Industrial Democracy

A new book has just been published:  “Our trade unions, what comes next after the summer of 2022?” By Nigel Flanagan, Manifesto Press.

The book is vigorously written and addresses the question of the immense weakness of the trade union movement today without flinching.  It rightly addresses the question of how it came about as a decline from the high point of power in the 1970s.  The common reaction today, whenever the unions show any strength, is ‘Beware! The unions will take us back to the anarchy of the 1970s’.  What was this ‘anarchy’ of union power?  Flanagan gives us a short history and his book is dedicated to Jack Jones, who was there at the time, at the heart of developments attempting to deal with this ‘anarchy’.

Which is why we are disappointed that Flanagan ignores totally what is to us at Labour Affairs the missed opportunity of real labour power, the Bullock report. The rejection of the Bullock report by the labour movement entrenched a preference for a subservient role for the working class, only getting the most under the present system, instead of being part of decision making.  Flanagan does not mention the Bullock report, which was an achievement of the labour movement.

We will write a longer review next month, but we reproduce below an article by Conor Lynch on the subject, and separately an interview with the very Jack Jones to whom Nigel Flanagan dedicated his book.

 

Trade Union Diary by Conor Lynch[1]

Industrial Democracy

A recent letter in this magazine complained about harking back to the past. Why do we go on so much about the lost opportunities for industrial democracy in the 1970s?

Firstly, what was proposed at that time has been all but written out of history. Accurate history is vital for understanding the present. History is what makes us what we are. And if we don’t understand what we are, we have little chance of developing a coherent plan of action for the future.

Can anyone doubt that our movement hasn’t a clue these days about what it was, what it is, and where it is going? For the most part it does little more than react to the latest Tory jibe or the latest Sun editorial.

Secondly, we believe that the core of the policy we supported in the 1970s is even more applicable in the 1990s. This core is that the working class has developed well beyond the point of being merely an exploited mass in need of protection against wicked employers. After 200 years of trade union organisation, 70 years of political democracy, and over 40 years of general education, the welfare state and the NHS, the working class is a very heterogeneous and complex body indeed.

It is only at work that the working class allows itself to be subservient. In practice, of course, employees daily take vital decisions – often of necessity behind the backs or against the wishes of employers. But the work culture is still subservient. ‘Management’s right to manage’ was promoted by Hugh Scanlon, Arthur Scargill, Frank Chapple and others in the 1970s. That is not ‘merely’ history. Scargill and Co. won that battle. Their position is the general trade union position today. Trade unionism still props up the subservient work culture.

There is still the belief that if a 19th century confrontational trade. union policy is abandoned, working class organisation will collapse and we will all be ground down. Well, the victory of the free collective bargainers didn’t help a lot these last 12 years. We suggest it caused what has happened these last 12 years.

The trade union position has in practice (and often in theory) been that the employer is there to screw you and the union is there to screw him. This is the essence of the Thatcherite ethos. It is the very antithesis of a socialist ethos. And I suggest that the time may be more than a little overdue for our movement to be promoting a socialist ethos as against a capitalist ethos.

The socialist ethos is that of public service. Goods and services are produced primarily for public consumption and enjoyment – not primarily to provide the capitalist with profit or the worker with wages. Such a public service spirit breaks out all the time in the working class. I have had the pleasure of mentioning it in this column in relation to railway workers. Most of us get pleasure when a consumer is happy with the product or the service we provide.

But there is a limit to the development of the public service ethos. And that limit is precisely in the capitalist relations of production. Trade union attitudes only perpetuate capitalist relations of production. These relations can be replaced by the working class assuming that it can have real power at work: through industrial democracy.

We are not, as has been suggested, wedded to a particular form of industrial democracy. We will support all kinds of proposals and occasionally make a few of our own. The important thing now is to win the battle for industrial democracy in the unions against the class struggle fetishists – then, whenever an opportunity arises to develop a specific agitation, we will be in a position to take it.

The point about the Bullock Report is not that we are re-proposing it. It was not proposed. It was offered on a plate. The unions had no nerve for this sort of thing. And a golden opportunity was lost. We are trying to develop a type of trade unionism which will grasp such opportunities whenever they arise. Hence the history lessons.

This article appeared in September 1991, in Issue 25 of Labour and Trade Union Review, now Labour Affairs.  You can find more from the era at https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/.

[1] Using the pen-name Dave Chappel