IF THE TUC adopt Strategy for the Future when the General Council meet this week it will deliver a big blow to the labour movement.
It is a document snuggling up closer to the Tories and distancing the unions from the Labour Party. When it talks about strikes causing damage to 'the community' it strengthens the demand of the Tories for no-strike agreements in the public sector.
The document's moralising about the unions doing more on welfare and employment rights rather than using their muscle for pay rises Is a DIl SICK The TUC's cowardice in 1982 failed the health workers and weakened the defence of one of the most important sections of the welfare state.
And considering that it has not given senious any workers striking against sackings and redundancies, the TUC's talk about employment rights rings absolutely hollow.
The latest retreat by the TUC rams home the process begun at last year's Congress when the right wing headed by Chapple made their turn to "realism'. The movement away from the Labour Party is also echoed by Roy Hattersley, who has decided 'that the unions going to diminishing force political and industrial life' as he announced at a Fabian conference a fortnight ago.
worried backing to dwindling membership, TUC bureaucrats share Hattersley's pessimism about their future and have become ever more desperate about the threat to the cosy relation unions have maintained with post-wal cramas At a more bureaucratic jobs are threatened, expenses are less generous, union cars will have to last longer, and the 'personal' relabe tions with local businessmen British will no longer be so 'friendly'.
wages.
Intimidated by the Tories about their the explain personal level ing the summer TUC Faced with this threat the