We Must Fight Them in the Boardrooms...

Back to political rantings today, after yesterday's ode to the joys of eclecticism in blogging.  Well, I say 'rant' but, surprisingly, I'm going to try and be constructive today.  My uncharacteristic bout of rationality was brought on by the government's announcement of its plans to privatise the Post Office by floating it on the stock market.  Now, I know that you'd usually expect me to be foaming at the mouth at such an idiotic move, but part of the proposed sell-off set me to thinking.  In a fairly pathetic attempt to buy off the work force, the government is proposing to give them all shares in the privatised Post Office.  Obviously, their combined shareholdings would be pathetically small - there's no way that our ruling fascists, (yes, I called them fascists, I'm not being that constructive), are going to allow any nasty working class types to have a controlling stake in their employer.  However, it struck me that a strategy for the communications workers union might be to try buying as many shares as they can.  Now, I don't know if trade unions can actually own shares, but maybe they could form some kind of trust or holding company to do it.  Anyway, if they could purchase sufficient shares (not necessarily a majority share holding) then they could conceivably exert considerable influence over the new company, ensuring that profits were invested in the company, for instance, rather than being paid out as dividends to rapacious capitalist shareholders.

OK, I'll admit I have no idea as to whether the communications workers union, or any other union, has the financial means to buy shares on a sufficient scale to be able to influence companies, but it's surely worth exploring the possibility.  (Of course if, as they've threatened, the union held industrial action to coincide with the stock market flotation, they could force the value of the shares down, making it easier for them to buy).  As I've noted here before, the UK's trade unions seem to be stuck in a time warp with regard to how to combat this government's policies - strikes and demonstrations are patently having no effect whatsoever.  I've banged on about how a new strategy was needed but was at a loss to come up with one.  Well, now I have - fight the capitalist bastards at their own game.  The fact is that we can't fight them in the workplace anymore.  They've seen to that with all the anti-union legislation Thatcher brought in and Labour failed to repeal.  NO, we need to take the battle to them, confront them on their own turf: the boardroom!  Apparent 'Mad Max' Kaiser was banging on about something similar on the Kaiser Report the other day, so I'm clearly not completely insane.   His suggestion was that organisations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace should set up their own hedge funds to influence the share prices of the big energy companies to try and force them into adopting greener policies.  Which actually could work for my version.  The hedge funds, I mean,  The unions, via the TUC, could perhaps set up such a thing.  Like I said, we've clearly got to start using the capitalists' own weapons against them.