to work as a protest) without
any warning by the workers and often without the official support of the unions.
Cambridge dictionary.

But council communist Anton Pannekoek outlined the reason that anarchist
communists and libertarian communists emphasise the subversive potential of
wildcat strikes:
"In the wildcat strikes, we may see the beginnings of a new practical orientation
of the working class, a new tactic, the method of direct action. They represent
the only actual rebellion of man against the deadening suppressing weight of
world-dominating capital."

Wildcat strikes are a form of direct action and the anarchist Emile Pouget
explained the significance for revolutionaries of this tactic of militant working
class action:
"Direct Action is a notion of such clarity, of such self-evident transparency,
that merely to speak the words defines and explains them. It means that the
working class, in constant rebellion against the existing state of affairs,
expects nothing from outside people, powers or forces, but rather creates its own
conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its means of action."

As a form of autonomous action, wildcat strikes have the potential to go beyond
the narrow framework of trade unionism. Anarchist communists and other communist
revolutionaries offer criticisms of the limitations of trade unions.

William Morris, the author of News from Nowhere and Lectures on Socialism, wrote
in 1885 that:
Trade unions[do not]"represent the whole class of workers as working men but
rather are charged with the office of keeping the human part of the capitalists'
machinery in good working order and freeing it from any grit of discontent".

In a similar observation to William Morris, council communist Cajo Brendel
described the role of unions:
"The undeniable fact that from the very first day of their existence unions have
had the task of mediating between capitalists and workers, mediating of course in
order to extinguish the flames of conflict between the two parties, not to kindle
the fire by pouring oil into it, mediating in order to stabilize the antagonistic
relationship of workers and capitalists, not to destroy it."

The wildcats in the UK have been in mostly, though not entirely, in workplaces
where there are either no unions or they are unrecognised. The GMB are talking
credit for at least some of the Amazon actions, but they are, for the most part,
self-organised. What is important about these wildcat strikes is that they show
what workers can do for themselves. If they can be extended and spread then they
can overcome isolation and being picked off.

Useful texts and pamphlets:

Goodbye to the Unions! Controversy About Autonomous Class Struggle in Great Britain

Direct Action. Emile Pouget.
libcom.org/article/direct-action-emile-pouget

https://surreyanarchistcommunistgroup.blogspot.com/2022/08/wildcat-strikes-very-basic-introduction.html
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