Dave Gardner

It is generally agreed that you are more likely to be successful in achieving your aims if you work with others to achieve those that you have in common. This is the basis of social life. Individuals who share a common interest are more likely to realise that interest if they work together. When workers have common interests which are opposed by capitalists then they have a common incentive in uniting to pursue those interests in opposition to the capitalists who employ them. This does not mean that employers and employees do not have any interests in common. On these they can work jointly. But in many areas employers and employees do not always see eye-to-eye: working conditions, pay, job security, pensions, health and safety are just some of the areas of conflict that are likely to occur. In addition, employees might wish to gain greater control over the enterprises in which they work, over training practices and regulations and over the administration of unemployment benefit and social security. These are all matters in which they have a vital interest. Collective action in pursuit of these goals is much more likely to be effective than the action of individuals acting independently. The ultimate sanction that those who labour can enforce on their employers is the withdrawal of their labour, either wholly or in part. They can only do this without fear of the sack when they act collectively.

Their chosen instrument of this collective action is a trade union. Trade unions exist to further the interests of members who are employees of particular enterprises or of the state. In one form or another they have been around for 200 years or more. In that time they have contributed mightily to the defence and improvement of workers’ rights in the workplace and beyond, often in the teeth of ferocious and even deadly opposition from employers and the state. Their work is not done nor most likely never will be since the interests that they represent impinge on the will of some employers to do what they please whatever the consequences.

Different kinds of Unions

Trade unions are diverse and reflect the complexity and diversity of the working class. This is both a strength and a potential weakness and managing this diversity within the trade union movement is one of the main tasks of trade union leaders. Craft unions have their origins in the guilds of the mediaeval period and are organised on the basis of participation in a specialist craft occupation such as bricklaying, locksmithing or boilermaking. General unions bring together workers from different sectors of the economy, usually where there are some economic connections between different workers, for example between dockers and lorry drivers. General unions often organise ‘unskilled’ workers, that is workers who do not have a formal qualification for the work that they do, who receive little training and are easily replaceable. The Transport and General Workers Union (now Unite the Union) is a prime example, the heritage of the outstanding organisational, campaigning and political work of its first General Secretary, Ernest Bevin. Then there are industrial unions, organised around an economic sector such as construction, retail or banking and encompassing a range of occupations within the sector. German trade unionism is largely organised on industrial lines. 

As well as unions, there are trade union federations. In the UK there is one, the Trade Union Congress, but it is very common to find federations organised around religious and ideological lines, with Catholic, Communist and Social Democratic trade union federations to be found, for example, in France.

Because the working class is itself very diverse trade union activists and leaders often have a job in handling divisions and conflicts within the broader movement. Craft unions often jealously guard their occupational boundaries and there are often rivalries between unions for members of occupation that could potentially belong to more than one union. Trade unions’ political orientation often means that they are affiliated with rival political parties. This diversity is inevitable as the working class is not a monolith. At the same time, a degree of working class unity is a prerequisite for industrial and political action. It goes without saying that employers and hostile elements in the state will constantly seek to devise ways of undermining and dividing the trade union movement by exploiting such divisions. One of the great challenges for trade unions is to manage such diversity in a productive way, while presenting as little opportunity for disruption by employers and the state as possible.

What they do and what they can do.

Trade unions were established to defend the interests of their members mainly in the workplace. They are a pillar of the working class element of civil society. In order to defend their members’ interests they need to have the right to exist in the first place. In Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries there was great opposition to this happening and today there are still many people who would prefer that trade unions did not exist and that their ability to organise should be limited as much as possible. Economists like Adam Smith thought that any sort of combination of employers and employees was bad for the public and in 1799 and 1800, parliament passed the Combination Acts which forbade any association of either employers or employees to raise or lower wages. No employer was ever prosecuted and the legislation outlawed trade unions or any ‘combination’ of two or more people acting together for such a purpose. Even when trade unions are legalised, there is a great deal that can be done, both with and without the law, to limit their ability to be effective. Laws can limit the ability to take industrial action, to recruit new members, to have trade unions recognised in the workplace and to gain the support of other trade unions and of the public. The movement has constantly to be on the guard against laws and practices that limit their ability to represent the interests of their members and in particular to bargain collectively.

Collective Bargaining.

The ability to bargain collectively is a fundamental activity of trade unions. The union negotiates with employers on behalf of its members rather than each individual bargaining with their employer. The workforce as a collective is a much more effective bargainer than individuals on their own. They can make and enforce much better agreements than individuals acting on their own could ever do and for this reason the right to be recognised to be entitled to bargain collectively is often fiercely contested by employers. Even when the right to recruit members in the workplace by a trade union is recognised by employers, they may well refuse to bargain with the union on behalf of the workforce. In Britain a priority of the trade union movement should be to repeal legislation that limits their rights to recruit, to achieve recognition, and to take collective negotiation and if necessary action to back up their demands, let alone to act in concert with other trade unions to pursue matters of common interest. Many of these rights, gained in the Twentieth Century were lost through Tory legislation in the latter part of that century through the weakening of the union movement and the reluctance of the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 to do anything significant to strengthen the position of the trade unions. 

What Should Trade Unions Concern Themselves With?

Traditionally and quite rightly unions have been concerned with the working conditions and remuneration of their members. The length of the working day was an early point of contention, along with rates of pay. But there were other matters of great interest to the workforce, including the safety of workers and their compensation as a result of workplace injury, broader issues concerned with health and safety at work and the conditions of recruitment of new workers into the industry or a particular workplace. In addition, trade unions have seen the need to protect members in old age through pensions as a highly important issue, treating the pension as deferred pay for a time when a worker was no longer able to support him or herself. Trade unions that fail to apply themselves to these issues are not likely to raise themselves high in the respect of the workers whom they claim to represent and are thus not likely to survive. 

Beyond such core day-to-day interests, are there other areas of vital interest to workers that should be the proper concern of trade unions? We at ‘Labour Affairs’ would argue that there are and that neglecting these while focussing exclusively on wages and conditions can weaken the movement, as the history of British trade unionism from the Second World War until 1984, the year of the miners’ strike, show so clearly. We realise that taking an expansive view of trade union activity goes against the grain of the attitudes and practices of many trade unionists but remind readers that there is a proud tradition of trade unionists taking a broader view of the role of unions in their society. We have mentioned Ernest Bevin, but Jack Jones, also of the T&GWU was an outstanding trade unionist of the 1970s and more recently Frances O’Grady of the TUC was another who championed the role of unions in having a decisive say in how the enterprises in which they work were run. Across the Irish Sea, James Connolly and Jim Larkin Jr. were both exponents of the key role that trade unions could play in society and it is no exaggeration to say that Irish trade unionism is one of the founders of the Republic of Ireland.

The other issues that should concern trade unions include job tenure, vocational education,  entry to the workforce, administration of insurance and social security, participation in the running of their enterprises. There need be no limits to the role that unions play in their society. The limits lie in the minds of their members and leadership. They should certainly ensure that they are represented politically at the highest levels, but they should also ensure that they are not captured by political parties. We will return to this.

Trade unions and conflict with employers.

By the late 1960s British trade unionism was able to exercise a dominant influence on British economy and society. So much so that from the early 1960s onwards attempts were made to bring it into the running of capitalism alongside the state and capitalists. The National Economic Development Council and the National Incomes Commission, together with the Industrial Training Act of 1964 were all attempts to institutionalise the union movement. They ultimately failed and trade unionism continued to advance on the narrow front of ‘pay and conditions’. Labour’s failed ‘In Place of Strife’ White Paper of 1968 was another attempt to institutionalise class conflict and finally the Bullock Report of 1977, supported by Jack Jones and other trade unionists, proposed a decisive role for trade unions in managing larger capitalist enterprises. These proposals were made at the high tide of British trade unionism and they were rejected by the majority. A chance like this would not come again. So what went wrong and why did British trade unionism go into seemingly irreversible decline? 

British trade unionism accommodated a right wing and a left wing, but both combined to defeat any attempt to expand the role of trade unions beyond struggle over wages and conditions. Let’s look at the right wing first. The dominant view here was that there are employers and employees who are in competition about how the product of capital and labour should be distributed and that it is the job and the only job of trade unionists to gain as much of a share of that product as possible regardless of the consequences for their enterprises. ‘It’s management’s right to manage’ was the slogan of this faction. Consequently they had no interest in the governance or management of their enterprises. On the left there was a powerful faction, dominated by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) which thought that worker militancy would be developed by the wage struggle and that the development of class consciousness that this would lead to would bring about a revolutionary situation in which capitalism would be abolished. Anything like the Bullock proposals would look like an attempt to revive a dying capitalism. Both of these factions believed in ‘management’s right to manage’, the only difference being that the left believed that the wage struggle was going to open the door to a socialist utopia. We all know the consequences of this limited view of trade unionism and the difficulties that it led to, which the left continue to wrestle with.

Trade unions and political representation.

The history of the 60s, 70s and 80s tells us that trade unionism needs to have a political perspective. To some extent, under the influence of trade union leaders like Jack Jones, the Labour Party provided this but trade unionism as a whole was unable to respond. After this, the Labour Party turned decisively away from representing trade union interests but the trade union movement continues to regard the Labour Party as its vehicle for political representation when it has long ceased to act as such. This suggests that trade unions and the TUC need to have a political perspective, but they are ‘on their own’ as regards political representation. They cannot rely on a party that claims to have their best interests at heart, which takes the money of their members and offers little or nothing in return. They need to adopt a transactional attitude to Labour and to other political parties, providing them with support on the issues that affect them and withdrawing it when those parties are not prepared to support the objectives of trade unionism. Above all, they should avoid capture of their leaderships by officials whose first allegiance is to a political party rather than the trade union. A terrible current example of this is the way in which some trade unions have succumbed to globalist propaganda about Ukraine, following the imperialist line developed by the Labour Party without any serious attempt to inform themselves about the matter. A trade union movement that behaves in such a slavish way to outside interests has a long way to go to developing an informed and independent stance. How unions can support a policy that promotes neo-nazism and impoverishes their own members beggars belief. But it is the result of capture by the Labour Party.

How should trade unions relate to political parties?

We suggest therefore that a much stronger element of conditionality be built into trade union support for the Labour Party while at the same time looking for alternative forms of political representation. At the same time it is important that unions and the TUC develop their own capacity, not just to research the state of the enterprises for which their members work, which is vitally important for trade union core functions, but also to think for themselves about the wider world, free from the policies of the British political parties which, with the exception of the Workers Party of Britain are imperialist in inclination. 

Related to this it is important that unions develop leaderships that are committed to the welfare of their members and the union rather than to political careers within the Labour Party. There are too many careerists who promote their own, often anti-working class agendas at work within the trade union movement and, while able trade unionists need to be given leadership opportunities, their members need to ensure that they put the union and its members first rather than their own political ambitions or ideological fads. 

The TUC will remain important as a means of resolving disputes between unions and providing a collective voice for unionism when this is needed, but it will not regain the influence that it once had without a considerable expansion in union membership.

The future of trade unionism.

In order to arrest the decline of organised labour, unions need first of all to develop, as some have already done, a ferocious and forensic focus on the operations of their employers and their ability to fulfil their members’ needs. They need to be far more conditional and unsentimental in their support of political parties and use them to sustain their own strategic objectives, which should include the repeal of most of the anti-union Tory legislation restricting the activities of trade unions and the development of a national presence within key national institutions. A key demand should be the enactment of legislation along the lines of the Bullock Report which would have placed trade union representatives on the boards of directors of their companies in a number sufficient to protect and develop the vital interests of their members. These are necessary steps towards playing a fuller role in the governing of the organisations in which they work, which will include taking greater responsibility for vocational education and the running of the business directly alongside shareholders, representing employee interests at the highest level. But they cannot do this without an effective political strategy that also places them in influential positions in State institutions, most notably the Bank of England and more generally they should campaign for structures which allow them a significant say, particularly in the areas of economic development, unemployment benefit and social security. Without this orientation they will continue to decline.