The Commist Party of Sweden calls workers to fight back against the deal of capitalists and yellow unions on furthering limitations to the right to strike.
ICP, 16 June 2018
The Commist Party of Sweden issued a statement on 14th of June on the proposal furthering the limitation of the right of workers to strike. On 5th of June, the three main labor union federations had announced that they, in cooperation with the capitalists’ organizations had reached an agreement on how to further limit the right to strike.
According to the statement, the workers’ right to strike in Sweden is already limited through the obligation to notify a strike seven workdays in advance and through the obligation to maintain the peace during periods, in which collective bargaining agreements are in effect. This time, strikes and conflicts that do not have a collective bargaining agreement as its goal are to be forbidden. Even though solidarity actions, political strikes and other kind of measures are exempted from the proposal, the risk is great that strikes or other actions for workers who have been fired or where the company has broken the law will be forbidden.
It was informed that the negotiations between the capitalists and the reformist labor unions were supported by the Social Democratic Party Labor Minister Ylva Johansson. The statement said, ‘If these measures are carried through, the capitalists are given the possiblity to sign collective bargaining agreements with their own, yellow labor unions. The agreements signed with the yellow unions would regulate the conditions of the workers and would be illegal for the workers’ unions to challange within the confines of bourgeois law. This leaves the workers’ labor unions with two options: to underbid the yellow unions in order to win the contract or to challenge them in opposition to the existing law.’
The Communist Party of Sweden declared that it denounced every attack on the workers’ right to industrial action and categorically rejected the right of the bourgeois law to limit the struggle of the working class. The CP of Sweden warned the Swedish capitalists, saying ‘conscious of their class and of their goal, the working class will disregard the bourgeois law and show that the law is nothing but the right of the workers.’
The statement underlined that ‘When the contradictions between the imperialist centers grow, when competition increases, the need to push back the own country’s working class and on their backs increase the effectiveness of the competition with the imperialists around the world intensifies. In the same way that the Swedish Social Democrats attack the workers of Sweden, the capitalists’ politicians attack the workers in other countries. They too, need to be able to compete.’
The CP of Sweden called to deal with the capitalist system, 'with its stat, its politicians and its union bosses in order to guarantee the right to strike'. It also called to struggle for socialism asserting that ‘real progress and real security or the working people in Sweden and in the world can be won’. Finally, the statement called the workers to act against the capitalist attack, to fight the yellow labor bosses; regain control over your unions, to fight every limitation of the right to strike – the proposed ones as well as the already existing and to make the defensive struggle against the capitalist attack to an offensive struggle for socialism.