Electricians in the construction industry have won a decisive victory, after Balfour Beatty threw in the towel.

For six months, the electricians have been fighting off attempts to slash their wages, and smash their national agreement. Faced with a national shutdown of Balfour sites, and having failed in their attempt to get the courts to intervene on their side, Balfour Beatty announced on Thursday last week they were withdrawing the contracts they were trying to impose, and that they were withdrawing from the renegade employers’ group they had tried to set up. This was swiftly followed by first one, then a second, contractor joining the retreat until it became a rout.

How did a group of largely disorganised workers, in one of the most viciously anti-union industries on the country, successfully beat back a well-planned and coordinated attempt by the employers to cut wages and conditions?

In August last year, a breakaway group of employers, headed up by Balfour Beatty’s electrical services wing, walked away from the national negotiating body, and announced they were forming a new employers’ group. They simultaneously announced that they would be imposing new contracts on all their electricians, to take effect at the start of December – removing travel allowances, ending existing overtime agreements and current grading agreements, and leading to pay cuts of up to 35%.

Lay activists in the electrical trades, organised around the unofficial construction industry paper Siteworker, called an emergency meeting of construction workers in London. Over 500 (extremely angry) construction workers attended that first meeting, elected a National Rank and File Steering Committee, and decided to mount a protest and demonstration outside one of Balfour Beatty’s prestige contract sites in London.

Since that day in August, the R&F committee has organised weekly demonstrations outside sites in London; regional committees have been set up, all of them organising weekly protests and the campaign has attracted support internationally.

Unite, the union, after an initial period of hesitancy, has responded increasingly supportively to the pressure from the membership. This ambivalence towards the official structures of the union undoubtedly hindered activists in their ability to overcome the hesitant response of some officers of Unite. On the other hand, it was crucial in stimulating the creation of a rank and file response. It would be a mistake to read this suspicion of the “official” union as anti-union. In fact, from day one, activists were calling on construction workers not yet members of the union to join up; the leaflets they handed out at the protests argued the same, and membership forms were handed out on every protest.

Militants accepted from the start that they would have to organise themselves. Because of this, they were free to develop a strategy employing the tactics of civil disobedience and street demonstrations, with the clear aim of trying to build the conditions for collective industrial action – which to be successful, would have to challenge the anti-union laws.

This was not an option for officials of a union that has in its constitution a rule requiring compliance with the law; and without a strong, self-confident unofficial organisation prepared to dispense with such niceties it is almost sure the employers would now be crowing, and we would be facing the prospect of widespread wage cuts.

However, it is also true that if it had simply been a matter of rank and file activists operating independently of the union machine, we would probably be facing the same result. Despite the fantastic campaign waged by the rank and file committees, it is unlikely they could have won the action they needed. Although they successfully stopped sites, they were partial and limited, token stoppages.

The decisive factor in this struggle was the recognition of the legitimacy of the rank and file committees, and the support offered to them, by first the London and Eastern regional administration, whose Regional Secretary (a full time officer) and Regional Chair (an elected lay member). Because of this, the potential for tension and suspicion between the two was considerably undercut and the hostility of sections of the union administration was undermined.

The outcome is a decisive defeat of a major attack, but there are important tasks left. We should use this clear cut victory to drive forward some key demands.

1. We need to make sure the union launches a membership drive on the back of it, pointing out the success construction workers can enjoy – providing they act collectively.
2. We need to build on the organisation we have constructed during this campaign, to address the real problems still existing for construction workers. We need to build a campaign to enforce the JIB agreement – particularly Rule 17, which commits the employers to directly employing the workforce. It is a disgrace that so much labour on site is ‘self-employed’ agency labour.
3. We need an effective campaign against the blacklist that the employers routinely use to keep effective organisation off site.

We are far stronger if we can bring the union on-side. Unite has a formal commitment to lay democracy, it has a policy-making procedure which is supposed to ensure union policy is created by the members, and driven through the Industrial Sector Committees. We need to ensure those committees reflect the members’ interests and do not become sterile talking shops.

Counterfire therefore strongly urges the rank and file committees to publicise the above platform, and argue for the election of activists that support these points to the constitutional committees. All these committees will be up for election this summer. We have a real chance to make sure that the union’s lay structures reflect the anger among the membership, and are in tune with the desire to fight back, based on a member-driven agenda.

If the union campaigned for a register of labour, subject to union scrutiny, we could end the blacklist and build union organisation at one stroke. The sparks dispute has shown that even the most vicious employers can be beaten. Now we need to strengthen union organisation in the industry.