The balance of class forces in recent years(Cont’d) |
Analysis of the industrial disputes over the last few years shows the employers in a much more belligerent mood. As an expression of their stance a document published on 19 March 1979 by the Engineering Employers’ Federation, entitled Guidelines on Collective Bargaining and Response to Industrial Action, is most illuminating. [52]
The origins of the guidelines go back some months. Several major firms, and GKN in particular, threatened to quit the EEF if it did not produce a policy which would enable management to fight stewards’ organisation and involve right wing AUEW officials in stamping out militancy. GKN was not alone. Hardline companies, like Westland Aircraft, Serck, Birmid Qualcast, Johnson Matthey, Powell Duffryn, Edgar Allen, Low and Bonar, have all been exerting their influence to get a tough line agreed in the EEF. Not surprisingly, these are the same companies that always impose lockouts (five in March-April 1979 in South Wales alone). They are the same companies that fund blacklisting organisations like the Economic League, and many of them supply members of the Economic League Central Council. [53]
The change in the actual balance of class forces between the working class and the capitalist class, between the heyday of the struggles of 1969-74 and the last couple of years, shows itself in the paradoxical situation that while the Tory Industrial Relations Act existed the employers resorted to the courts against workers far less than they have done in the last couple of years.
A book dealing specifically with the actual working of the Industrial Relations Act has this to say:
Managers ... combined effectively with unions to draw the sting from the law’s attack on the closed shops ... they believe the use of the law could only make disputes more intractable. Managers were aware that legally enforceable agreements, attempts to end the closed shop, and restriction on the right to take industrial action were strongly opposed by unions and their members. [54]
Thus throughout the two and a half years of the Industrial Relations Act there were only four applications to the National Industrial Relations Court against the closed shop. [55]
In one case, when a worker named Joseph Langston insisted on his right to work in Chrysler Ryton factory, Coventry, and by law he had the right not to belong to the union, he won his case at the Birmingham tribunal (28 December 1972).
The next day Langston went to Ryton and was met by “shouting, jeering and swearing workers who had staged a lightning walkout in protest”. Langston was sent home, still on full pay, and arrangements were made to send his wages to him to avoid further confrontation. [56]
Later Chrysler dismissed Langston. Managements connived at getting round the law by including in collective agreements they signed with the unions a disclaimer of any legal binding of the agreements. And the reasons were obvious. Management were frightened of shopfloor reaction: “Managers recognised that legally binding agreements would not necessarily have been easier to enforce than those binding in honour only”. [57]
Altogether:
There were 33 applications by firms to the NIRC seeking relief from industrial action (there were also four applications by employee organisations against unions seeking similar relief). Obviously these represent only a very small minority of all disputes. For example, in 1971 there were 2,228 stoppages, in 1972 2,497 and in 1973 2,854 stoppages. (these figures also show that despite the Industrial Relations Act the number of strikes continued to increase.) They no doubt underestimate the actual number of stoppages and in addition to those recorded there are various forms of industrial action which are not notified for statistical purposes. The direct use of the Industrial Relations Act in situations of industrial action was extremely rare. [58]
The companies that applied to the NIRC were untypical in their industrial composition: “The pattern presented is of a use of the act by a small number of firms in private sector service industries”. [59]
The NIRC itself was quite careful not to come too often and openly on the side of the employers: “Less than half the employers who sought orders of the NIRC got them”. [60]
The government itself quite early got cold feet about the law: “Some managers told us that the DoE had actively discouraged any use of the act’s collective bargaining provisions”. [61]
Where the law did intervene with a heavy hand – the docks and Shrewsbury – in the first case it had to beat a hasty retreat; in the second, because of the betrayal of the union leaders and the weakness of workplace organisation, it was as vicious as it could be. Building workers in North Wales are not in big well organised units, as were the five dockers who landed in Pentonville jail. Hence Des Warren served three years in prison, Ricky Tomlinson two, and Ken Jones nine months. The law used against the Shrewsbury workers was not the Industrial Relations Act but the criminal law regarding “conspiracy”.
The government tried to use the law against the railwaymen (May-June 1972), but they were very inept. A cooling-off period was imposed, and then a ballot of the workers involved. The results of the ballot showed a better than six to one majority in favour of the union rejection of BR’s last offer, and the Sunday Times’s comment on this was typical of press reaction: “It would seem that the ballot which was intended to cool off the crisis has only served to do the opposite”. [62]
All the above shows clearly the actual strength of workers’ organisation at the time.
Now let us look at the activities of the court, and police, in industrial disputes over the last couple of years. We need only give a few examples from the courts, and these especially from the Court of Appeal presided over by Lord Denning.
On 29 July 1977 the Court of Appeal sided with George Ward of Grunwick by overruling a High Court decision in favour of ACAS.
On 20 May 1977 the Court of Appeal decided that the Association of Broadcasting Staffs had no right to refuse to transmit the 1977 BBC Cup Final to South Africa. The court ruled that this was not a trades dispute, but “coercive interference”.
In the same year Lord Denning came down heavily on SOGAT. The journalists of the Daily Mirror went on strike and so stopped the production of the paper. The Daily Express decided to take advantage of the situation and increased its output by 750,000 copies. The general secretary of SOGAT, Bill Keys, whose members handle the distribution of newsprint, instructed them not to handle the extra copies. The Express applied for an injunction to restrain SOGAT. The Express lost in the High Court, but then won in the Court of Appeal, which found that there was no dispute between SOGAT and the Express.
The case of Star Sea Transport of Monrovia versus Slater, secretary of the National Union of Seamen, had even more serious implications. The International Transport Federation tried to secure that the wage rates paid to Greek and Indian sailors on a Liberian-registered vessel – the Cammilla M – were in line with recognised ITF minima, but the employers won an injunction when the unions tried to prevent the ship sailing from Glasgow. The judges said it was an open question whether the action was a trade dispute.
Then just before Christmas 1978 came the case of Express Newspapers versus McShane and Ashton. This arose out of a strike called by the National Union of Journalists against provincial newspapers. Because the local papers also get news copy from the Press Association, the union called upon its members employed in the Press Association to come out on strike as well. About half of the PA did not obey the union instruction. The NUJ then ordered its members employed by the national newspapers to black PA copy. The Express sought an injunction against the NUJ officials McShane and Ashton. The High Court granted the appeal, and when the NUJ appealed to the Court of Appeal, their case was dismissed. Lord Denning held that the blacking of PA was not in furtherance of a trade dispute. It seems no act of solidarity is in furtherance of a trade dispute.
Then again the case of United Biscuits versus Fell. This case arose out of the lorry drivers’ dispute. Fell, a lorry driver, was running the picket line at Loders and Nucoline, one of the sources of supply of edible oil for United Biscuits. The High Court declared that, as the lorry drivers’ strike was not against United Biscuits, to allow this “secondary picketing” would be tantamount to “writing a recipe for anarchy”. [63]
When the Nottingham Evening Post refused to recognise the NUJ and NGA, the NGA wrote to all concerns regularly advertising in the paper asking them to stop advertising. Sixteen organisations continued to advertise, and at the end of February 1979 they were informed in a joint letter from NGA and SLADE that all members of these two unions on any newspapers or periodicals would be instructed not to handle any advertising submitted by the relevant organisations. Some 26 organisations sought an injunction against Wade, the NGA general secretary, and others. The High Court granted an interim injunction, and when the NGA appealed against this the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. Lord Denning made it clear that this was a case of secondary industrial action. [64]
The legal costs to the NGA were as high as £84,000 – higher than the fines imposed on the TGWU by the NIRC in 1972 which (like those imposed on the AEU) had been reimbursed to the TGWU.
On 19 July 1979 Lord Denning and the Appeal Court decided that the strike by the 8,000 low paid provincial journalists last winter was unconstitutional. This interpretation of the NUJ Rule Book means that members who scabbed through the strike and then benefited from hard won gains could not be disciplined.
Leicester Mercury journalists were banned from blacking a news agency which supplied copy to the Nottingham Evening Post.
NUJ members at the Stratford Express on strike in defence of their closed shop were sued for libel over a leaflet they produced. More writs have been threatened to stop the NGA from blacking the Express.
In north London two NUJ members at the Camden and Hornsey Journal were taken to court by a sub-editor who resigned from the union. [65]
At the time of writing there are a few further cases of courts persecuting trade unionists – for instance, the High Court injunction secured by Wandsworth council against UCATT official Lou Lewis, preventing him picketing in defence of direct labour.
In recent years the courts have been joined with great vigour by the police in cutting down the power of pickets. Besides Grunwick, there are many other cases. The most recent is the case of Andy Darby. He is a GMWU senior steward arrested on 5 February on an unofficial picket line outside the GLC refuse tip in Factory Lane, Croydon. That morning the police had repeatedly tried to stop pickets talking to the lorry drivers coming into the tip. When the police waved on a 32-ton crane lorry Andy stood in front of it and threw a door down in its path. For this he got three months imprisonment for “threatening behaviour”. [66]
In practical, technical terms, present laws and their application are tough enough to satisfy the needs of the employers. The new proposed Tory industrial relations act has mainly ideological importance, to justify the policy, to win the battle of people’s minds, to give succour to the police in their breaking of strikes.
The change in the balance of class forces in Britain has been caused by a whole number of inter-related factors: incomes policy; the massive establishment of productivity deals which has been associated with the weakening of the independence of convenors and shop stewards; the wide spread of workers’ participation in industry; the move to the right of “left” trade union leaders like Jones and Scanlon; the integration of convenors into the trade union structure; the role of the Communist Party as the main organiser of rank and file activists in industry, both in supporting workers’ participation and in supporting the left union officials; the ideological trap of the concept of “profitability”, “viability”, etc, combined with a loyalty to Labour even when Labour attacked workers’ living standards; the impact of the economic crisis – cuts, sackings, etc, etc, on all the above factors.
The single most important factor in the deterioration of shopfloor organisation has been the weakening of stewards’ bargaining position and role during the period of freeze and incomes policy. In fact it does not make much difference to the power of the shop steward whether incomes policy is of nil growth, 3½ percent, £1 plus 4 percent, £6, 10 percent, or 5 percent. As a matter of fact only three of the last 13 years have had no incomes policy.
A more insidious and in the long term damaging effect on shopfloor organisation has been the move towards productivity deals. Our organisation was far ahead of everybody else in recognising this trend. Ten years ago the book The Employers’ Offensive, subtitled Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them, highlighted the ruling class determination to stop wage drift and transform shopfloor relations by removing stewards from effective direct influence on take-home pay, thus weakening the support they had from their constituents.
The Donovan Report on trade unions argued that the abolition of piece-work would undermine the autonomy of shop stewards and would help the unions to integrate the stewards into the union machine, so that they might better control their activities in the interests of managerial order. The main target was clear – the factory floor organisation.
The aim of the Donovan Report was the integration of the shop stewards into a streamlined union machine, into a plant consensus. This process of integration could be helped by greater legal and managerial discipline. Order had also to be brought into the working of the unions: “Certain features of trade union structure and government have helped to inflate the power of work-groups and shop stewards.”
Among the institutional changes proposed by the Donovan Commission was, first of all, the substitution of factory agreements for industry-wide agreements. [67] The negotiation of piece-rates makes for permanent activity in the shop and hence for very close relations between the shop steward and the workers he or she represents.
The elimination of piece-working, especially if it is connected with the transference of bargaining to a company-wide level, necessarily takes away the power of shop stewards to seriously affect the wage packets of the workers they represent. This applies to all industries from engineering to the docks to the mines. The shop stewards become integrated into the union machine and incorporated into management.
A study of actual working of the union at shopfloor level in the mining industry has this to say: “At one time the pay structure and methods of domestic bargaining in coalmining had much in common with those in engineering – industry agreements on pay settled minimum rates, leaving ample scope for domestic bargaining in the collieries.”
Things changed radically in 1966, however, when a national agreement on wages – NPLA – was introduced:
The delegate continued to agree work terms with management, but this became something of a routine. He argued the case of men who wanted to be regraded to a higher rate of pay, or moved to another job or shift; dealt with disciplinary cases; investigated accidents; checked on safety, dust and lighting; advised the injured and the sick on their entitlements; and helped his members with domestic problems – housing, debts, divorce and so on ... The delegate’s job had thus become largely administrative.
In an interview, Pete Exley, surface fitter at Grimethorpe Colliery near Barnsley, described the work of the four full timers in his colliery – the president, treasurer, secretary and delegate: “The treasurer’s main job is on a Friday, like today, to dish out money for bereavements, old age pensioners. We still have that thing in Yorkshire that we pay so much a fortnight out of the branch funds and you have the old retired miners coming for this money.” The president does “the same. He is just there for any disputes and negotiates and hangs round in the union box. You see them coming in at 9 o’clock every day. They are gone by about 1.30 or 2 and are in the union box for most of the rest of the time. If there is a dispute down the pit or safety checks or something like that they will go down the pit and do that.”
To blunt the edge of shop steward organisation, Devlin Phase II introduced a clever design to divide one port from another. Eddie Prevost writes:
In different ports there are differences in hours of work, manning, pay. Now negotiations take place at a local level. The national agreement covers only a small proportion of workers’ wages and conditions ... The main weakness for us was the differences between the ports over the time they negotiate their separate agreements.
“Today the TGWU strategy”, writes Bob Light, “is to absorb militancy through the safer channels of officially-recognised shop stewards”:
As far as the employers are concerned, they too now try more to contain militants into official channels rather than victimise them ... The shop steward’s job can be very easy. There is no supervision by management at all, so there are no hassles about things like timekeeping, etc. A steward could almost come in when he liked and go home when he liked. And some do! We are provided with an office by the employer, and if you liked you could sit in there all day just talking, reading, playing cards, drinking tea – whatever you liked. So there’s no doubt at all that shop stewards can have it very easy if they like, and the truth is that many of them do like it.
And Eddie Prevost adds, “Shop stewards in the Royal work two weeks as a steward and two weeks on the job (in theory). Sickness and holidays mean in practice they don’t work that much. In other docks stewards are full time.”
One result of the weakening of dockers’ shopfloor organisation has been the practical disappearance of the famous mass meetings. Eddie Prevost writes, “Since the 1975 strike in London dock gate meetings have been very poorly attended. No doubt the government’s pay policy has effectively stifled the shop stewards committees in all docks.”
The power of the shop stewards to negotiate wage rates has been undermined by productivity deals, and especially by transferring bargaining to plant, or worse, company level.
When collective bargaining takes place at a level above the shop, or above the individual plant, the actions of the negotiators which are of primary concern to the lay members are remote from their control. Hence apathy is quite natural. Now with productivity deal negotiations concluded far away from the shopfloor, the shop steward finds himself more and more isolated in practice from his mates, the convenor even more so.
Lord Acton coined the aphorism, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In fact, it would be even more apt to say, “Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.” The decline of the power of the shop stewards in gaining significant wage rises in recent years again and again led to their alienation from their base, to a loss of confidence of the rank and file in the shop stewards, and to a loss of self-confidence by the shop steward.
As against the tradition of shop stewards’ organisation, there is another tradition in the labour movement – that of passive democracy, at best a periodic opportunity to elect the officials. Such a democracy, like bourgeois parliamentary democracy, must lead to general alienation of the officials from the base, and the general apathy of the latter.
Ken Montague describes very well the impact on shop stewards and convenors in engineering factories in north London – the weakening of the ability of shop stewards to affect wages makes them:
... feel that they have no control of their situation any more. In almost every case they are reacting to situations rather than setting the pace for the management. The whole struggle has become a defensive battle and I doubt very much if any but one or two committees in the area have any kind of perspective for actually gaining anything. There is no real sense of there being a purpose or a future in what they are doing. They are distinctly not building very much up, but hanging on. Perhaps the only exceptions to this are where there is the possibility of building something on a combine or network basis (Racal, British Rail, Smiths Computer workers).
This is true even where organisation is relatively new. Among the old established committees there is a feeling of being overburdened with problems and of resentment towards the membership. In many of the newer organisations there is a tremendous sense of weakness, lack of self-confidence and a feeling that they haven’t got a complete organisation or the respect of management. The fact is that many of these newer committees are in a weak position, tend to be in less skilled industries, have had very little support or even contact from the established committees or the district committee. Many of them are in factories and workplaces that are close to the verge of closure.
If the individual shop steward and convenor feel that they cannot rely on their mates, or that they cannot in practice lead their mates into action, it is no wonder that solidarity in different workplaces, which depends crucially on the authority of the shopfloor organisation, withers away.
To quote Ken Montague again:
There is a strong feeling that every shop stewards organisation is on its own, can’t look for more than formal, token support from outside the particular workplace, and therefore only formal support is given in return. All sense of enthusiasm about other people’s struggles, the tradition of seeing yourself as part of an area, where what happens down the road matters to you, has been drained away.
The impotence of the shop stewards:
... explains their reluctance to put things to their members and their virtual fear of the membership. Distrust of the membership, combined with fatalism about the closures, has produced the lack of perspective about the future, the anxiety of keeping the old organisation together, the unwillingness to build up new personnel on the committee. The most striking thing about many of the established committees is the absence of young cadre. There are the politicos who can fight to get on the committee and to whom the older stewards do eventually turn, but there is no tradition left of personal training of voting members and developing successors. My feeling is that the defensiveness of many stewards has reached the point where any up and coming young member is not regarded as an asset but a possible threat.
All this is reflected by (or reflects) the district organisation of the AUEW ... the district committee today seems to function on the assumption that it can’t do very much. On the whole it is a fairly realistic assumption.
The fear of the district committee of taking initiatives, reflected in the fear of the shopfloor committees to stick their necks out, has also contributed to an attitude of looking to other people to put up token fights. This mainly explains the rise of Brent Trades Council which for about the last five years has been the Communist Party’s, and therefore at times the AUEW’s mechanism for looking as though they are doing something. In the absence of organising for a real fight, in the context of the weakness and lack of credibility of the Local Area Organising Committee and the Shop Stewards Quarterly, it has always been possible for the trades council to call a conference with MPs and star officials.
However, Ken Montague points out that there were spasmodic local exceptions to the general picture. But these emphasise even more the general drift of things. These exceptions happened:
... mainly in “peripheral” industries and unions. There was the occupation by dustmen and caretakers in Barnet, the strike and occupation by computer workers at Smith’s, quite a good turnout at Central Middlesex Hospital from other unions during a public sector day of action two or three years ago. There have also been two strikes and a sit-in, mainly by women, in the Smith’s main factory (MA 1) – in fact the women have pretty consistently kept up the pressure to change the moribund organisation at Smith’s. But there are two things about most of the actions that have taken place: they have been extremely dynamic, at times (the Smith’s ASTMS occupation/strike 1976, and the recent “internal picketing” at Frigidaire’s) almost anarchic. Secondly they have remained peripheral in their impact on the area as a whole. You can’t help feeling that something will have to be pretty explosive to change the prevailing climate in the main industries in the area – and this of course has a deadening effect on the actions that do take place, or it encourages desperation.
The decline of shop organisation reflects itself in the terrible deterioration of the shop stewards’ quarterly meetings. Roger Cox writes the following about the north London district quarterly meetings:
I can remember that in the mid-1960s you could expect to have at least 100 stewards and at most 250. Now you are lucky if you get 100 at the December quarterly when elections to the district committee take place. Mostly it is 30 to 40 ... The central item discussed was wages – who was earning what ... Now it is dreadfully boring and pointless. It could be improved if the district committee campaigned to make the four meetings important. But a district committee that refuses to raise a levy in support of Desoutter workers on strike for recognition is a district committee not of a union but a cemetery.
The institution of shop stewards is profoundly democratic. They are the direct representatives of the workers. They have no privileges. One writer contrasts them with MPs:
The shop steward ... did not, once elected, pack his bags and move to carry out his representational duties in an institution alien to the experiences of his constituents. Neither was his constituency so large that he could remain personally anonymous to the overwhelming majority of his electors ... The steward spent the bulk of his time at work alongside those who had elected him ... He was highly visible, subject to the same experiences at work as his comrades. [68]
Dave Lyddon, a former worker in Leyland, Oxford, commenting on this description of the steward, argues that it does not apply to the increasing number of convenors who spend their working week on union business, quite a lot of it away from the factory. He writes:
In larger factories there are probably now half a dozen senior stewards and convenors who don’t even have a nominal job but who are provided by management with an office and telephone, and are paid to be full time union representatives in the factory ...
Those senior stewards and convenors based in an office cease to be the direct representatives of the workers on the spot ... Senior stewards don’t share the work experience of their members ... And they don’t suffer the car workers’ constant insecurity of a fluctuating wage packet. Is it any wonder they get out of touch? [69]
A similar description of the role of the convenor is given by Gerry Jones, a shop steward in Chrysler, Stoke. The convenors “spend much more time away from the plant than they used to. They’re given expenses-paid trips to the motor show, they have visited the National Exhibition Centre on behalf of the company, and they’ve been taken on trips to Sinica in France and Chrysler in Iran”. [70]
The estrangement of the convenors from the rank and file is not mainly the result of their having a cushy number, but mainly a result of their function under plant or, even worse, company-wide bargaining with the “participation” policy prevailing. The rank and file become apathetic towards the convenor as the other side of the coin of the key decisions being taken away from them.
Over the last few years the number of full time convenors increased dramatically. A study published in 1978 shows this clearly. It was based on a survey of 453 workplaces employing 330,000 GMWU manual workers across a wide range of manufacturing and service industries. Of the total number of workers in the sample, 73 percent were in manufacturing industry and 23 percent in public service (principally gas, water, electricity, NHS, national and local government).
The study showed that in manufacturing 62 percent of all plants employing more than 500 workers had full time convenors, while the corresponding figure for engineers was 69 percent, and for the public sector 21 percent. The study reckoned that there are now four times more full time convenors than there were in 1966 – about 5,000 in manufacturing establishments. (In addition, there are another couple of thousand in other places of employment.) Thus the number of full time convenors is about 2½ times the number of full time officials.
The shop stewards interviewed were asked whether management had generally resisted shop steward activities at their workplace. The answers were summed up with this very revealing conclusion: “For manufacturing, only 33 percent of the larger workplaces that experienced current resistance had full time shop stewards compared with 64 percent ... where the management accepted the stewards, the implication that management had a strong influence upon the existence of a full time steward deserves special emphasis”. [71]
Of course the position of full time convenors is not identical with that of full time union officials. But quite often there is a greater similarity between these two categories than between either of them and the rank and file workers. Some full time convenors get wages plus perks that far surpass the pay of the lower ranks of the trade union bureaucracy. Some have a more permanent job than elected officials. One need but think of Bert Brennan, who served as convenor of Metro-Vicks in Trafford Park until the age of 79, or Dick Etheridge who served for donkey’s years as convenor of Longbridge, or the convenor of Rolls Royce, Derby, etc., etc. Derek Robinson’s constituency is nearly 100,000. Of course there are no absolutes. In terms of relations with the rank and file, by and large convenors are far more malleable. But this is not always so. One need only compare, let us say, Bert Brennan, Jim Airlie or Derek Robinson, on the one hand, with Lou Lewis, the UCATT full time official in London, or John Tocher, Laurie Smith and Bill Taylor of the AUEW, on the other, to see this.
Donovan argued for co-partnership of management and unions through the integration of the shop stewards into the structure of the union and their participation with management. Such participation has been introduced into a whole number of key companies in the country.
The result is increasing alienation of the rank and file from the convenors.
Dave Lyddon of Leyland writes:
There are no facilities for report-back meetings to the constituencies, so there are no report-backs. Notes of meetings aren’t always put up on noticeboards, and when they are, they don’t contain anything considered “confidential’. The lack of participation by the overwhelming majority is built into the whole set-up. Even the discussions that led to the signing of the participation agreement completely denied the rank and file worker any say. The union meetings that discussed and accepted the Ryder report consisted only of senior shop stewards and senior staff reps. [72]
Similarly Gerry Jones speaks about the secrecy surrounding senior stewards on committees and sub-committees of workers’ participation:
The convenors endorsed the planning agreement but had no mandate. They hadn’t reported back in any detail at all. Everything had been done at convenor level. At steward and shopfloor level the feeling is that it is a complete and utter waste of time. The result so far has been that convenors are better armed with managerial arguments – detailed economic arguments. Already they see the exercise as separate from the shopfloor.
An AUEW senior steward at Linwood, Willie Lee, said:
We used to have a bad time with the full time convenors, who had a very bad attitude towards the shopfloor. When they came into a section with a problem they were very antagonistic, because they were having a job to do. They didn’t ally themselves with the people on the shopfloor the way they used to do when they were just straightforward shop stewards, and I think that with worker participation the division will be even worse, because these people will then be in a position – maybe at the moment are in a position in some factories – where they are actually sitting down agreeing with management that there are things that have to be done on the shopfloor. They’re talking about increased productivity, finance and production, and manpower. And that obviously puts them in a position where they are going back to try and make sure that what they agreed is carried out on the shopfloor.
The result is the incorporation of senior stewards into management structure. As Rob Reid, an AUEW steward from Linwood, put it, “It wasn’t so much us participating in management – it was management participating in unions”. [73]
One result of the alienation of the rank and file from the top table was the complete fiasco of the 20 April 1977 national strike against incomes policy, the call for which came from the Leyland convenors and on which not one Leyland factory came on strike on the day.
The same alienation of the rank and file explained the collapse of the struggle for higher wages in Leyland in August 1977:
The shop stewards at Longbridge put to the membership a call for strike action in support of their 47 percent wage claim. Derek Robinson went on TV to announce that the vote was going to be 50 to one in favour of striking – even though the night shift had not begun to vote!
The result was an anti-strike demonstration by several hundred workers. Robinson refused to give a positive lead to the two thirds of those voting who had supported strike action. Instead, the strike was called off. [74]
A year later, again after a lot of huffing and puffing by Derek Robinson and Co, Leyland workers were forced to swallow the 5 percent:
Stewards and convenors can pose as shopfloor leaders. They can attend combine committee meetings, make speeches, sit on official union committees for years on end. It is only if they try to do something that their bluff will be called, because to do anything they need the lads. [75]
An added factor undermining participatory, active, direct democracy on the shopfloor has been the widespread introduction of the checkoff system, the practice whereby the employers deduct union dues from the wages of members in their employ and pay them over to the union – much like a government tax.
For a long time between the two wars and after the Second World War the major unions were headed by right wing leaders. They in principle opposed the activities of shop stewards and all unofficial strikes.
However, the fact that they collaborated with the employers and the state did not in the majority of cases bring them into actual conflict with the rank and file. The bureaucracy’s bark was worse than its bite. In a number of cases it managed to smash the rank and file organisation – for instance at British Light Steel Pressings (1961) and Ford Dagenham (1962). But usually management retreated under the duress of a short-lived strike – i.e. before the trade union bureaucracy managed to intervene effectively and discipline the workers. Capitalism was quite prosperous and the employers were ready to give in without prolonged and widespread battles. If a strike went on for only a couple of days, the question of whether headquarters supported it or not was not of overriding importance. In many cases, a central element in the tactics of the militant was to win the strike before trade union headquarters heard about it!
In 1967 the left won the presidency of the AEU, in the person of Hugh Scanlon. A year later Jack Jones became the general secretary of the largest union in the country, the TGWU.
The shift from small localised disputes to national confrontations with the government thrust these leaders into the centre of the stage. They were forced, under rank and file pressure, to lead their members in confrontations. So Scanlon and Jones led the opposition to Wilson’s incomes policy and In Place of Strife in the late 1960s. Where these leaders acted thus they did so to direct the militancy into official channels and to prevent it escaping their control.
Thus in the first national strike in Ford, the 1969 Penalty Clauses strike, it was Jones and Scanlon who gave support to the rank and file and led them to victory. [76] At that time the National Joint Negotiating Committee (NJNC) of Ford was entirely composed of full time national officers of the various unions. In the aftermath of the strike Ford convenors were brought onto the NJNC to sit with the full time union officers.
Two years later, in 1971, during the national official strike for parity of Ford’s wages with BMC, Scanlon and Jones played a completely different role, putting the brakes down hard on the rank and file. After a nine-week strike they came to a secret agreement with Stanley Gillen, chairman of Ford Europe, behind the back of the NJNC and, breaking all traditions, they did not allow a mass meeting to decide whether to go back to work, but instead insisted on a secret ballot, exactly as the Tory Industrial Relations Act demanded. In addition the agreement included two penalty clauses
Whenever Scanlon, Jones and other leaders moved in front of the workers in struggle it was in order to keep control over the strike, keep control over their members. Only under mass unofficial pressure does the official machine move, and that was the case also in the struggle against Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. The 1969 strike against the penalty clauses was deprecated by practically all union leaders. The first “Kill the bill” strikes of 1970-71 were also unofficial, although they were not condemned by the left leaders, while the second wave had some official support. By 1972, after the unofficial strike of dockers spread to print and engineering and threatened to get completely out of hand, the TUC itself proposed to call a general strike against the jailing of the five dockers. However, throughout the campaigns against the Industrial Relations Act both Scanlon and Jones did their utmost to restrict the struggle.
The engineers’ opposition to the Industrial Relations Act – the most forthright of any union – had been largely passive and abstentionist. The two-day strikes called by it – on 1 and 18 March 1971 – were token actions, a futile gesture previously used by Lord Carron, the right wing president of the AEU, in 1961. Such token strikes serve the purpose of the union leaders by allowing the members to let off steam in a relatively harmless fashion.
The TGWU was even more concerned to avoid confrontation with the act; and it is interesting that its own guidance to shop stewards was altered after the NIRC insisted that the union was responsible for the actions of its shop stewards. [77]
Following the fright they got in the summer of 1972 from the actions of the dockers and their friends round Pentonville, the TUC, including Jones and Scanlon, veered sharply rightwards, and throughout 1973 did their best to come to an accommodation with Heath. Between July and November 1972, again and again, the TUC leadership engaged itself at Chequers and Downing Street in talks with the government and CBI on economic strategy and incomes policy:
The immediate effect was to help salvage the government’s reputation and deflate the political crisis. In the slightly longer term, the talks gave ideological strength to the government’s incomes policy proposals.
In the end, of course, the TUC withheld its agreement; but by then this was of minor importance. For in participating in the talks the TUC helped bolster the argument, assiduously fostered by the government and the media, that “irresponsible” pay claims were a major threat to “the economy”, and that some form of restraint would benefit both the low paid and the “national interest”. [78]
By the end of 1973 Heath was able to impose the most rigorous and comprehensive pay control ever experienced in Britain, and this was met by no more than token opposition by the trade union leaders.
The treachery of trade union bureaucrats – “left” as well as, of course, right – is not new. The tactics of the left, however, are quite different to those of the right. Arthur Deakin never allowed, let alone encouraged, shop stewards in the docks. It was Jack Jones who introduced them, and this gave him a weapon to control dockers, accompanying their introduction with the introduction of Devlin’s productivity deal.
An excellent example of how left wing leaders rise to power in the unions on a wave of militant action by the rank and file, and then take control to prevent the rank and file from doing their own thing, can be gleaned from the case of the Yorkshire NUM leadership.
In September 1969 the miners at Cadeby Colliery near Doncaster came out on unofficial strike over wages. They were instructed to return to work by the Yorkshire Area Executive of the NUM, but they stayed out and tried to spread the strike. Before the issue could be resolved, 70,000 Yorkshire miners were on strike in support of a demand for shorter hours for surfacemen. The strike was spreading to pits in South Wales, the Midlands and Scotland. Altogether 140 collieries were involved. [79]
These mass unofficial strikes demonstrated to the NEC of the NUM the pent-up pressure of the rank and file. At the 1970 conference of the union a
resolution for a wages structure of £20 a week for surface workers, £22 for underground workers and £30 for face workers was passed unanimously. An amendment from the South Wales area calling for strike action if the claim was not met was carried by 169 votes to 160.
In September the NCB offered half the amount claimed. The NEC of the union recommended a national strike. A ballot was held and produced a 55½ percent vote for strike action. At that time, however, the rules demanded a two thirds majority before strike action could be taken. The “left” leadership hummed and hahed, but the rank and file acted. Within three weeks all but a handful of miners in Yorkshire were out, all the pits in South Wales were out, all but eight in Scotland, and stoppages were also occurring in Kent and Durham.
It was in 1972 that the rank and file showed its magnificent prowess, the culmination of years of unofficial rank and file action.
The flying pickets came into their own. All power stations were picketed. But of all the picketing that occurred in this strike, the one at Saltley Coke Works, Birmingham, will be most remembered. Pickets from the Barnsley area had been there for about ten days. They were routed several times by the West Midlands police. Many were deliberately injured. On 9 February the Birmingham East District of the Engineers’ Union passed a resolution calling for an all-out strike and demonstration on the following day.
So far as is known, no unionised lorry driver crossed a picket line; no docker moved an ounce of coal. Seamen offered and gave full cooperation, as did the railwaymen. Thousands of shop stewards in factories laid off due to coal shortages collected thousands of pounds for the strike fund.
By mid-February the power stations were flickering to a halt, many factories were completely closed and most were on short time. A state of emergency had been declared on 9 February. The government was desperate, the miners jubilant. [80]
In the 1974 miners’ strike things were different. The leadership kept complete control over the struggle and kept the participation of the membership very low. It is true that only a few days before the strike began Scargill and McGahey had been proclaiming that there would be “a hundred Saltleys’. The opposite was the case. Unlike in 1972, this time all rank and file initiatives were squashed. Pickets dwindled from six to four to two, and finally in many cases to none at all.
At Saltley Coke Depot queues of 150 to 200 lorries waited unperturbed by pickets and then moved freely through the gates. Included among the lorries were those owned by haulage companies blacked during the 1972 miners’ strike. [81]
The fact that Jones and Scanlon and the rest of the trade union leadership supported the Social Contract, while having in their hand new weapons – those of productivity deals – made them much more formidable opponents of rank and file action than Bill Carron or Arthur Deakin were in their time.
Another important element in determining workers’ struggle is the Communist Party and its Broad Left.
For decades the Communist Party has been the only organisation able to offer a national framework to industrial militants. For a long, long time it represented largely a community of industrial activists. The CP played a big role in strengthening shopfloor organisation and gained very much from the increased power of the shop stewards during the boom years following the Second World War.
Although The British Road to Socialism, the first draft of which was published in 1951, spoke about taking the parliamentary road, for the rank and file of the party the main thing was still the activity in industry. They could not but agree with Harry Pollitt’s statement to the executive committee of the CP in February 1949: “There can be no substitute for factory organisation. To underestimate the key role of the factory branch is a social democratic attitude”. [82]
At the 27th congress of the party, 1961, the leadership made a shift towards unity with the Labour lefts. “We now have the most important situation in the labour movement for a generation,” said John Gollan, general secretary of the CP, at that Easter 1961 congress. He continued:
The 1960 Scarborough decisions on peace, Clause Four, and the sovereignty of the Labour Party conference are a big step towards real independent working class politics ... The present position, however, is a new and much more important stage in the left struggle in the Labour Party. The previously automatic trade union voting majority for right wing policies has been shaken.
The logic of the policy of influencing the leadership of the unions in order to push the Labour Party to the left also meant that the CP’s traditional method of building in the workplace was to suffer. A rank and file organisation in the engineering industry, under CP leadership, had existed since 1935. From 1946 it had produced a paper called the Metalworker which was associated with an unofficial body known as the Engineering and Allied Trades’ Shop Stewards’ National Council. This was disbanded in 1962.
There was disagreement within the CP on this change in line until 1967. Part of the resistance to the change in policy may have come from districts or unions and industries where the Communist Party base was strong and still felt able to act and build independently – areas like Clydeside, Sheffield or north London. In the engineering industry these areas were certainly capable of organising within the shop stewards committees, and the branches and district committees of the union without much help from others on the left.
The result was the building of a very effective electoral machine in the unions that involved the shopfloor organisation. Murray Armstrong writes:
Although the Broad Left was from the beginning an electoral machine designed to shift the balance inside the union, one of the ingredients of its success was its relationship to the shopfloor union organisation. The leadership of the union, under Carron and Conway, was very much opposed to the “unofficial” activities of shop stewards. The success of shopfloor organisation depended on the ability of stewards to negotiate directly and immediately on piece-work prices and to be able to respond to any changes in work organisation or practices.
But the involvement of those shopfloor activists was only at election times. The Broad Left did not play an active part in the day to day problems of the workshops – in formulating a common policy for the struggles in the factories, in raising support or generating solidarity for disputes taking place.
The result was that, “after the national leadership of the Broad Left achieved their first goal of representation in the national union structure, the links to the shopfloor began to weaken and Broad Left policy became indistinguishable from the official National Committee policy of the union”. [83]
The result was clearly demonstrated in the quarterly meetings of the AEU shop stewards. Jack Robertson, present editor of Engineering Charter, was a shop steward in Manchester in the early 1970s. He describes the nature of those quarterly meetings:
They would always begin with a general attack on the evils of the system (probably by the Manchester district president, Stan Cole) followed by the divisional organiser, John Tocher, or Panther, the district secretary, with a long report of what was happening nationally and locally. Then Betty Crawford (convenor at Ferranti in Oldham), always as the token woman. There would be a resolution at the end of the meeting about repression in Greece (whatever the Morning Star was pushing at the time) which would be passed unanimously even though nobody had a clue what was happening there. And the next day the Morning Star would report, “Last night at a meeting of shop stewards representing 40,000 workers ...”
There were never any honest debates about what was happening in the local factories. For a start there was no time. There would only be half an hour at most for discussion, usually ten minutes. Even then, the speakers from the floor would be CP members of the district committee like Stan Brazil (convenor at GEC Openshaw) or Alan Spinks (convenor at Francis Shaws) to emphasise one of the points made earlier from the platform.
These meetings were stifling because they were treated as a chore rather than an infrequent opportunity to bring the leading members in the district together and have a good discussion.
It was obvious from the quarterlies, and the talk in the bar afterwards, that very, very few young people were being drawn into activity by the CP. The old guard ruled the roost. Only a fanatic would have been prepared to even sit through quarterly meetings which were CP propaganda sessions from beginning to end.
Already at that time the Broad Left used more left rhetoric than real action. The organisation in many Manchester factories, Jack Robertson goes on to say, was diabolical. He gives an insight into one of the most important factories in the area, Metro Vicks (whose labour force went down from 30,000 in 1945 to 5,000 in 1972):
One thing that stuck in my mind was the Victorian control which the company exerted through use of arriving on time. There was a stampede through the huge gates every morning in order to clock on before 7.44. One morning a man collapsed in the scramble ten yards in front of me. His haversack opened on the road beside him, an apple rolled out and his face turned green. Nobody stopped. The tide kept on moving.
The factory was so big it had its own ambulance service. But if any injuries ever occurred (which happened frequently) the victim would be expected to clock off before receiving attention.
In summing up the nature of the Broad Left, Jack Robertson writes:
The extraordinary electoral successes of the Broad Left are not explained by saying that they built a rank and file organisation. But, as the strongest organised group within the official union structure, they were able to control and direct the rank and file by placing the most minimal demand (the vote) on the stewards and branch committees.
Even if at the roots, at the shopfloor and district level in industry, the Broad Left was withering, it still had strength so long as it was led by Scanlon in a very popular struggle – against the last stage of Wilson’s wages policy, against In Place of Strife, and later against the Tory Industrial Relations Act. Then the CP was quite effective in mobilising rank and file support. It was for the above purposes that the Communist Party built the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.
The Liaison Committee started as a “lobby organising committee” under the secretaryship of Jim Hiles. It organised its first lobby of parliament on 1 March 1966. Some 4,000 trade unionists participated. A second lobby was organised in June. It was sponsored by a number of rank and file organisations in London: the London Docks Liaison Committee, the Building Workers’ Joint Sites Committee, EMI and ENV Engineering Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee, Exhibition Workers’ Committee, London Sheet Metal Workers’ Organisation and the Shop Stewards’ Defence Committee. In February 1967 the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, as it had begun to call itself, organised a sizeable lobby of parliament against the Labour wage freeze.
From 1968 onwards the LCDTU turned its attention to the impending threat of industrial relations legislation. As soon as “In Place of Strife” came out, it managed to organise significant stoppages. In February 1969, 150,000 stopped work mainly on Clydeside and Merseyside, followed by a May Day strike of 250,000, with a 20,000-strong demonstration in London and demonstrations in other parts of Britain. With Labour’s retreat over In Place of Strife, the committee became relatively dormant.
Not until the Tories came to power in the summer of 1970 did the LCDTU gather fresh momentum, which culminated in the massive unofficial stoppage of 600,000 on 8 December 1970, despite TUC attempts at sabotage. This strike helped lead the way for other stoppages in 1971 against the Industrial Relations Bill. These took place on 1 January (mainly in the Midlands) and 12 January. [84]
The CP at that time already faced a dilemma – whether to be critical of the sell-out of the Ford workers by Scanlon and Jones in 1971 and the disastrous leadership of the national engineering claim in 1972.
The ability of “left” union leaders to come to the top of the union machine with the help of an aroused rank and file, and when arriving there becoming a shackle on the very people who raised them, is not peculiar to the engineers or to the CP.
Let us look at the Yorkshire miners. At the time of the 1969 and 1970 unofficial strikes, the Yorkshire area executive of the NUM was right wing controlled. “Hence the panels (assemblies of delegates from each pit corresponding to the NCB areas) organised in a sort of rank and file committee basis,” writes Bill Message:
They did more or less represent the aspirations of the militants in the coalfields, whereas today the leadership is “left” wing in Yorkshire. The panel is used by the Yorkshire leadership in order to try and keep everybody in line with the position that the Yorkshire leadership take – in other words, if the Yorkshire leadership want to move then they’ll use the panels as the instrument to get them moving. If they don’t want to move then they’ll use them to stop them.
What about the caucus around Scargill? Bill Message says:
The Broad Left in Yorkshire, say eight years ago, was very very strong, well organised. They held their own secret meetings but they held Scargill’s – what did he call it? – the Forum, which used to hold public meetings as well, with good speakers, and they used to attract a good audience, but since he’s got the position he is in the secret meetings continue but they are more for Scargill’s benefit than for the benefit of the militants taking part in them.
The Forum was dominated largely by full time lodge officials, whose workstyle, as described above, is quite different to that of the rank and file. They are paid top wages, while they don’t have to work in the horrible conditions down the pit, with the danger of injury or pneumoconiosis. The Forum shaded very much into the Yorkshire area NUM executive, which is completely composed of the area full time office officials plus the NUM agent for each of the NCB areas, plus four members from each NCB area, plus one from all the different NCB workshops – i.e. some 17-plus full time officials.
Made up largely of officials or aspiring officials, no wonder the Broad Left in the Yorkshire NUM cannot keep its unity. In the last elections for the job of vice-president of the Yorkshire area, there are 14 candidates, at least nine of them Broad Left.
The crisis of the working class at the present is not only a crisis of organisation and leadership that goes from top to bottom of the movement, but also a crisis of ideas.
It is a fact that trade unionists will tolerate from a Labour government what they would not tolerate from the Tories. However, this alone could not explain the massive retreat of the working class over the years of low wages, unemployment, cuts.
Workers’ consciousness is usually full of contradictions. In a famous passage in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. [85]
Hence the overwhelming majority of workers have always believed in the “national interest”. They always believed that profit was necessary – if the employers cannot make profits the workers cannot have jobs. They have always accepted that an inegalitarian distribution of wealth and income was just and inevitable.
These ideas have in no way been able to prevent the class struggle. A worker can accept that profits are inevitable and at the same time complain bitterly that the profits of his own employer are far too big compared with his wages.
Workers’ loyalty to Labour has in no way prevented them going on strike while Labour was in power. One has only to remember the fantastic enthusiasm of the miners for the nationalisation of their industry in 1947 and the massive support they gave Labour at the time while at the same time they chose to go on with strikes at a very high level.
Then look at the Second World War. There was no time in which the idea of national unity, especially in face of fascism, was as popular as then. But this did not prevent numerous strikes in the milling industry. Of course the Yorkshire miners supported the war. But this did not prevent them from detesting the owners of the mines, grumbling about the level of wages, complaining about their leaders, and acting accordingly. So the number of strikes rose rapidly in the last five years of the war. [86]
In general the number of strikes and strike days rose during the war compared with the years before. In the years 1934-39 there were 5,700 strikes involving 10,846,000 strike days, while in the years 1940-45 the number of strikes rose to 8,247 and the number of strike days to 11,904,000. [87]
The overwhelming majority of workers accepted the arguments of the Wilson and Callaghan governments about pay, inflation and unemployment. They fell for the argument that wage rises are the cause of inflation and would lead to unemployment if there was no wage restraint. But accepting the argument in general would not in itself prevent workers from demanding wage improvements. After all, in all periods of rising prices these arguments have always been used.
Where the argument becomes more convincing is where it is clear that the company the worker works for is facing the danger of closure, or at least of redundancies. And the rising dole queues in recent years strengthens the argument.
Of course if one accepts without question that the rights of private property should apply to the means of production, the rules of capitalism must also be accepted. Once one accepts the right of owners of industry to dispose of their capital then the view that the workers are fundamentally dependent on their employers follows with inescapable logic. If capitalist ownership is sacrosanct then of course “there must be profit”, and if there is no profit there cannot be jobs. The concepts of “profitability”, “efficiency”, “viability” appear as immutable, natural, commonsense rules.
The fact that the profit system is natural and necessarily beneficial to workers seems in contradiction to the fact that this same system brings mass unemployment and suffering. But the majority of workers have never seen the causal relation between the capitalist system on the one hand and slumps and mass unemployment on the other, and of course the capitalist press and the television do not enlighten the workers on this point.
However, the lack of a coherent answer to the crisis could not by itself paralyse workers’ struggle. After all, the irritants in the wages paid, of one group of workers compared to another, has for a long time been the mainspring of industrial action by workers. With rising inflation, workers’ focus on comparability increases. It is always in the area of contradictions in consciousness that the spring of struggle for higher wages rises. If not for this contradiction the workers would not fight for “fair” wages, but for the abolition of the wages system as such.
It would therefore be ahistorical, banal, to attribute the right turn in the working class in recent years to the acceptance by workers of the ideas of “national interest”. The idea is as old as the working class. Again the ideas of class collaboration are as old as the British trade union movement. After all, the talks between Ben Turner representing the TUC, and Sir Alfred Mond, the ICI chief, in 1927, calling for a joint council of workers and employers, affected the ideological stance of the whole trade union movement for decades afterwards. The question therefore remains, why have those always treasonable trade union officials managed to sell the “Contrick” in recent years much more effectively than they did in the five years before, 1969-74?
Lack of confidence to break, or at least loosen, the vice of government and employers is the key impediment to raising class consciousness. Class consciousness cannot exist independent of class confidence. The decline in the cohesion of the shop organisation under incomes policy, under productivity deals, with workers’ participation, makes the ideology of national interest and of Labourism a much stronger straitjacket and impediment to action.
As one element in an equation, the ideological impasse is both a cause and an effect of the crisis of the movement. Labourism, loyalty to the Labour Party, whether in government or in opposition, is the arc uniting all the elements of ideological confusion and subservience to capitalism dominating workers’ thinking.
In the years 1970-74 the balance of class forces expressed itself in workers’ offensive on the economic front – however sectional it may have been – and retaliation and employers’ offensive on the political front, above all the Industrial Relations Act, however ineffective that also may have been.
Alas, there is no automatic transition from economic to political struggle. When Lenin said that politics is concentrated economics, he did not in any way identify the one with the other, or assume a fatalistic transformation from the one to the other.
The unstable balance between the political generalisation on the employers’ side and the industrial militancy on the workers’ side could lead to one of two extremes – to political generalisation of the industrial militancy, or to the decline of sectional militancy. The latter took place as a result of the misleadership of the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour left and the CP.
The present recession, while at the moment less intense, is a much more general and permanent phenomenon than that experienced in the 1930s. Attacks on living standards, cuts, redundancies, plant closures, are going to affect working people in a harsher and harsher way.
This harsh reality, while exposing the crisis of leadership of the labour movement from the top of the TUC to the shopfloor, is a challenge that cannot be met with the weapons of yesteryear. Such fragmented reaction will not do now, on the wages front, not to say on the front of cuts, closures and unemployment. The muddled thinking of workers in the years of the boom did not prevent them from still improving their material conditions. Now what happens in the grey matter of workers’ heads is decisive for their material wellbeing. Politics, socialist politics, has therefore to be brought to the shopfloor.
The rank and file organisations must play a central role in fighting the employers and the government while keeping themselves independent from the treacherous union bureaucracies. Within such organisations, revolutionaries can organise together with those workers who want to fight, want to go further than the bureaucrats even though they have not broken fully with reformism.
The fact that the commitment called by Rank and File’s “Defend Our Unions” conference the Code of Practice is so elementary – solidarity, respect for picket lines, collecting money, organising blacking – should not disguise the point that to get such a code accepted and acted upon by branches, district committees, stewards committees and the union membership will be a very hard task to achieve.
Many of the defects – and much of the detail of shopfloor weakness – were spelled out at the conference again and again by the delegates who spoke. But, throughout, this sense of realism was combined with hard determination to organise, educate and fight back.
To give but a few quotes [88]: Dick North, executive committee member of the NUT and chairman of the conference, defined the subject of the conference as “how we can rebuild the trade union organisation at the rank and file level to prepare the fightback against the Tory government ... We have to re-establish the rank and file tradition at the shopfloor level, about which we’ve been talking but which – it’s been implicit in many of the contributions – has declined in recent years.”
Phil Gilliatt, chairman of Sanderson’s strike committee, spoke about the “bad state of the movement”:
One of the main problems at the moment is us, the people here and this massive trade union movement we’ve got – about 12 million. And yet we fail consistently; we fail to win recognition disputes, one by one, longer and longer they go on, everyone failing. It is very easy to turn round and say, “Why are we losing?” and say, “Oh well, it’s them. It’s the officials – they’re not doing the job right. They’re putting the block on it.” OK, but there is another reason – and that’s us; our failure to organise. It’s all very well you telling me, “Oh yes, we’ve got it, the movement’s as strong as ever.” No way. The movement has never been in such a situation as it is now, with attacks coming from all over.
Joe Carberry, TGWU Birds Eye Shop Stewards Committee, said:
What we need to do at this conference is to get back to the basics of trade unionism. The basics of trade unionism are that we do not cross picket lines; we will support other workers in struggle ... If you look at the reality of the situation, there are more workers than ever before, I’d suggest, actually crossing picket lines ... If we’re going to win any sort of organisation, what we must do is to say, “Yes, we will start to control our strikes; we won’t leave it to the union bureaucracy, because we’ve been sold down the river too many times by them.”
Gordon Vassall, FBU, said:
It is no good beating about the bush. Our strike was beaten. The Labour government was busy putting out the ardour of the firemen. Demoralisation hasn’t just happened to the firemen. It’s happened right across the spectrum of the trade union movement. Over the past few years they’ve been beaten back, and beaten back again. The trade unionism that we had, years and years ago, the links that we had – we’ve got to build them again. The employers are organised; they know exactly what they are doing. We have got to be organised; we need to take up the fight.
Tommy Douras, chairman, Hackney Joint Works Committee, said:
What the Social Contract did wasn’t just to restrain your wages. It did what In Place of Strife couldn’t do in 1969. It did what the Industrial Relations Act couldn’t do under the Tory government. It won the battle of the mind. It won the argument in trade union branches. It filtered right down to the very shop stewards’ movement. We had shop stewards taking part in workers’ participation and coming back like errand boys and telling workers on the shopfloor to do what the bosses told them to do. It’s not happened all of a sudden, but over the last four years, bit by bit, that the ideology that we cross picket lines, that we don’t put on blackings for other workers, has crept in.
Tommy Douras was followed by Ann Robertson (ASTMS, North Manchester Hospital):
As Tommy said, the thing about the Code of Practice is that it really concerns very basic trade union principles, trade union principles that seem to have been undermined fantastically in the last few years. It might take a long time for the offensive against the Tories, against Margaret Thatcher. We’ve got to be prepared for that, and the only way we can be prepared is building groups of rank and file militants around us. And that for me is what this conference is supposed to be about.
The aspiration for self-activity of the rank and file must be infused with clear socialist ideas. Socialism is the only answer to a deepening and permanent capitalist crisis. For all the different battles – in industry, in the hospitals, in the schools, against the cuts, against racism, against women’s oppression – a unifying organisation is necessary, a mass revolutionary workers party. The task of building it cannot be shirked for a minute.
So long as capitalism was expanding and by and large prosperous, industrial militancy in itself could achieve quite significant results. Today, when world capitalism is in deep general crisis, industrial militancy alone is quite ineffective. General social and political questions have to be faced. The battle of ideas becomes crucial. To build a bridge between industrial militancy, rank and file activity and socialism, we must relate the immediate struggles to the final struggle – the struggles inside capitalism to the struggle against capitalism.
The Tories are going to test out our working class organisations. Hence it is necessary to see every attack in the context of the general offensive. This means it is crucial to rally the greatest possible support for every group of workers in struggle and to relate their struggle to the government’s attack. The whole battle has to be given a clear, political – i.e., general class, socialist – anti-government edge.
The working class has paid and is continuing to pay a very high price for its crisis of leadership. The Labour Party and its CP hangers-on have weakened the workers’ movement. However, the dialectics of history, the general crisis of capitalism, are far more powerful than all the bureaucrats. If the crisis accelerates the death of the reformist forest, it will – if revolutionary socialists adopt a correct strategy and tactics – accelerate the growth of the green shoots of rank and file confidence, action and organisation.
52. Socialist Review 11, April 1979, said:
‘The EEF document doesn’t just invite its 6,000 member companies to take a hard line. It virtually orders them to. It says:
* “these guidelines aim to help employers achieve greater confidence and coherence in the practice of collective bargaining, and in responding to the threat or fact of industrial action.”
* the guidelines aim to ensure “any employer following them will not feel isolated”.
* “Where an employer has rights under a national, local or domestic agreement, he must be vigilant to exercise and maintain them.”
* employers “should press the need for appointment of stewards with proper qualifications who are competent for office”.
* “abuse of the position and power of stewards should not be accepted.”
* “employees should be made aware that their employer is willing to provide facilities for secret ballots.”
* “To maintain the authority of procedure, of union officials and management, companies should refuse to negotiate where procedure has been breached.”
* “layoff pay should not he offered for those affected by disputes in the same plant or wider bargaining unit.”
* “Industrial action such as go-slows, refusal to work normally, and blacking of employees, products or machines should not be tolerated for more than a few days. After a warning, with a sufficient period allowed for reflection, suspension without pay should be the normal response.”
* “Lump sum payments should not normally be offered by way of settlement as an inducement to return to work ... as regards income tax refunds, companies can limit their obligation to pay them during the course of a strike by giving notice, and passing the obligation back, to the Inland Revenue.”
* “A company’s striking employee should not be recruited by other companies while the strike lasts: nor should its work be carried out by other companies, unless by agreement. A customer company should not pressurise a supplying company whose employees are on strike to make an unsatisfactory compromise settlement. Any company subjected to such pressures should feel free to invoke the influence of its Association or of the Federation”.
53. R. Holt, The Employers’ offensive, Socialist Review 11, April 1979.
54. B. Weekes, M. Mellish, L. Dickens and J. Lloyd, Industrial Relations and the Limits of Law: The Industrial Effects of the Industrial Relations Act 1971 (Oxford, 1975), p.223.
55. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.203.
56. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.59.
57. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.160.
58. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.201.
59. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.202.
60. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.218.
61. B. Weekes and others, Industrial Relations, p.228.
62. Sunday Times, 4 June 1972.
63. Industrial Relations Review and Report 194, February 1979.
64. Industrial Relations Review and Report 200, May 1979.
65. Socialist Worker, 1979.
66. Socialist Worker, 14 July 1979.
67. T. Cliff, Employers’ Offensive, pp.39-53, 126-127.
68. T. Lane, The Union Makes Us Strong (London, 1974), p.198.
69. D. Lyddon, Leyland, Shop Stewards and Participation, International Socialism (first series), October 1977.
70. T. Cliff, Chrysler Workers: The Fight for a Future (London, 1978), p.20.
71. W. Brown, R. Ebsworth and M. Terry, Factors Shaping Shop Steward Organisation in Britain, British Journal of Industrial Relations, July 1978.
72. D. Lyddon, Leyland.
73. T. Cliff, Chrysler, pp.20-21.
74. Socialist Worker, 3 September 1977.
75. H. Benyon, Working for Ford (London, 1977), p.216.
76. See H. Benyon, Working, ch.10.
77. R. Hyman, Industrial Conflict and Political Economy: Trends of the Sixties and Prospects for the Seventies, Socialist Register 1973 (London, 1974), p.124.
78. R. Hyman, Industrial, p.123.
79. See J. MacFarlane, The Changing Pattern of Industrial Conflict in the British Coal Industry (duplicated, Sheffield); B. Message, The Miners and the Labour Government, International Socialism (first series), September 1976.
80. J. Charlton, The Miners: The Triumph of 1972 and the Way Ahead, International Socialism (first series), April 1973.
81. Socialist Worker, 2 March 1974.
82. Quoted in M. Armstrong, The History and Organisation of the Broad Left in the AUEW (MA thesis, Warwick University, 1978).
83. M. Armstrong, History.
84. J. Townsend, The LCDTU, International Socialism (first series), March 1973.
85. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (London, 1970), p.64.
86. N.A. Clark, Unofficial Strikes on the South Yorkshire Coalfield in the Second World War (MA thesis, Sheffield University, 1978). [The reference for this note is missing so we have put it in where it appears most appropriate. – Note by MIA]
87. C.T.B. Smith and others, Strikes, p.129.
88. Socialist Worker, 9 December 1978. [The reference for this note is missing so we have put it in where it appears most appropriate. – Note by MIA]
Last updated on 24.10.2005