Dave Gardner

In the July/August editorial of Labour Affairs, we drew attention to the British trade unions at their most influential period between the Second World War and the late 1970s. It is worth asking ‘What is a trade union?’ before going on to the question of the role that they may or may not play in serving the interests of the working class and working people more generally. The basic idea is very simple: individual workers are weak in relation to their employers. They depend on their employer for their livelihood and the employer can withdraw their employment rendering them without means of support. On the other hand, as a collective, employees are a lot stronger. An employer may be comfortable sacking a single awkward worker, he cannot contemplate sacking his entire workforce if no replacements are available. If workers as a collective, withdraw their labour from an employer for long enough then the employer will no longer be able to do business. 

Trade unions were for many years illegal in Britain and other countries. They were thought to be both a threat to businesses and to the political order in the country. Trade union rights to representation had to be fought for and many trade unionists suffered and died in the cause of trade unions’ right to exist. Today there are many who still doubt their legitimacy and would like to see them fade away, whether through legal coercion or through indifference. Their ability to organise in particular workplaces is usually fiercely contested by employers. Their role in civil society and politics is significant but cannot be taken for granted. Most worryingly, if they are not longer supported by workers they will undoubtedly fade away. 

Trade Unions are bodies that organise workers collectively for the purposes of bargaining with an employer or group of employers to further their collective interests. Their main function is and always has been to ensure adequate wages, working conditions and security of employment for their members. These are clearly vital collective interests for employees and their dependents and cannot be neglected by any trade union worthy of the name. A question arises, however, as to how far other interests should be pursued by their trade union. Should, for example, the trade union negotiate a decent pension for its members? Should a trade union have a say in who gets employed in a business? Should they take an interest in vocational education and the nature of the qualifications needed to become competent in the activities needed by the business? Should they demand representation alongside management at plant level to further their bargaining strength? Should they demand representation at enterprise level for the same reasons? Should they be involved in matters of national importance for workers such as running the national insurance and social security systems? Before we address these issues, it’s worth noting that obtaining vital information about the enterprise’s operations, including its assets, profits, dividends, liabilities, investment plans and the condition of its rivals may all contribute to making bargaining on the basics of pay and conditions more effective. One way to do this is to employ specialist workers to investigate these issues. Another is to have members on the board of the enterprise so that they can have access to and comment on these matters. The more that workers know about the operations of their employers the more effective they will be in advancing their interests.

By and large trade unions in Britain have seen their role to be focused on improving pay, conditions and pensions through collective bargaining and, where necessary through striking. Sometimes they will conduct forensic investigation of the state of health of the businesses with which they are bargaining – Unite is a good example of this. More rarely, they will get involved in training issues. The EETPU under the leadership of Eric Hammond is an outstanding example of this approach. However, the idea that they should assume a role in running the business, particularly at the level of the governing body, the board of directors, is anathema to most, if not all British trade union general secretaries. In the last issue, we described how this approach led to a position where business could not act independently without the consent of trade unions and how successive governments sought to provide a structure in which the great power of the trade unions could operate so as to move beyond stalemate towards at least some form of guarded co-operation on matters of common interest and how these attempts failed through trade union unwillingness to engage. 

Such an institutional framework would have made trade unionism a part of the British constitution, both legally and in terms of established institutions and practices. As we noted, with the exception of some outstanding leaders such as Jack Jones and Clive Jenkins, this approach was rejected in favour of an approach that entrenched the class stalemate. On this view, workers and bosses have antagonistic interests which cannot be reconciled. It’s management’s right to manage and workers’ right to oppose management. Effective opposition to management leads to better pay and improved conditions, something which no employer will willingly concede. We noted that this approach, when conducted from a union position of strength, ultimately led to the long term and continuing decline of trade unions in Britain.  Once a certain level of power had been obtained by the trade union movement it did not have a way forward. In the absence of any initiative to expand union power into the realm of governance and management and hence into economic responsibility and responsibility for the well-being of the organisations in which they worked, trade unions had nowhere to go. Even an at the time relatively well-disposed Labour Party could not help them and in fact discredited itself through association with a movement that did not seem to know what to do with itself. With the defeat of Labour in 1979 the party went through a period of disorientation and ceased to be an effective force throughout the 1980s and beyond.

In the end, the lesson that the Labour Party learned from this period was that it should distance itself from the trade unions and closely shadow the Tory Party if it wanted to gain power once again. In turn, the activist base and administrative structure of the party more closely came to resemble that of the Tories. Nowadays, and since the time of Blair, the trade union movement can expect little from the Labour Party, which as we have argued, has increasingly become a Tory Team B. However, in the absence of meaningful political representation, all that remains to the working class is local and national struggles for improvements in pay and conditions with varying degrees of success. The movement’s decline has been accelerated through the successive introduction of highly restrictive legislation making it more and more difficult for them to effectively represent their members. Deindustrialisation has helped to restrict trade unions in the private sector and left them predominantly within the public and ex public sector, while large sections of the working class remain in precarious and poorly paid employment without any union representation. The attempt to use trade unions as an instrument to destabilise the State in the mid-1980s only speeded up their decline. We have now seen that the Labour Party is an organisation that, although it nominally supports working class interests, in effect disables them by posing as acting in their interests while in practice failing to do so.

Class Struggle and Socialism.

Class struggle is to a large extent the day-to-day conflict of interests within the workplace on company policy on wages and conditions. All of us experience conflict, not only in the workplace but in other areas of our lives. We learn to negotiate, compromise and co-operate even when our interests are in many respects opposed. The interests of capital and labour are opposed, but they can be reconciled on a temporary basis as both have an interest in the viability of the enterprises which one group owns and the other depends on for its livelihood. Trade unionism is the practical expression of the truth that collective action in pursuit of a coherent objective by individually weak but numerous individuals is more effective than individual action. Collective action is the basis of socialism so in that sense trade unions are bound to have some kind of socialist orientation, even when their explicit orientation is liberal or Christian Democratic. 

In Britain’s case that collective action has usually been limited to achieving the individual goods of higher pay, better pensions and better safety and better job security. At the time when it was most powerful and effective the trade unions and the Labour Party were also able to achieve goods that had a collective as well as an individual value: better education, a national health service, better public transport and better housing. These goods can be enjoyed by all and contribute to general prosperity and well-being as well as benefitting individuals. It’s important to note as well that political and union action at the municipal level can also bring about important local benefits such as recreational space, bus services and housing. Collective action in the pursuit of collective goods is, so to speak, the second tier of a socialist approach, even if it does not use that name. Currently in Britain, the trade union movement struggles to reach this second tier.

The Bullock report offered an opening to the third tier, effective participation in the control of enterprises both at board and plant level. This would have involved union representatives in the practical problems of management and strategic governance as they are in some other European countries such as Germany where these rights were fought for and achieved after the Second World War, with some help from British trade unionists, notably Ernest Bevin. Participation in governance and management would ensure that businesses were run in the interests of their employees as well as their shareholders and the latter would not be able to have everything their own way. It’s very important to note that having workers on the board does not mean that industrial action becomes obsolete as the German example illustrates. Workers retain the right to back up their demands at board level with industrial action where this is thought to be necessary to persuade the shareholder representatives of their point of view. The opportunity to participate in governance and management was turned down in Britain in 1977 with consequences that we have already noted, which make the achievement of even tier one objectives more difficult. 

Since then there have been attempts by the then TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady to interest trade unionists in the issue but they have been met with indifference. Whatever the views of individual members, trade union general secretaries since the time of Jack Jones have shown no interest in or even hostility to the issue. Until this changes through the engagement of some of the large unions, as well as the TUC, we can see little sign of a change in attitude.

The Fourth Tier of Engagement.

Early trade unionists and politicians realised that trade unions, although socialist in orientation through collective action, would have limited effect if they did not have a political wing or some kind. Only a political party focused on state power could enact and see legislation on trade union rights enforced and the collective goods that trade union members prized secured. For a brief period from the Second World War until 1951, trade unions and the Labour Party worked in sufficient harmony so that working class demands relating to health, housing, transport, education and unemployment benefit were secured.  This period was the nearest that we have come in Britain to progressing a socialist agenda through a politically oriented trade union movement.

But the working class’s grasp on the State is always going to be insecure so long as it only controls parliament. Even when it has a parliamentary majority and is in government, it cannot guarantee the co-operation of the Bank of England, the Treasury or the rest of the civil service, let alone the police and the armed forces. In Britain, where the Labour Party had already been compromised by its co-operation with imperialism and liberalism, the danger was acute. The trade union movement’s abandonment of anything beyond a narrow vision of their role made the takeover of Labour by an elite which shared the values of the Tories even easier. The ‘Uniparty’s birth can be dated from the Blair period where this orientation was made explicit, but its roots lie in the failure of the trade union movement to consolidate its gains in the 1960s and 1970s.

Some on the left would argue as follows: workers will only become politically militant when they engage in economic struggles. As they fight with their bosses they will come to see that nothing much can be achieved without a political movement whose objective will be to seize State power. The problem with this approach is that there is no evidence that it will succeed. Even when trade unions have engaged in struggles whose partial aim was to bring down the government they have never succeeded nor have they succeeded in bringing all other significant unions into the struggle. Crucially, they have not succeeded in developing a revolutionary class consciousness.

Given the limitations inherent in working class domination of the government but not of the State, trade unions have to remain politically strong and aware of the need to support government action and to discourage attempts to weaken or overthrow a socialist government. Today we have a curious situation. The trade union movement provides funding and near unconditional loyalty to a Labour Party that has given up on representing working people’s interests. It is little more than a Tory alternative to the Tory party. This attitude is pointless from the trade union point of view. You cannot get concessions by offering unconditional loyalty to someone who does not have your interests at heart. At this time, the trade union movement needs to adopt a more transactional attitude to the dominant political parties and to only support them financially or otherwise when they can be relied on to advance the working class interest on some important matter such as legislation on the right to organise or on employment status. At the time of writing we are heading into a general election between parties whose outlook is much the same, controlled by elites who have more in common with each other than the sections of society that they claim to represent. This is likely to continue until trade unions raise their sights towards a broader set of collective goods and develop the political capacity to campaign for these in the workplace and civil society. 

Unless they do this, their so-called party political representatives will not have sufficient incentive to remain true to them. When the trade unions are ready for more substantial collective action then they will be ready to organise better political representation.