Introduction
This
article considers the shape of working class and the challenges
facing trade unionism stemming from the impact of neoliberalism in
the last forty years.
What
neoliberalism is and the degree it marked a break with the post-war
settlement is regarded as decisive but honesty compels me to
acknowledge that no narrative or account of neoliberalism is offered
here. But it is assumed there was a ‘neoliberal turn’ that
proceeded on the national stage in a complex dialectic of the
economic, political and ideological levels mediated by a global
crisis of profitability in turn amplified by the growing
internationalization of the world economy. Indeed Britain’s
relative economic decline was already visible in the mid 1960s
vis-à-vis its immediate international competitors and placed
increasing strain upon the ‘corporatist’ post-war settlement. To
this author it seems Neil Davidson’s peerless overview of
neoliberalism offers the essential outlines of just such an account
(Davidson 2010).
A
focus on what happened to the working class means we briefly visit
two related topics that represented the IS tradition’s most serious
attempt to wrestle with the changing composition of the working class
and its implications for the class struggle from the late 1970s
onwards.
The
first was Tony Cliff’s ‘downturn thesis’ in 1979 that explored
the fateful loss of impetus of the shop floor militancy that
flourished in the post-war years. The
second was the tradition’s response to claims that a contraction of
the manual working class as a proportion of all employees fatally
infirmed the socialist project. The issue of the ‘changing working
class’ and changes in the structure of employment was addressed by
Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos (Harman and Callinicos 1987). But
neither Cliff’s ‘downturn thesis’ or Harman and Callinicos’s
fertile exploration of the nature of the working class was really
developed further. They were a necessary prolegomena left in abeyance
as the theoretical arteries of the IS / SWP tradition hardened in
adversity.
Considering
neoliberalism – which loomed larger as the 1980s turned into the
1990s – would have meant further reflection on these starting
points and broached questions at the heart of the SWP’s
perspectives.
To
begin this article starts with an apparent detour about how mass
based trade unionism was finally achieved in Britain early in
twentieth century. Originally this article was a paper for conference
for socialists, trade unionists, students and anti-cuts activists
commemorating the centenary of the 1911 Liverpool general transport
strike. So the parts focusing on the Great Unrest 1910-14 are
retained because as James Cronin summarized: “the shape of the
British labour movement was basically set between 1889 and 1920. This
primary mobilization of the working class proceeded through three
turbulent explosions of strike militancy and persistent and profound
social turmoil” (Cronin 1979: 93).
As
I hope to show there are instructive parallels with the long
‘downturn’ that proceeded the Great Unrest 1910-14 when only one
in eight workers held a union card and today when union density in
the private sector has fallen so low. Not every parallel flatters
this earlier history though I would caution that if the 1910-14 Great
Unrest and the period before provides some interesting points of
comparison for the current generation of working class partisans, I
would not deny the historical specificity of this earlier season of
struggle or imply that our own ‘explosion’ now being prepared,
lies around the corner.
The
Past: 1900-14
It
is a hundred years or so since the 1910-14 Great Unrest – that
passage of fierce class conflict that shook the edifice of late
imperial Edwardian Britain before the caesura of the First World War.
One of the highpoints of the Great Unrest was the 1911 Liverpool
general transport strike which began among the seamen before
spreading to the dockside workers and then to tram operatives, the
benighted railwaymen and other groups of workers. A
strike of goods porters of the Cheshire
and Lancashire
railway company led to the first ever national rail strike when the
four
different
existing rail unions were compelled to respond to the militant
initiative of their rank and file, and were unexpectedly rewarded
with victory just three days later. This victory signaled the
definitive arrival of trade unionism on the rails and led via union
amalgamation to foundation of the National Union of Railwaymen in
(NUR) in 1913.
What
follows is not intended as a deep historical scrutiny of the events
of 1911 or its backdrop in the Great Unrest or even the whole period
between 1910 and 1920 – when the consolidation of mass based trade
unionism in Britain was finally achieved as the unions finally
embraced the proletarian majority for the first time
and were transformed in the process. This period of struggle also
illumines our present and retains some relevance to the question of
how to revitalize the labour movement against the backdrop of the
‘waning of collectivism’ (Samuel 2006: 3-17). In 1909 on the eve
of the Great Unrest only 15% of workers were in a trade union. Trade
unionism was still in its “bow and arrow stage” according to WF
Hay a militant South Wales miner (Haynes 1984: 90).
The
general transport strike in Liverpool demonstrated a high degree of
combativity and ‘spontaneity’. Ostensibly it was led by Tom Mann
who had returned from Australia only shortly before. Mann’s career
was extraordinary and he was literally on the spot for every major
turning point in the British labour movement over four decades. Mann
had been at the heart of the dock strikes in the East End of London
in 1889. On his arrival In Liverpool in 1911, Mann took up the reins
of organizing and spreading the action with the support of James
Sexton, Joseph Havelock Wilson and Joseph Cotter who led the dockers,
the seamen and ships cabin staff respectively. The strike committee
they led shaped the strike’s tactics and negotiated settlements
with the different dockside and shipping employers.
A
notable feature of the unrest in Liverpool and elsewhere in Britain
was the extraordinary hostility of working people to the civic
authorities. During the national rail strike there was widespread
sabotage of track and signal boxes. In Chesterfield a confrontation
between strikers and soldiers saw the station being burnt down. In
Liverpool thousands of troops and police (mainly from Birmingham and
Leeds) were sent to the city while the first
middle class citizens militia was founded (a forerunner of similar
outfits constituted during the 1926 General Strike).
When
Mann’s strike committee called a city wide general strike the
warship Antrim
appeared on the Mersey. The strike wave had been remarkably free of
violence until baton wielding police attacked a crowd of 80,000
workers and their families in St. Georges Plateau on a day that
subsequently became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ The savage rampage
of the police had its sequel days later on ‘Bloody Tuesday’ when
soldiers provocatively escorted a prison van through the heart of the
working class North End of the city en route to Walton gaol. Soldiers
shot dead two so-called ‘rioters.’ Hours later soldiers fired on
crowds without warning and killed two workmen in Llanelli South Wales
against the backdrop of the first national rail strike. Neither of
the men, John John and Leonard Worsell, were rail workers and they
were the last civilians to be killed on mainland Britain by the army
(Holton 1975, Taplin 1986: 80-107, Mann 2008: 203-229, Evans 2011).
Yet
in Liverpool the repression as in Llanelli and elsewhere ultimately
proved to be no more than a violent gloss on the general transport
strike which ended in victory days after ‘Bloody Tuesday’. The
1911 strikes in Liverpool proved to a major watershed for trade
unionism in the city and more broadly the Great Unrest heralded the
revitalization of organized labour in Britain as trade unionism
spread to many hitherto unorganized sections of the working class. On
the national stage, working class revolt converged with suffragette
insurgency and Irish nationalist struggle for Home Rule, to hasten
what George Dangerfield called the “strange death of liberal
England” (Dangerfield 1997).
Comparisons:
1910-1920
One
notable feature of trade union growth in Britain is that generally it
has been a product of spikes or explosions of class struggle whether
1889, 1910-20, 1934-39 or 1968-74 rather than a steady ascent. In an
interesting essay on the pattern of class struggle in Britain, James
Cronin suggested that strike action did not actually become the norm
of working class struggle until the 1870s (Cronin 1973). It is
noteworthy given Liverpool’s justified reputation as a stronghold
of proletarian radicalism, that the city had trailed other major
urban, industrial areas in the nineteenth century in terms of the
development of independent working class organization. For example,
six trade unions emerged from the unforeseen eruption of class
struggle on Liverpool and Birkenhead docks between 1871 and 1873. Yet
within a year all of these unions had disappeared. During the
Victorian age it was extremely difficult to establish lasting trade
union organization in the city due to a combination of mainly local
factors that included (i) the fierce intransigence of the employers
which meant it was not uncommon for workers with a grievance to
approach their employers with a humble petition or deferentially seek
mediators among ‘progressive’ or liberal employers, (ii) the
constant over-supply of labour from North Wales, Cheshire, Lancashire
and, of course, rural Ireland which reinforced the (iii) dominance of
casualism on the docks that also partly reflected an enduring
attachment to the practice among dockers because it meant ‘freedom’
from the clock, and (iv) and sectarian divisions between Catholic and
Protestant workers.
Nationally
the working class as a relatively cohesive force did not arrive until
quite late. That does not mean the working class did not exist as a
‘sociological reality’ before the critical watershed of the
1880s. We must not downplay the tenacious struggles of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century either that included the peak
of Chartism. Indeed Chartism’s defeat meant the loss of substantial
ground. Marx and Engels learnt much from the working class struggles
of the 1840s but the defeat of Chartism left them “isolated
pioneers” during many of their years of exile in Britain with
momentous historical events like the 1871 Paris Commune observed from
afar. During this mid Victorian interregnum, before genuine mass
workers parties began to appear, the rapidly growing working class
was “still halfway between workshop and factory” (Perry Anderson
1976: 1-3). Similarly Chris Harman observed that in the Europe of the
1840s the working class could only be considered a significant
presence in Britain and Belgium and the growth of new industries was
inevitably accompanied by the contraction of others (Harman in Harman
and Callinicos 1987: 80). In such a context The
Communist Manifesto’s
(1848) anticipation of the emergence of a global working class as
independent agency proved to be extraordinarily prescient.
By
the end of the nineteenth century Britain was already
an old industrial country.
Rapid urbanization and feverish industrialization ensured that by
1851 the majority of Britain’s populace lived in town or city. As
Eric Hobsbawm noted in his 1978 lecture Forward
March of Labour Halted? a
century earlier, Britain was uniquely proletarian; its working class
was overwhelmingly based in manufacturing, mining and the railways
though a significant proportion of female wage labourers were in
domestic employment and remained so well into the twentieth century
(Hobsbawm 1978: 280).
Within
Marxism the distinction between class-in-itself
and class-for-itself
has come to bear more weight than Marx’s original glancing
reference perhaps justified. But we might see the passage between
1910 and 1920 as the period when the British working class finally
developed trade union consciousness on a widespread basis and sealed
its transition to being a class-for-itself in the minimal sense of
becoming established as a distinct political presence nationally.
According to James Cronin, the working class “thrust itself into
the centre of Britain’s social and political life during an upsurge
of militancy lasting from 1910 to the early 1920s” (Cronin 1984:
1). Similarly Richard Hyman observed that “trade unionism was more
clearly on the offensive than in any other period of its development,
before or since” (Hyman 1975: vii).
In
the years before the First World War a sustained tide of industrial
struggle swept Britain. Unofficial action and rapid unionization
moved in lockstep. One indication of the advances trade unionism made
is shown by the most successful union of the period: the Workers
Union, which grew from 5,000 to 160,000 members between 1910 and
1914. Overall trade union membership rose from 2.5m members in 1910
to 4.1m members in 1914.
The
arrival of the war marked a pause in the militancy though there was
wartime opposition to dilution and the conscription of skilled men in
engineering. However British workers did not strike against war as
German workers did. In the war’s aftermath Britain teetered on the
brink of social revolution. By 1920 trade union membership had
swelled to 8.3m members. Winston Churchill, who had sent police and
troops to Britain’s industrial centre’s (including Liverpool in
1911) throughout the Great Unrest, complained that the problem with
trade unionism was there was not enough of it by which he meant not
enough responsible
union officials keen to establish organization and the inevitable
discipline and machinery of bargaining that accompanied such a
settled state of affairs. Churchill had bemoaned a similar lack as he
dispatched troops to industrial hotspots throughout Britain during
the Great Unrest.
A
crucial feature of the pre-war militancy was that much of it simply
bypassed the nascent machinery of conciliation and collaboration
designed to ensure ‘social control’ of the nascent labour
movement (Cronin 1984: 21). This was a process being fostered and
promoted by the state and some of the more farsighted employers but
real ambivalence about this containment strategy existed among the
employers overall. On the one hand nearly 400 state posts were
created by the Liberal government (in the Home Office, factory
inspectorate and so on) for trade unionists, on the other hand, the
state and even ‘liberal’ employers were not averse to
intransigence and utilizing repression against strikes. The attempt
to incorporate trade union officialdom was checked by the nature of
the ‘dual revolt’ in 1910-14 that saw informal organization in
often unorganized workplaces bypass the trade unions (Haynes 1984:
92). The spread of strikes and unrest saw the spread of union
recognition and collective bargaining but the extension of collective
bargaining was often regarded as tyranny by employers rather than the
“sociological innovation that institutionalized class conflict”
(Haynes 1984: 100). In 1907 4m working days were ‘lost’ to
strike action. This figure jumped 10m in 1908 and reached a pre-war
high of 41m days ‘lost’ in 1912. According to John Saville the
explosion of militancy began where the great strikes of the
unorganized and the unskilled in the 1880s, had left off among
waterfront workers but then rapidly spread to entirely new sections
of the working class (Saville 1988: 37).
Among
the rank and file there was a widespread if often inchoate awareness
that the trade union officials were a barrier to an effective
offensive against the employers. The offensive nature of the pre-war
militancy revealed the rank and file’s hostility to anything
smacking of class collaboration and while wages, conditions and hours
were the chief catalyst for strike action one third of strikes was in
pursuit of union recognition sometimes alloyed with a strong desire
for shop floor control (Hyman 1975: vii-xxxiii).
This
reflected the pre-war growth in the influence of industrial
syndicalism which strongly promoted workers self activity and the
control of production. The other key element of syndicalist ideology
was its critique of ‘sectionalism’ and the necessity for
industrial
unions in contrast to trade unions to place unions on a wider and
firmer basis. Though syndicalist militants were a small minority they
were often a key influence on their workmates and often articulated
an aggressive hostility to the employers, capitalism and the
advocates of parliamentary reform in the ranks of the infant Labour
Party.
The
workers offensive was a reaction to capital’s own offensive.
Raymond Challinor argued that at the turn of the century, a strategy
of confronting labour was increasingly forced on the employers by the
relative decline of British capitalism as newly emerging competitors
like Germany and the US challenged Britain’s global supremacy.
Britain’s share of manufacturing output fell from 31.8% in 1885 to
14.1% in 1913. Also its economy remained overly reliant on the
industries that had dominated the latter part of the nineteenth
century like coal and textiles whilst the sufficient investment in
new industries was lacking. Such investment might have secured
competitive modernization but instead a growing proportion of capital
was invested overseas rather than the domestic circuits of
production. Between 1901 and 1905 foreign investment averaged £50m
annually and climbed to £200m annually between 1911 and 1913.
Squeezed profit margins resulted from, and, in turn reinforced
falling domestic investment and spurred the employers ruthless cost
cutting (Challinor 1977: 56-57).
The
1890s saw a series of harsh defeats for the working class especially
the defeat of the engineers in 1897 after a national lock-out. The
ASE took many years to recover. At the start of the new century
workers faced wage cuts, speed cuts and a lengthening work day. In
1902 the Taff Vale judgement allowed the Taff vale rail company to
successfully sue the ASRS rail union for lost revenue during
unofficial action by its members (Dangerfield 1997: 184-86).
The
bargaining power of workers grew weaker and only 1 in 8 workers held
a union card despite the existence of 1,323 trade unions. The
aggressiveness of the employers, Taff Vale and the frailty of most
unions organizing a minority of the working class reinforced the
caution of the union officials. The officials already regarded their
primary role as mediating conflict between labour and capital and
conserving union organization. The narrow sectional basis of the
existing unions could be traced to their origins as “craft unions”
established by highly skilled workers but excluding the mass of
unskilled and semi-skilled workers. But from the 1880s onwards, the
“general unions” started to appear attempting to organize all
those workers not wanted by the “craft unions” and the titanic
struggles of the Great Unrest 1910-14 and in the post-war period, was
an extension of this process. Ironically another factor that
reinforced the inertia and conservatism of the trade unions was the
steady improvement in wage levels between 1850 and 1900. At one level
the period between 1880 and 1910 could be regarded as one of advance
for trade unionism, albeit unspectacular in extreme: union membership
trebled in these years and trade unions in Britain were among the
strongest in Europe. But from the early 1890s the numbers of strikes
also declined though 1897 and 1898 saw a spike in strike days lost.
More significantly, the proportion of successful strikes fell from
40% in 1893 to 17% in 1904 (Challinor 1977: 57).
Summary
A
major impetus of the struggles of the 1910-14 Great Unrest 1910-14
was a rank and file drive of the largely unorganized to improve
wages, conditions and win trade union recognition. This last was
closely connected to a desire to overcome sectionalism. On the eve of
1910 there were just 2.5m trade unionists and 1,323 trade unions. The
powerful appeal of syndicalism sprang from a dual awareness of the
importance of collective organization but also the ineffectiveness of
many unions as a defensive bulwark against the employers. A great
absence and weakness in the movement was the lack of an appreciation
of the importance and potential of trade unionism among the socialist
left. This included the notionally Marxist Social Democratic
Federation (SDF) led by the wealthy businessman HM Hyndman. The
politics of the SDF was shaped by parliamentarianism and abstract
propaganda. The group’s dogmatism and sectarianism made Engels
despair. In 1911-12 the SDF became the British Socialist Party (BSP)
when it merged with dissident ILP members and despite some early
promise the hostility to ‘irrelevant’ strikes continued to mark
the new formation.
The
exception to this pattern was the relatively small number of
syndicalist militants like Tom Mann who founded the Industrial
Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) in 1911 that produced eleven
issues of the Industrial
Syndicalist.
The only avowedly Marxist organization that did not share the native
incomprehension of trade unionism was the Socialist Labour Party that
creatively reworked the syndicalist ideas of the American Marxist
Daniel de Leon. The SLP had split from the SDF in 1903 in opposition
to its opportunism, disavowal of trade unionism and deference to
parliamentarianism. The SLP counted among its ranks some of the
finest socialists ever produced in the British isles like James
Connolly. It had an orientation to the trade union struggle and was a
significant presence on the Clydeside though, contrary, to some
accounts it did succeed in creating branches in England. By 1907 two
thirds of its branches lay outside Scotland (Challinor 1977: 87).
However the SLP was also marked by dogmatism (for contrasting
judgements see Kendall 1969: 63-77 and, more reliably, Challinor
1977: 278-83).
So
during possibly the greatest passage of working class revolt in
Britain the extant organizations of the left: the ILP, the infant
Labour Party, the SDF-BSP, all shared either an incomprehension or
hostility towards trade unionism or working class self organization
which reflected an elitist top down tendency to separate politics and
economics, privileging the former at the expense. Such a stance was
part of a well established vein of “transcendental disdain”
(Marx) for trade unionism that marked Britain’s native socialist
traditions. In the socialist press Phillip Snowden attacked trade
unionism while Arthur Henderson and three other Labour MPs proposed a
bill to make strikes illegal without 30 days notice (Haynes 1984:
105).
In
contrast the alternative ideological viewpoint suffered its own
weaknesses. So the SLP understood the importance of the trade unions
but their de Leonite critique of the limitations of trade unionism
and the treacherous role of the ‘labour lieutenants of capital’
led to the embrace of ‘dual unionism’ which effectively served to
isolate militants from the mass of workers and reinforce
sectionalism. This may not have not have been so apparent given the
SLP’s modest size and the fact that at one point the SLP claimed
1,500 workers as members of its trade union at the 10,000 strong Singer factory in Clydebank, a few miles from Glasgow, where it was strongest (Haynes 1984: 110, Higgins 1971). Thus in the period 1910-14 the left never
benefited or indeed shaped the struggles of the period to anything
like the degree that was probably possible.
The
Impact of Neoliberalism on the Working Class
It
might be argued the revolutionary left, particularly the SWP –
Britain’s most significant revolutionary socialist organization –
has failed to fully to appreciate the full import of the ‘neoliberal
turn’ of the 1980s. A case could be made that Cliff’s original
insights were not developed and as the 1990s arrived a debilitating
lacunae at the heart of the party’s perspectives was becoming
increasingly apparent. In mitigation Harman and Callinicos indirectly
addressed some of the issues (Harman and Callinicos 1987) but also as
Gary Daniels and John McIlroy observed that the “…the
developments which constitute neoliberalism have crept up on us. Few
designated Margaret Thatcher a neoliberal in 1980” (Daniels and
McIlroy 2010: 6).
In
1979 Tony Cliff first proposed the ‘downturn thesis’ diagnosing a
weakening of the militancy and intra-class solidarity that had
underpinned the unofficial shop floor trade unionism of the post-war
years. In truth Cliff was not the wholly original innovator of the
‘downturn thesis.’ Cliff probably drew on several sources. There
was Stuart Hall’s genuinely arresting anticipation of the dangers
embodied by Thatcherism though its Eurocommunist political premises
and cool critical appraisal of the ‘antique’ class politics of
the left simply led to a polite Social Democratic quietism in the
1980s. Also shortly before Cliff’s piece Chris Harman had also
argued the current was flowing against the left and the working class
apparent in the crisis of the revolutionary left across Europe and
North America (Harman 1979). Cliff was attempting to re-orientate revolutionaries and socialist militants as
working class resistance began to ebb. From the late 1960s,
government and employers had sought to curb the unofficial movement
on the shop floor to arrest the relative decline of British industry.
Instead state intervention provoked generalized working class
resistance whose fission severely stretched the limits of British
trade unionism as it had developed hitherto.
According
to Cliff the ‘turning point’ was the impact of the 1974-79 Labour
government’s on the working class. Between 1975 and 1978 the Labour
government imposed wage restraint delivered with the connivance of
the TUC. It yielded a fall in real wages of 13% before a rebellion of
the low paid reached critical mass during the ‘Winter of
Discontent’ and torpedoed the ‘Social Contract.’ Inevitably the
bitter fruit of the Labour government’s offensive against its own
working class electoral base helped weaken the class morale that was
the mainspring of workers shop floor power. A new defensiveness and
lack of confidence now characterized many struggles according to
Cliff (Cliff 1979: 1-50). The Tories were helped back into office in
1979 with a greater proportion of trade unionist votes than they had
won in 1974 or would win subsequently in 1983 (Harman 1987: 83-88).
Indeed,
as Ian Birchall argues in his biography, Cliff might have been
criticized for a failure to recognize the ‘downturn’ before 1979.
As early as 1975 there had been a debate in the Communist Party with
various critics of a Gramscian or Eurocommunist provenance,
challenging the party’s industrial strategy (Birchall 2011: 442).
Some of these critics were profoundly critical of a mode of struggle
they felt imprisoned workers in the snare of ‘economism’ that was
unable to provide a bridge to socialism. Of course what they meant by
‘economism’ was quite different to that understood by Lenin. It
served as a catch all for the industrial struggle of the working
class per se and implied there was some other ‘model’ available.
Hobsbawm echoed these criticisms counterposing ‘economism’ to the
existence of a larger political or communal interest that assumed the
underlying identity of the interests of the working class and the
Labour government.
Recently
Sheila Cohen has criticized this stance by arguing that the problem
was not
militancy per se but the absence of an explicit and systematic
consciousness of the importance of these grassroots struggles among
those conducting them: “an awareness which would identify them as
advances in a ‘war of position’ between labour and capital.”
For Cohen the barrier was the pervasive nature of reformist ideology
shared by the rank and file militant and the trade union official
alike, an ideology critical of capitalism’s abuses but which
implicitly accepted there was no alternative social order and so
reforms and improvements would have to be wrung from capital (Cohen
2006: 175-76).
By
contrast Eurocommunism simply proved to be latest updating and
rationalization of reformism. Later in the pages of Marxism
Today
and against the backdrop of Thatcherism and a far reaching shift to
the right in the labour movement these ideological positions hatched
into invocations of post-Fordism, ‘new times’ and the
post-industrial society. But in the mid 1970s there was no echo of
this CP debate in the IS itself despite a major
factional
battle that saw the departure of a section of the IS leadership and
membership many seriously committed to the group’s rank and file
strategy, a strategy apparently shared by all though Cliff began to
wonder aloud if the shop stewards were being “bent” by the
reality of Labour in power and point to an older, supposedly more
conservative layer in contrast to a younger layer of workers in the
workplace (Higgins 1997, Birchall 2011: 344-379). Yet we should be
wary of anachronism when discussing the mid 1970s split as the
‘downturn’ controversy only became controversy in the SWP in
1979. More importantly, Cliff faced a great deal of scepticism and
resistance to his new sober estimate of the balance of class forces
throughout the party (Birchall 2011: 442).
But
whatever the final telos of the Eurocommunist argument surely its
account of Thatcherism was prescient and perspicuous? Daniels and
McIlroy are rightly critical of contemporary accounts of Thatcherism
like Stuart Hall’s ‘The Great Moving Right Show.’ Hall’s
article was indisputably an acute and clear eyed anatomy of
Thatcherism. Originally drafted in January 1979 before the Tories
swept to power it was later substantially rewritten, appearing in a
1983 collection called ‘The Politics of Thatcherism’ which was
itself a distillation of the politics of the Eurocommunist helmed
Marxism
Today
journal. There was much to admire in Hall’s account which was
framed as a specific alloy of Gramsci and Althusser. It regarded
Thatcherism as an intervention fashioned from pre-existing
ideological elements that had been previously marginal or unrelated
but were synthesized to create a space that ideologically condensed
and articulated the ‘crisis’ through the lens of Thatcherism.
Indeed this lens was intended to ensure the ‘crisis’ was actually
lived on
Thatcher’s terms and the ‘solutions’ were viewed through a
similar ideological optic. In Hall’s view the success of this
ideological-hegemonic strategy would have a prophylactic function,
acting as a powerful barrier to alternative narratives of the
‘crisis’ and their ‘solutions’ even though ‘objectively’
they ran counter to the ‘interests’ of many those interpellated
or constituted as political subjects by such ideological siren calls
(Hall 1983: 19-39).
But
such views tended to exaggerate the degree of Thatcher’s hegemony.
Daniels and McIlroy follow earlier critics (like Callinicos 1985,
Milliband 1985) who sharply contested the excessively masochistic
claims for Thatcherism’s appeal. They note that in January 1979 a
record majority told pollsters that trade unions were ‘too
powerful’ though those surveyed were divided as to whether this was
a good or bad thing. Yet by 1981 the proportion of voters telling
pollsters the unions were ‘too powerful’ was the lowest since
1973 and fewer respondents approved Thatcher’s trade union
‘reforms’ than did Heath’s a decade earlier. Though record
numbers of C2 skilled workers defected to the Tories alongside many
newly unionized white collar workers and the growing intermediate
layers like supervisors, managers, highly skilled salaried workers
and the like, the total of C2s was only marginally higher than 1974
when Labour ousted Heath from office with 37% of the national poll
(Daniels and McIlroy 2010: 37-39). Evidently there was a ‘new’
appeal among some sections of workers but this was far more delimited
than the reverse proselytizers of Thatcherism allowed for. Also, with
successive enlargements of the franchise there had always been a
section of the working class that had voted for the Tories.
Cohen
notes that despite the propaganda campaign to make “trade unionism
dirty words” (the starting point of the Ridley plan), Thatcher
moved stealthily, first of all introducing the 1980 Employment Act
that provided government funding for union postal ballots, restricted
picketing and ‘secondary action’ (solidarity) in the first salvo
of anti-trade union laws carefully put in place to circumscribe the
unions. But as Cohen demonstrates such destructive measures still
required the supine acquiescence of the TUC and despite rhetoric
promoting non-compliance like the specially organized 1982 Wembley
Conference that gathered to discuss the next round of anti-trade
union laws, meaningful opposition quickly collapsed like a house of
cards (Cohen 2006: 53-55).
Electorally
the Tories did not become more popular. Throughout the 1980s the
Tories remained, electorally, a minority taste though Thatcher
arguably succeeded in a creating a specific electoral bloc combining
traditional middle class Tory supporters with newly emerging
occupational segments based in the new or rapidly growing economic
sectors like financial services, the City, sales, retail and so on.
Trade unionists voting Tory declined again in 1983 despite the
popularity of the Falklands War. The Tory vote declined further in
1987 and 1992 and their vote was dwarfed by the combined votes of
Labour, the SDP (formed in 1983 by top table defectors from Labour)
and the Liberals. Crucially the vagaries of Britain’s ‘first past
the post winner takes all’ electoral system helped the Tories stay
in power until 1997. During the high tide of Thatcherism between 1983
and 1987 the British
Social Attitudes
survey recorded what it termed a “shift to the left” among the
British public largely hostile toward a whole number of Thatcherism’s
fundamental nostrums (Daniels and McIlroy 2010: 37-39). There were
points in the 1980s when the Thatcher could have received a fatal
rebuff thus checking the advance of neoliberalism. The most important
such moment was the epic 1984-85 Miners Strike that despite the
careful planning of the Tory government, the state managers combined
with the supine abstention of the TUC and Kinnock’s Labour
leadership had at least
two
clear cut moments when the NUM might have won: the dockers strike
that erupted in the summer of 1984 in defence of the National Dock
Labour Scheme and the pit deputies threat to withdraw pit safety
licenses for all working collieries.
Even
so a rejection of Marxism
Today’s
reading of Thatcherism that legitimated the Eurocommunist’s
advocacy of the ‘broad democratic alliance’ between Labour, the
Gang of Four and the Liberals and proclamations that ‘post-Fordism’
rendered older models of socialism antique, must not be allowed to
obscure the import of the Tories incremental ‘neoliberal turn’
which operated on the national and international plane. Nationally:
deflation in the context of a global recession allowing unemployment
to rise dizzyingly, the first salvo of anti-trade union laws, the
beginnings of a reduction in welfare coverage though this did not at
all mean reduction in the role of state, simply a reordering of its
priorities, regressive taxation and the abolition of capital
controls. Later other measures would be added to the neoliberal
repertoire such as privatization and ‘deregulation’ of the City.
Internationally: ‘globalization’ understood as the growing
salience of international competition, the reign of the market and
‘financialisation’. As the 1980s progressed, ‘globalization’
accelerated as the market pulled in previously ‘sheltered
economies’ like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and India.
‘Financialization’ involved deregulation and the scrapping of
capital controls and great flows of capital across the globe that
fed, and, in turn sustained the further acceleration of
‘globalization’. The reach of the market was extended even
further with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Ironically,
in Britain, the ‘neoliberal turn’ could only be carried through
by the state though it was not until Thatcher’s second term that
the Tory government could fully rely on the ‘state managers’ and
senior civil servants to implement their program. The state still had
a pivotal role to play in providing an optimal environment for
capital in terms of infrastructure, subsidies and incentives (as
neoliberalism meant Keynesianism for capital writ large), the supply
of adequately skilled labour, minimal legislative interference and so
on. So ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ – for this was
emphatically no return to the nineteenth century – retained
elements of the post-war Keynesian settlement while radically
remaking those elements especially the role of the state (Daniels and
McIlroy 2010: 29).
Perhaps
the greatest prize that neoliberalism carried off in the 1980s and
the 1990s was that of attaining the trade union’s quiescence. The
Tories success in intimidating the trade unions was crowned by the
capitulation of Labourism whose acceptance of neoliberalism set the
final seal on the new consensus and the paramountcy of the market. As
Gregory Elliott pithily expressed it: Labourism had never been an
offensive power against capital but after 1979 it could scarcely be
regarded as a defensive power either (Elliott 1993).
With
the return of capitalist crisis to the heartlands of global
capitalism – simultaneously the transmission belt of the crisis of
working class morale, leadership and organization – and a motive
force driving capital to radically attenuate the post war settlement
– the class based reformist parties of Labourism and Social
Democracy became active agents in radically recasting the existing
‘social compromise’ in a neoliberal direction.
After
the Labour Party’s electoral debacle in 1983 policy albatrosses
were sacrificed and the constituency based left demoralized or purged
with a consequent narrowing of ideological horizons as the leadership
drove the party to the right. By the late 1980s Kinnock’s Labour
Party had declared for the ‘social market’ as it grew to accept
the new landscape created by the Tories. The ambition to restore full
employment quietly receded as did the goal of reversing the Tory
privatizations.
But
it was the arrival of Tony Blair as leader after John Smith’s
unexpected death in 1994 that finally confirmed Labour’s
accommodation with neoliberalism. When Blair was elected party leader
Labour had suffered four bitter electoral defeats in a row (1979,
1983, 1987 and 1992). A slick ‘moderniser’ barely acquainted with
the traditions of the organised working class, contemptuous of trade
union baronialism, Blair had set his sights on the goal of, if not
quite emancipating Labour from the ballast of the trade unions by
breaking the ‘organic link’, then drastically attenuating union
influence. A reduction of the ‘block vote’ in the party’s
electoral college was obtained (from 70% to 50%). In the eyes of the
modernizers, the existence of the ‘block vote’ was an
embarrassing indication of Labour’s below the stairs origins as a
creation of the trade union movement. Of course the ‘block vote’
had been the innovation and instrument of the trade union bureaucracy
and had always been wielded to ensure the dominance of the
bureaucracy and parliamentary cliques over the union and party rank
and file’s. Battening off a grievious legacy of defeat, the
‘modernisers’ exploited their position of strength to push the
trade union chiefs for concessions on ‘reform’ of the ‘organic
link.’ But perhaps the most dramatic episode of the party’s
revisionist reconstruction that defined the birth of ‘New Labour’
was Blair’s success in ditching ‘Clause IV’. Despite the
successive derelictions littering Labour’s record ‘Clause IV’
had remained a vestigial talisman of the party’s socialist
aspirations.
As
‘New Labour’ went into the 1997 general election it relentlessly
emphasized the common ground it shared with the employers and the
Tories, openly promised to retain the Tory anti-union laws and
boasted the unions would receive no more favours than the bosses
club, the CBI. In the event the CBI and employers were perhaps
treated far more kindly than the TUC which saw its modest hopes for a
union-employer ‘social partnership’ with government as ringmaster
after the ‘Rhineland model’ brusquely rebuffed by Blair. Blair
and Brown in opposition also rejected the most timid steps toward
‘redistributive justice’ or progressive taxation. Indeed Blair’s
‘New Labour’ proved allergic to encouraging expectations of
change other than a change in the personnel in government or
cultivating any illusions that it would deliver reforms. In fact
‘Vote Labour with no illusions’ might very well have been Blair’s
slogan (Alford 1996: 2-23).
Whether
apocryphal or otherwise, it is said that Thatcher came to regard
Blair as her greatest achievement.
So
even allowing for the novelty of neoliberalism and the difficulty of
identifying a definite point of departure from the corporatist
post-war settlement, there was a general tendency in the SWP to focus
on the continuity with the past or to maintain that the post-war
settlement essentially
remained in place. Some of this had to do with identifying the
fulcrum of resistance. Thatcher was in power for 13 years but public
expenditure was cut in real terms in only two of those years. Public
sector employment grew while trade unions were reduced but certainly
not destroyed (the NUM was one of the exceptions). Evidently there
was some truth to this picture but simply emphasizing the
continuities with the past led to complacencies in analysis. Part of
the issue here then is properly defining neo-liberalism and its
scope.
How
do arguments reaffirming the centrality of the working class connect
with current arguments about the changing nature of work, the
radically altered ‘new capitalism’, the flexible labour market,
the acute problems faced by trade unionism in the context of
declining membership and, finally, the subject presently functioning
as a mnemonic for all these problems: the precariat? The supposed
dilation of precarious work and the emergence of the precariat
defined in
nuce
as labour easy to fire, temporary, often notionally self employed,
low paid and lacking the rights of full, long term and often
organized workers, is at the centre of debate. In a conjuncture
dominated by the gravest crisis of global capitalism for generations
and by austerity imposed by a supposedly enfeebled neoliberal
coalition government, the relevance of questions about the shape of
the working class for socialists and militants trying to organize at
the grassroots and workplace, is an urgent one.
The
Present
Since
the 1980s trade unionism in Britain has suffered a steep decline from
its historical highpoint of 13.9m members in 1979. In 2009 union
membership stood at 6.7m members. Similarly according to the Labour
Force Survey
trade union density had declined precipitiously from 52.9% in 1977 to
24.7% in 2009 (LFS
2009).
In
turn the strongest citadels of trade unionism in manufacturing
suffered the sharpest decline. A combination of global recession and
Thatcher’s premeditated domestic deflation of the economy in the
early 1980s led to a mass shake out of labour that saw one in four
manufacturing jobs disappear between 1978 and 1985 – a retrenchment
of 22.8% in employment in the sector (Harman 1986: 3). Significantly
manual workers were also the core of Labour’s electoral support.
After Labour’s 1983 electoral meltdown when it won just 26.6% of
the national poll, some observers linked falling Labour support with
an irreversible shift in the class and occupational structure of
British society and some concluded on this basis that only a
fundamental realignment involving a shift right towards the ‘centre’
could remedy Labour’s impasse. Such a shift entailed Labour’s
fatal embrace of neoliberalism.
The
most celebrated version of this argument – for its cogency and the
controversy generated – was offered by the eminent
grise
of British social history and founder member of the Communist Party
of Great Britain’s Historians Group, the late Eric Hobsbawm, who
had diagnosed the forward march of labour halted as early as 1978 in
a lecture delivered during the twilight of Callaghan’s Labour
government, then beset by a growing social and economic crisis. Since
1978 the long retreat of organized labour in Britain and elsewhere
has seen many former critics concede Hobsbawm’s general argument.
The latest, Goran Therborn, argues the 1970s marked the highpoint of
the labour movement in the twentieth century before the millenarian
“Grand Dialectic” of Marxism, was checked and reversed with the
“triumph of neoliberalism” and the definitive eclipse of
“Eurocentric industrial socialism” (contrast Therborn 1984 and
Therborn 2013: 11).
After
Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, Hobsbawm reworked his lecture,
dropping the question mark capitalizing the l of labour in a move
deftly underlining the basic identity Hobsbawm saw between the Labour
Party and the working class. Originally there were two key elements
in Hobsbawm’s position. Firstly, recognizing the long term
contraction of the manual working class – Labour’s core bedrock
and, secondly, Hobsbawm’s insistence that fratricidal economism or
sectionalism, supposedly prominent in the shop floor revolts against
Labour’s income policy in the late 1970s, had undermined a wider
social solidarity and sapped political goodwill toward the Labour
government.
In
other words Hobsbawm failed to offer a serious, critical appraisal of
the demoralising impact of Labourism itself on the working class, the
effects of the imposition of pay restraint on workers that led to a
13% fall in real wages between 1975 and 1978, before the ‘Social
Contract’ was torpedoed by a bitter rebellion (Harman 1987).
Yet Hobsbawm was correct to identify a long term contraction of the manual working class. The gentle post-war decline of manufacturing employees began to accelerate in the late 1970s and was apparent in the major centres of the world economy as these figures illustrating the decline of manual workers as a proportion of all employees in some of the major European economies since the early 1960s makes clear.
Yet Hobsbawm was correct to identify a long term contraction of the manual working class. The gentle post-war decline of manufacturing employees began to accelerate in the late 1970s and was apparent in the major centres of the world economy as these figures illustrating the decline of manual workers as a proportion of all employees in some of the major European economies since the early 1960s makes clear.
So
in 1960-61 the percentage of manual workers as a proportion of all
manual workers in the following countries was: Belgium (34.6), France
(27%), Germany (36.5), Italy (26.6%) and Britain (34.8%). In 1970-71
the percentages were as follows: Belgium (32.1%), France (25.8%),
Germany (37.6%), Italy (31.1%) and Britain (32.4%). In 1980-81:
Belgium (21.9%), France (22.3%), Germany (32.7%), Italy (22.3%),
Britain (20.6%). Finally, in 1991-92: Belgium (17.7%), France
(18.9%), Germany (28.2%), Italy (19.8%) and Britain (18.9%) (Sassoon
1999: 652).
Though
Sassoon notes the reduction of manual workers as a proportion of the
workforce, apropos Labour’s falling share of national polls in the
1980s, he argues the central problem was less the ‘disappearance’
of Labour’s core constituency but rather the desertion of so many
C2 voters in 1979 and 1983 to the Tories (or the SDP after its
formation). As we noted above a third of trade unionists voted for
the Tories in 1979 mirrored in a swing of 11% among skilled manual
workers from Labour to the Tories (Sassoon 1999: 654).
Yet
the corrosive impact of Labour’s ‘crisis management’
governments not only drove away many skilled workers from their
traditional party but also prevented the mass of routine white collar
workers proletarianized and unionized in the 1960s and 1970s from
transferring their allegiance to the Labour Party as manual workers
unionized from the late 1880s through to the Second World War had
progressively done so. The growth of white collar trade unionism had
actually reversed two decades of trade union stagnation as union
density in Britain rose from 43.1% to 52.9% of the workforce between
1968 and 1977. Yet in 1983 – Thatcher’s second electoral victory
– only a quarter of white collar workers supported Labour at the
polls (Harman 1987: 83-95).
In
the early 1980s the Tories carefully choreographed set piece
confrontations with the steel workers (1981), the printers (1983) and
most significantly, the miners (1984-85), led to defeat for these
groups of workers. Defeat bred defeat. The Tories had been careful to
prepare the ground and isolate each group of workers before entering
the struggle. When it was prudent to do so the Tories walked away
from confrontation. Indeed they backed off from a battle with the
miners in 1981 pressurizing the Coal Board to quietly shelve plans
for pit closures (Cohen 2006: 57).
They
incrementally introduced anti-union laws that ensured the landscape
in terms of the law and trade unionism was transformed by the end of
the decade (McIlroy 1988). The Tories also mobilized the repressive
apparatus of the state, particularly the police, in a centralised and
co-ordinated fashion as factories closed and unemployment rose
spectacularly. For many observers the miners defeat fed a growing
apprehension of a ‘waning of collectivity’ (Raphael Samuel), of
the weakening of those formerly automatic ties of reciprocal class
solidarity, a bedrock consciousness of ‘us and them’ both
generated by, and animating the collective organizations of the
working class and shaping the milieu of the manual working class and
its communities (Samuel 2006: 3-17). The extension of this
‘collectivity’ was the existence of ‘trade union consciousness’
across the working class.
Indeed
in his dazzling overview of neoliberalism Neil Davidson argues the
“reduction” of the trade unions in Britain proceeded on three
lines in a coherent offensive reliant on the “strong state” for
its success. Firstly, unemployment was allowed to rise to levels
unknown in the post-war years. In 1982 factory closures unemployment
hit the 3m mark where it stayed until 1986. Simultaneously benefit
claimants were being treated with increasing harshness. This tended
to reinforce the isolation of the unemployed from the employed
working class. Also the destruction of social housing via the ‘right
to buy’ played a role in domesticating workers resistance. As Kevin
Doogan has argued the ‘fear’ of redundancy especially for workers
with mortgages and families hardly corresponds to the actual
possibility of redundancy but workers with families and mortgages
internalize that ‘fear’ and hesitate to take industrial action.
Secondly, the Tories set out to provoke confrontations with state
backed workers (see above) and rely on the wider trade union
movement’s timidity and the law to discourage solidarity being
extended. Britain’s industrial relations landscape was transformed
in a decade from one characterized by laissez-faire to being among
the most internationally legally restrictive frameworks in place.
Thirdly, in a more prolonged process where the employers led, new
industries were established and previously marginal industries
expanded as manufacturing capacity and jobs were shed. This process
often took place in areas like new towns with low and non-existent
union membership where management made strenuous efforts to prevent a
“culture of membership” taking root. Sheila Cohen noted that the
reimposition of the bosses ‘right to manage’ has acquired a novel
twist with neoliberalism with a whole new adversarial free workplace
culture promoted by the employers with the willing cooperation of the
trade unions keen to stave off redundancies (Cohen 2006: 70). As
Davidson ironically observes, Britain had its own analogue of the US
experience where the ‘sunbelt’ beget the ‘rustbelt’ as jobs
migrated South and tossed away their union cards en route. In
Britain, the job flight to new towns and conurbations was far more
significant than the job flight to Global South (Davidson 2011:
28-32).
Crucially,
in the ‘new industries’ like the call centre industry that now
employs 850,000 workers, the typical entrant is a young adult largely
unaware of trade union traditions. These workplaces present
formidable barriers to efforts to organize for a number of specific
reasons including employee turnover, the proportion of students among
the workforce and so on. Recruiting young workers as they enter
employment is key to retaining their loyalty and thus ensuring the
trade unions remain relevant.
Eric
Hobsbawm had something similar in mind to Samuel’s ‘waning of
collectivity’ when he discussed a ‘common style of proletarian
life’ that emerged from the 1880s and dominated until it began to
be eroded in the 1950s. This ‘common style of proletarian life’
reflected a historic reordering of the existing homogeneity and
heterogeneity, of the stratified divisions of the nineteenth century
working class as the old craftist, ‘aristocracy of labour’
(coined by Marx in correspondence in 1872) was undermined by the
transfer of skill from men to machines, the appearance of a separate
stratum of technicians and professionals not recruited from the
workshop and the growth of the tertiary sector and white collar
employment (Hobsbawm 1978: 281). Indeed this ‘common style of
proletarian life’ or ‘trade union consciousness’ was the
foundation Labourism was built upon. For other observers, the
‘recomposition’ of the working class indicated a deeper, more
profound mutation of society whether it signaled the advent of ‘new
times’, ‘post-Fordism’ or the ‘post-industrial society’
thus posing threat to the continued relevance of the labour movement
(Samuel 2006: 3-17).
Composition
and the Working class
Clearly
since the late 1970s there has been a dramatic change in the
composition of the working class. As we noted above manual workers
declined as a proportion of the total workforce. But changes in the
composition of the working class have been an integral feature of
capitalism since its inception. In its most celebrated, lyrical
passages The
Communist Manifesto
(1848) defined the capitalist mode of production as a dynamic mode
distinguished from all previous modes of production by the “constant
revolutionisation” of production. In Capital
(1867) Marx elaborated further: the industrial revolution was in part
defined by a historical transition from the formal subsumption of
labour power to the real subsumption of labour power. This historical
process had involved a more or less prolonged struggle by capital to
make artisanal forms of the labour process it had inherited its own
object and thus transform the labour process itself by introducing
and extending the social division of labour, detail labour and so
forth. This development was an aspect of the transition from the
domestic putting out system to manufacture and to machinofacture in
the course of the nineteenth century.
So
the dynamic of competitive capital accumulation led to changes in the
production and labour process which also drove the constant making
and remaking of the working class. Nevertheless we should
parenthetically concede EP Thompson’s stricture that one, variable
aspect of this ‘making’ of the working class, as part of the
dialectic of the subjective and objective, was a product of the
resistance of the working class itself which though it was an
exploited, subaltern class, had never merely been the fungible object
of capital. Thompson made a vital methodological point and one at the
centre of his theoretical enterprise that: “class and
class-consciousness are always the last, not the first stage in the
real historical process” (Thompson quoted in Price 1980: 14). The
transition from a strongly artisanal labour force to factory hands
also paralleled a transition from one mode of industrial conflict
dominated by machine breaking, ‘food riots’, physical violence to
the resort to the strike weapon which became slowly separated as
those other means became obsolete (Cronin 1979: 46-47).
Though
manufacturing did not employ all manual workers (as Harman had
pointed out), it certainly embraced the bulk of them. With the
contraction of manufacturing in the advanced capitalist economies,
the tertiary and service sector grew. In his 1978 article Hobsbawm
had conceded that a wider proletarianisation of the workforce had
accompanied the contraction of manual workers. Cliff also made this
point when commenting on the growth of trade unionism among white
collar workers echoing earlier arguments on these lines in the IS
tradition (Cliff 1979 and Hallas 1974). But Cliff also maintained
white collar workers were far less “strike prone” than manual
workers as newcomers to trade unionism (Cliff 1979: 13).
Relatively
new to trade unionism white collar workers had yet to acquire the
traditions of solidarity and militancy that distinguished other
sections of the working class. They had only begun the process of
acquiring ‘trade union consciousness.’ But this was also true in
the past of other sections of the working class such as the highly
skilled artisans outflanked by manufacture or the craftist engineers
undone by deskilling and machinofacture. Or the car worker of the
1930s Midlands new ‘greenfield’ sites far from the factories,
smokestacks and mines of the great industrial cities like Manchester
or Birmingham or the sprawling industrial conurbation of the ‘Black
Country’ (this aspect of the ‘changing working class’ is
captured effectively by Smith 2007: 48-69).
This
discussion points to two key points: firstly, classes
do not stand still,
and, secondly, Marxists should be wary of ‘normative’ conceptions
of the working class and ‘timeless’ assumptions about what the
working class should look like.
Today
the lives of the vast majority of the populace are still shaped by
the necessity of having to sell their labour power whether low paid
or well paid, organized or unorganized. This is not to deny the real
objective difficulties facing militants in their efforts to organize
in areas that have proven stubbornly resistant to such attempts or
those areas that have become a byword for what is now widely
perceived to be precarious work.
At
present trade unions face a number of challenges not least retaining
their existing members even as they aspire to extend their influence
and membership. The success of such an elementary task may well be
connected to effective resistance to the neo-liberal cuts strategy of
the Con-Dem government and a broader revival of the working class. We
will return to this question in our conclusion.
Trade
Unions Today
(i)
International context
Clearly
the ‘neoliberal turn’ in the course of the 1980s was a major
demarche for the trade unions. Yet international comparisons are
difficult to make because of the (i) different national contexts, and
(ii) variable methods of statistical collection. Leaving caveats
aside Daniels and McIlroy summarise the latest international
comparisons made by Jelle Visser on the state of trade union
organization in 24 major countries published in 2006 (Visser 2006: 38-44).
During
the 1980s union membership increased in Australia, Canada, Denmark,
Finland, Sweden and Korea. In Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany
and Japan union membership remained stable. In contrast the US,
Britain, France, Holland and Ireland experienced significant declines
in union membership. Also union density – the percentage of workers
in unions of all employees – also fell.
During
the 1990s the decline in the US and Britain continued and they were
joined by Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Italy and Japan.
The position in France stabilized though from a low base. Membership
grew in Belgium, Holland, Spain, Canada and Ireland.
So
the picture in the last two decades of what Goran Therborn somewhat
mournfully described as the ‘workers century’ was of a
generalized retreat by trade unionism. From 1980 the US lost 2m trade
unionists and from 1990 Germany lost a third. Britain’s steep fall
came on the heels of historically high union membership of 13.4m in
1979. Between 1978 and 1985 2.5m trade union members were lost in
Britain alone (Harman 1987).
The
following period between 1997 and 2005 was one of stabilization but
not resurgence. So in the US union density fell slightly from 13.6%
to 12.5%. In Britain density fell from 30.6% to 29% and in New
Zealand from 23.6% to 22.1%. There were steeper falls in Australia
from 30.3% to 22.9% and Germany from 27% to 22.6%. Ireland went from
43.5% to 35.3%, Italy from 36.2% to 33.7% and Sweden 79.5% to 74.1%
(Daniels and McIlroy 2010: 5-6).
However
as Daniels and McIlroy point out aggregate union membership or
density is not the only indicator of trade union strength. The level
and intensity of industrial action is also important. The industrial
landscape in the US, Britain and Germany between 1996 and 2005
witnessed a low level of industrial action. So in this period
Britain’s strike rate was half the average of the core 14 EU
economies. France was double the average and Spain and was eight
times greater than the average. Also, France currently has a union
density less than a third of Britain’s. Yet in the last ten years
the French working class has been far more combative than British
workers.
Any
estimate of working class strength has to look beyond aggregate union
membership and density and also consider class consciousness,
confidence and militancy. Furthermore as indicators of class strength
they are never simply ‘givens’ but hard won gains acquired by the
working class in action and as such they may also be eroded or lost
entirely.
(ii)
Trade Unions In Britain Today
Today
there are 6.7m trade union members in Britain. In many ways this
represents an impressive benchmark. Historically it is relatively
high and there is no other association or organization that comes
close to claiming the allegiance of so many people in Britain. There
are many more trade unionists today than there were on the eve of the
Great Unrest 1910-14 discussed earlier. This is the case even though
the period between 1880 and 1910 saw annual if modest growth in trade
union membership despite largely being a period of relative downturn.
Even so the decline from the heights of 1979 was steep and further
declines cannot be discounted.
Consider
the following trends. According to research in 2005 by Alex Bryson
and Rafael Gomez focusing on young adults and trade unionism, a major
obstacle to the revitalization of trade union membership is the
growth of so-called ‘never members’. In 1980 only a quarter of
all employers had never been in a trade union. In 2005 that figure
was one half of all employees and though three in every five public
sector worker was a trade union member, the corresponding figure for
the private sector employees was one in every six workers. Also as
Darlington concedes employment growth in unionized workplaces is
slower than non-unionised workplace and that inevitably means that
falling trade union density is destined to continue in Britain unless
it is arrested by trade union growth from a different source (Bryson
and Gomez 2005).
Bryson
and Gomez claim that falling union membership is due to the rise of
‘never members’. Between 1983 and 2001 the percentage of workers
who had never been a union member rose by over two thirds from 28% to
48% while trade union membership fell by a third from 49% to 31% in
the same period. Crucially, this partly explains why union density is
greater among older cohorts of workers. In other words, higher union
density among older workers is not simply an expression of the length
of service. The implication is that union density will eventually
start to fall among future older cohorts of workers unless, once
again, these trends are arrested by new countervailing trends.
Interestingly, Bryson and Gomez found that for workers born after the
mid 1960s never
joining a trade union was a common life event. In 1994 ‘never
members’ became the majority of the workforce for the first time in
the post-war period. Thus, trade unions face the danger that joining
a union might become a deviant
instead of a conformist behavior. Part of the point about tradition
is that it is shared among a group as part of its experiential
horizon palpably connecting the generations and thus establishing
threads between the past and the present. Also a common life
experience in part shaped by a basic awareness of ‘us’ and ‘them’
is vital for ‘trade union consciousness’ to flourish. If the
experience of struggle, collectivity and solidarity is lost or
becomes atypical then trade unionism is confronted with difficulties.
We might say that Bryson and Gomez’s research symptomatically
underscores the importance but also difficulties of attracting new,
young entrants into the workforce (Bryson and Gomez 2005).
Yet
what is missing from Bryson and Gomez’s research or rather what
needs to be borne in mind is the wider historical or social context
in which trade unions flourish or otherwise and the past drivers
of union growth. So the pioneering struggles to establish trade
unionism in the nineteenth century were led by militants or
particular sections of the workforce ie. deviant
minorities though these minorities were articulating the wider,
largely inchoate experience of their workmates.
As
we saw the decline in union membership since 1979 has stabilized in
the last fifteen years or so but this has not brought a renewed
advance. The latest snapshot of trade union strength estimates
membership at 6.7m members. The 2009 Labour
Force Survey
(hereafter LFS) calculates union density among all workers to be
24.4%. Trade union density is higher among women (29.5%) than men
(25.2%), a reversal only established in the decade before 2009. So
2009 marked the eighth consecutive year that women were more likely
to be union members than men. Male trade unionism was severely hit by
the millions of jobs shed in traditional male occupations,
particularly manufacturing, mining and so on. Two thirds of all
manual occupations in manufacturing have disappeared since the 1970s.
In contrast to the declining fortunes of manufacturing employment
there was major growth in the service / tertiary sector though these
sectors contained many manual occupations such as dockers, lorry, bus
and train drivers, postal workers, refuse workers and so on.
Also
since the ‘neoliberal turn’ there has been a massive expansion of
employment in health and education. Kevin Doogan has drawn attention
to the massive expansion in the realm of social reproduction such as
health and education and noted how retrenchment in terms of cuts to
social benefits and so forth, has obscured reality of employment
growth in areas dominated by female wage labour. So between 1992 and
2002 total employment in the EU grew 8.7% but employment in education
was double at 17.7%. 12.2m jobs were created overall in the EU during
this period and over half of these jobs were in health and education.
Interestingly employment growth driven by health and education
experienced a similar surge in the US between 1980 and 2000 (Doogan
2010: 136-38).
Part
of the Tory animus towards the public sector apart from a desire to
recommodify social reproduction by means of contracting out,
privatisation and the like, in all likelihood derives from the fact
that public sector trade union density is 56.6%. This is in sharp
contrast to the historically low level of 15.1% for the private
sector – a quite stunning reversal of the previous relationship
that means just one in seven workers remains a trade union member in
the private sector. However we need to be wary of misunderstanding
the figures concerning trade union density. Union membership is in
fact fairly evenly split between the private and public sectors.
Union density in the private sector is so low because the sector is
actually much larger than the public sector though in certain
strategic areas of the private sector union density is quite high
(Smith 2007: 53).
Chris
Harman claimed that the ‘headline’ figure actually underestimated
trade union strength in the private sector as almost half of all
private sector workplaces were covered by collective bargaining
agreements. Also key private sector industries enjoyed high levels of
unionization such as the 40% of workers unionized in electricity, gas
and water supply, transport, storage and communications (Harman).
Perhaps
unsurprisingly trade union density mirrors the North-South divide and
also separates the Celtic ‘fringe’ from England. In 2009 union
density was 39.9% (it had grown 4.2% in the ten years before 2009)
with Wales the next highest (35.4%), followed by Scotland (31.8%) and
finally England (26.1%). In England union density was at its lowest
in the South East, London and East Anglia. Significantly across all
sectors of the economy 46.6% of all UK employees were in workplaces
where trades were present (LFS
2009).
Also
being a trade union member remained a reliable indicator of better
pay (the so called wage premium) with average hourly earnings of
trade union members 15.3% more than non trade union members though
according to analysis by Mercer and Notley the wage premium has
narrowed in the last thirty years.
Though
union membership fell steeply between 1979 and 1995 this fall was
broadly in line with the overall fall in employment levels though
such a claim hardly began to convey the devastating impact of
unemployment and recurring recession on regions where ‘traditional’
industries provided the spine of employment. In 2009 union density
among female workers in the public sector was 56.8% while among men
it was 56.2%. In the private sector just 12.4 of women were union
members compared to 17.2% of all men. The public sector is the main
bastion of full time women’s employment and its growth in recent
years across the OECD economies has been pivotal in the feminization
of the workforce and the trade unions (LFS
2009).
Between
1995 and 2009 trade union density fell in the public and private
sector having failed to keep pace with overall employment growth. We
saw in Bryson and Gomez’s research on ‘never members’, union
density increased as workers got older. So for the 16-24 age cohort
of males and females union density was just 9%. The corresponding
percentage for the following age cohorts was: 25-34 (28%), 35-49
(32%), 50 plus (35%). But Bryson and Gomez also suggested that the
relationship between rising union density with older cohort and
length of service was breaking down (Bryson and Gomez 2005).
The
larger the workplace the higher trade union density and so workplace
with 50 plus workers had 37% density compared to just 17.2% in
workplaces employing less than 50 workers and the coverage of
workplaces by collective agreement reflected this pattern with 45.4%
(50 plus employees) and 19% (50 less employees). More problematic is
the fact that trade union density is higher among managerial /
supervisory employees (28.6%) than non-managerial employees (25.4%)
and this probably reflects the higher union density in the public
sector. Ominously union density fell between 2002 and 2009 by -5.3%
among process plant operatives and machine operatives and by -6.6%
among skilled trades. Among the workforce collective agreements
covered 34.2% of full time employees and 28.6% of part-time employees
while there were definite benefits to being a trade union member.
Thus the wage premium – the difference between what union members
and non union members earn – in the public sector was 19% and in
the private sector was 5.1% (LFS
2009).
Presently
the savage effects of the Con-Dem coalition’s austerity measures,
public sector cuts and rising food and energy prices is contributing
to falling earnings and depressing living standards for the
overwhelming majority. A significant rise in militancy and industrial
struggle leading to a wider revival of trade unionism would be needed
to reverse such trends.
Comments
on precarious work
Before
considering the present state of the trade unions we briefly comment
on what is widely regarded as a novel mutation in the pattern of
employment especially in Britain and the US. We are referring to the
notion of precarious work and the assumption central to the idea that
the growth of the former is undermining stable, permanent employment
in the old heartlands of late capitalism.
There
is some pre-history here as discussion and speculation about profound
changes to the nature of the occupational structure stretch back to
the 1980s and even further. The Marxist French Regulation School
argued that the post-war regime of capital accumulation had been
characterized by the ascendancy of the Fordist model of accumulation
and yoked mass production to mass consumption providing the basis
upon which the edifice of the Keynesian post-war settlement arose
(Aglietta 1979 originally published in French in 1976; for a
devastating critique see Brenner and Glick 1991: 45-119).
Subsequently,
a number of theorists took their cue from the exhaustion of Fordism
and the emergence of a new, more flexible, less standardized regime
of accumulation, to suggest far reaching changes to the labour
market, the occupational structure and the working class. The 1980s
saw the adumberation of ‘dual labour market theory’ in various
guises such as Atkinson and Gregory’s ‘dual labour force’
theory that highlighted the existence of a ‘core’ and ‘periphery’
in the labour force on the basis of a “meager empirical foundation”
(Doogan 2009: 90). In the 1980s Chris Harman challenged some of the
assumptions underlying the idea of a ‘core’ and ‘periphery’
labour force by arguing that part-time employment, contracting out
and contracting in were identifiable trends in employment that
particularly stood out during downturns in economic activity but once
there was a need to increase output due to more stable demand,
employers were likely to turn temporary workers into permanent
workers and part timers into full-timers. Also Harman pointed out
that an economic downturn or recession was more likely prompt
employers to shed part-time or temporary workers rather than shedding
full time or permanent workers, shifting work back to the ‘core’
workforce (Harman 1987: 64-65).
For
some the notion of precarious work has a great deal of explanatory
power while others have contested its validity on the basis of
empirical weaknesses and theoretical shortcomings. The following
definition of precarious work comes from the International
Metalworkers Federation’s (IMF) 2008 Spotlight campaign material
against precarious work. Its anonymous authors define precarious work
as “typically non-permanent, temporary, casual, insecure and
contingent.” Significantly, in recent years the neoliberal ‘strong
state’ has abetted certain neoliberal employment practices by
abridging statutory rights or removing them all together and allowed
employers to pursue ‘flexibility’ in relation to their employees.
These employment practices include temporary contracts, bogus ‘self
employment’, abusive probationary periods, involuntary ‘free’
work, on call or optional daily hire, contracting out, employment
disguised as training and so on.
Also
the IMF Spotlight document argues that precarious labour has long
been a feature of employment in the Global South and its arrival in
the old heartlands of global capitalism represents a new threat to
stable, permanent employment (IMF Spotlight 2008).
One
issue is the use of employment agencies to provide employers with
temporary labour. In Britain it is estimated that there are between
1.1 and 1.5 million temporary workers. Most temporary workers are
employed in manufacturing, transport or financial services with the
majority of agency workers employed in large workplaces of 50+
alongside permanent workers. Unsurprisingly the majority of these
temporary workers regard agency work as a route to permanent
employment while employers mainly cite the provision of temporary
cover to meet a short term uptick in demand as their chief reason for
employing agency workers.
Figures
in the LFS
2010
temporary workers earn just 68% of the salaries of permanent workers
and yet 35% of temporary workers from agencies have been doing the
job for more than a year meaning they are permanent in all but name,
pay and conditions. Also since October 2011 the coalition government
changes to the agency worker regulations (AWR) has given the
employers more of a free hand to discriminate against temporary
workers.
Kevin
Doogan cites the OECD’s 2004 Employment Outlook survey that
reported 7% of male full-time employees were temporary workers. The
corresponding figure for women full time employees was 10%. Indeed
Doogan argues that issues around contingent and precarious work are
bedeviled by a tendency to hypostatize certain local trends in what
is a variegated, complex pattern of employment. The pattern of
employment, the occupational structure and the labour market are
quite fine grained and important nuances can be missed by analysis or
interpretation, as for example, in assuming changes in the nature of
work have proceeded from the labour market or the production process
and not changes in social policy or welfare. More generally, theories
of atypical contingent labour, the dual labour market, precarious
work and the like, implicitly assume a ‘normative’ conception of
the workforce or pattern of employment, from which the former
departs.
In
light of the IMF Spotlight description of precarious work we might
consider that precarious work has always been a feature of
employment, to a greater or lesser degree, particularly if we think
of the wretched nature of work and employment for long historical
periods in Britain or in certain industrial settings. Perhaps the
‘renewed’ significance of precarious work in the economies of
late capitalism should be considered as part of the demarche of
neoliberalism in the 1980s. In other words, the problem of precarious
work and its import might be subordinated to the larger problem of
understanding neoliberalism.
Neil
Davidson suggests another way of regarding the problem by arguing
that the post war ‘Golden Age’ of full employment that stretched
from the late 1940s until the arrival of mass unemployment in the
early 1970s, often treated as a ‘normative’ yardstick, was in
fact the anomalous development historically (Davidson 2010). More
generally, the ‘neoliberal turn’ and the severest global crisis
of capitalism since the 1930s has underlined in a quite startling
fashion just how historically transitory the post-war settlement was,
how full employment or, say, a national health service free at the
point of use to all, are not at all the natural, essential and
inevitable outcomes of capital accumulation.
Another
theoretical controversy proposes the novel salience of ‘flexible
accumulation’ and linked this to contingent labour in circumstances
where capital has acquired an extraterritorial nature. Thus capital’s
heightened degree of mobility reflects the trends of globalization
and financialization. A number of theorists have contrasted
extraterritorial capital to the territoriality of organized labour
and suggested that capital is now able to detour national labour
movements to a degree hitherto unknown. While it would be hard to
gainsay capital’s newly acquired extraterritoriality given the
massive growth in global flows of capital, financialization, the
tendency of corporations and multinationals to invest more in stock
markets or simply hoard billions instead of investing in production,
we should be wary of overstating the case. Extraterritoriality has
its limits and if capital refuses to invest in production because of
the low rate of profit it still remains dependent on labour and the
labour process. Massive investment in factories and plant accompany
capital’s requirements for infrastructure, educated, skilled
workers, supply chains, energy sources and markets and their
consumers. In other words, a relatively finite bundle of goods, or
necessary conditions is required for productive investment.
These
‘enabling conditions’ are provided by states which are by no
means powerless vis-à-vis capital in general, or transnational
corporations, in particular (TNC’s). Indeed national or
supra-national arenas (like the EU) are territorialities that also
provide capital with their markets. Of course the fear of capital’s
mobility is a powerful disciplinary factor on local labour movements,
exploited by TNCs to gain an advantage over labour and a competitive
edge against rival capitals as the history of the car industry in
North America, Europe and South East Asia indicates. Only recently GM
deliberated about which of its European plants would have to face
closure. In Britain both government and the trade unions beat a path
to GM’s door to provide assurances of workers continuing
willingness to be ‘flexible’ in order to save the Vauxhall plant
at Ellesmere Port. Yet GM’s decision was hardly a capricious search
for low cost, flexible labour but rather a painful strategic dilemna
of a TNC reluctantly dealing with the consequences of indefinite
‘overcapacity’ in the European car market.
In
this context, Kevin Doogan has noted that all the talk of the rise of
the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other
economies, though they have relatively cheap but educated labour,
tends to obscure that plentiful labour low costs are transitory and
in China labour costs are already rising. Startlingly, Doogan points
to the UNCTAD World Investment Report that shows that in 2005 Britain
received $165bn or 18% of all Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and
alongside the US, Canada, France and Holland received 75% of all FDI
while the poorest 50 nations received just 0.8% (Doogan 2009: 63-75).
Also citing Kim Moody, Doogan notes that since the early 1980s the US
has received more FDI than the outflow of FDI and yet 4m
manufacturing jobs were shed in the same twenty year period
indicating that whatever else was going on the loss of manufacturing
employment could not be credibly explained by ‘capital flight’
(Doogan 2009: 75).
Such
a picture would certainly appear to undercut common perceptions of
‘capital flight’ leaving organized workers high and dry by
capital chasing cheaper, more flexible sources of labour to exploit
elsewhere in the globe. It shows how the advanced, developed
economies remain at the core of the global economy and underlines the
fact that China is not just a rival to the established developed
economies but joining the ‘club’. Nevertheless, Doogan’s 2005
FDI figures for Britain omit the impact of crisis of 2008-09 that saw
the developed economies lose much ground in terms of the inflow of
FDI though they have subsequently recovered some of that ground. Even
so the developing and transition economies have retained the inflow
of FDI they won during the crisis. In 2011 Britain was the third
largest recipient of FDI among the developed economies after the US
and Belgium whilst also being the third biggest investor of FDI with
$107bn invested abroad after the US and Japan (UNCTAD World
Investment Report 2012).
Returning
directly to precarious work there are other problems with some
accounts. An egregious instance of ‘theory’ driven accounts or
speculation that is ‘blind’ to the complex empirical issues at
work is the distinction between part-time and temporary employment.
Often these two areas are confused. The OECD’s 2004 Employment
Outlook survey reported that 7% of male full time employees were
temporary while 10% of female full time employees were temporary. In
contrast 34% of male part time workers were temporary workers while
the corresponding figure for women was 18%. So there is less overlap
between part time and temporary work than is often assumed. For
example four in five women part time workers worked on a regular
basis in Britain (Doogan 2009: 155).
Similarly
a 2001 US Bureau of Labor survey found that 91% of part timers were
regular employees and that the largest proportion of these were
located in the retail sector where the wage differential between part
time and full time employees was the lowest. Again focusing on some
of the complacent generalizations from a weak empirical base Doogan
takes up some of the critical challenges to Chris Tilly’s research
on the growth and nature of part time employment in the US from 1970.
Tilly made a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ part time
employment that in his view sprang from the growth of a ‘secondary
labour market’ of low paid, low skilled, disposable labour largely
made up of involuntary employment. Subtle though the point is, Doogan
draws on research critical of Tilly but makes the more general but
useful argument that though involuntary labour has expanded in the
last forty years, the growth of part time employment from 1980
occurred because of the growth of industries that employed part time
workers. Full time workers were not being replaced by part time
workers. Trends and patterns in employment are quite complex and
quite specific and generalizing from trends can be misleading or skew
reality. Often flexibility in employment simply mirrors the specific
contours of an industry or sector that is particularly sensitive to
fluctuations in demand in opposition to those sectors where demand is
more predictable. In such contexts a more flexible labour force is
likely to be found such as the retail sector (Doogan 2009: 157-59).
A
crucial issue arising out of the debate on precarious work but also
the future of trade unionism, concerns the nature of work for young
people. There is a widespread perception that features typifying
employment for the 16-24 year old cohort such as low pay, part time,
unsociable hours and so on, will spread to, and undermine the
permanent, stable occupations of their parents. In other words, when
young workers are their parents age they will find precariousness has
become universalized.
We should not be complacent about such a vista; the ruling class are
currently conducting an offensive against working class living
standards right across the board but such an extreme scenario of
universal
precarity is
implausible for a number of reasons. Firstly, it misunderstands the
nature of employment for the 16-24 year old cohort that has broadly
shaped the nature of the work they do in the post war years; features
that define the occupations that 16-24 year olds do in the course of
their transition to the sorts of occupations that typify employment
for older workers.
In
Britain there have been modifications
to nature of employment for young people in the last forty years or
so. One is the great expansion in the service and retail sectors that
created a new demand for labour. Another has been the great reduction
in manual based apprenticeships as manufacturing employment declined.
Of course some of these apprenticeships are now degree based and part
of the great expansion, and participation of young people in higher
education. Connected to this central development Kevin Doogan notes
the more recent rise of the student labour market driven by the
expansion of student numbers in Higher Education and the state’s
attempt to cut grants and subsidies and shift the burden of tuition
costs onto students. In doing so an incentive was created for growing
numbers of students to find part time and temporary employment.
Evidently, the phenomenon of graduate unemployment notwithstanding,
most students will not spend the rest of their working lives doing
bar work, serving in restaurants or stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s
(by 1998 a quarter of the supermarket’s workforce were students).
Though connected to a longer established pattern of employment for
young people and the expansion of services and retail, the rise of
the student labour market has been driven by social policy and is
here to stay (Doogan 2009: 163-64).
Examining
recent ONS statistics for 2012 on the structure of employment in the
North West of England among the 16-29 year old cohort, it is revealed
that a shade over a quarter of those in employment were in sales and
retail (12.7%), waitressing (3.33), care home assistants 3.11%), bar
staff (3.0%), kitchen and catering (2.94%), office clerks (2.46%) and
customer care assistants (2.41%).
These
figures are interesting on a number of different levels. According to
ONS figures for 2012, NW England generated 10% (£120bn) of the UK’s
GDP. It was the region where manufacturing made the greatest
contribution to GDP. Yet for these young workers, the figures show
how important service sector and retail employment are. But it should
be borne in mind that a large proportion of young people in HE or
unemployed are not indicated. Most importantly though these
statistics are a snapshot of a particular occupational profile and
they show us what young workers are doing at 18 or 22 but not what
they will be doing in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond (ONS 2012).
(iii)
Trade Union Revival?
Only
recently Ralph Darlington considered the potential of the existing
network of workplace reps and lay stewards providing the spine of any
revival of trade unionism. Darlington’s position draws on a
critical tradition, a native socialist and Marxist evaluation of the
‘Janus’ like character of trade unionism that focused on the
perennial conflict between trade union officials and the rank and
file. Essentially this theoretical stance logically led to a
sociology of the trade union bureaucracy that explained why the
officials conservation of the union apparatus and their mediatory
role between capital and labour, was vital for understanding the
nature of the animal. This tradition stretched back to the working
class revolts of 1910-20 and was adapted and developed by the IS as
the post-war boom started to lose momentum and the struggle on the
shop floor reached a peak during the extraordinary struggles of
1968-74 (Sheila Cohen 2006: 9-29).
Darlington’s
balance sheet views workplace reps as qualitatively distinct from the
full time union officials and potentially more responsive to union
members. In the different political climate of the late 1970s Tony
Cliff asserted that “the institution of shop stewards is profoundly
democratic. They are the direct representatives of the workers”
(Cliff 1979: 32). Despite the profound changes in the workplace and
the low level of struggle Darlington also maintains that the lay reps
are potentially more responsive and democratically accountable to the
ordinary union members. Workplace reps and stewards remain the
backbone of workplace organization “in dealing with workers’
grievances, and standing up to management and attempting to
preserve/advance their members pay and conditions of employment”
(Darlington 2010: 1).
However
this optimistic assessment is not shared by all. Earlier Daniels and
McIlroy argued that the qualitative weakening of workplace
organization based on lay representatives was one of the
“achievements” of the Tories after 1979. The role of lay
representatives after the ‘neoliberal turn’ has been radically
altered and rarely involves negotiation or face to face on anything
as substantial as pay. With the TUC largely sidelined what modest
support there was for projects like the Union Learning
Representatives (ULRs) “represented the state’s attempt to
reshape workplace trade unionism and channels its functions away from
adversarialism.” Thus ULU provided limited scope for trade unionist
activists in the workplace (Daniels and McIlroy 2009: 140-41). Yet
Darlington’s argument has received some support. More recently, on
the basis of detailed research on the impact of union Equality reps
in the workplace, Sian Moore, has argued that despite their
apparently anodyne remit and the strenuous efforts by the employers
and union officials to maintain ‘non-adversarial’ workplace
culture, Equality reps have been drawn into the role of quasi
representatives of workers particularly through issue like workplace
stress and bullying and were often pushed down a path of viewing
employer-employee relations in an increasingly adversarial manner
(Moore 2011).
More
broadly Darlington recognizes the weakening of stewards organization
in the last 30 years. He points to the rapid dilation of shop
stewards during the 1970s that saw numbers peak at 350,000 in 1984.
Shop stewards organization had spread from its manufacturing
strongholds to other growing sectors of employment. But the
differential
impact of recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s combined with
the rapid advance of neoliberalism meant numbers tumbled as plants
and factories closed. A leitmotif of Alan Thornett’s gripping
account of carworker militancy at British Leyland’s Cowley plant in
the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, is the potential and limits of
British trade unionism – “strong on organization, weak on
politics” – in a narrative that weaves the story of a tenacious
shop floor militancy, hair raising betrayals by the union officials,
and deftly ends with Thornett’s major illustrative lesson: militant
trade unionism could not ultimately prevent the rash of plant
closures in the early 1980s. In other words, in the face of a
combination of severe recession and a determined, unified ruling
class offensive, the relative fragility of workers power within
capitalism, the dependence of a strong shop floor organization on
quite specific enabling conditions, was cruelly exposed when some of
those crucial constitutive features disappeared (Thornett 2011:
355-61).
But
what are the number of lay reps and stewards today? Weighing the
available evidence Darlington estimates the current number of
workplace lay reps is between 128,000 and 137,000 (or 146,000 if
smaller workplaces are included). The TUC estimate of 200,000 lay
reps is considered overly optimistic. Darlington concludes that
whatever the real figure – presently the same level as the mid
1960s though shop stewards were then were far more powerful – the
numbers are likely to have fallen further since the Con-Dem coalition
took office in 2010 due to the public sector cuts, redundancies,
outsourcing, privatization and decentralization of pay bargaining.
Clearly
public sector trade unionism has been facing a major challenge
analogous to the onslaught against trade unionism in manufacturing in
the 1980s. However there are some important differences. In the
advanced late capitalism’s the variegated tasks of social
reproduction are irreplaceable: capital requires an educated, skilled
workforce to compete internationally. The capitalist state if it is
to retain and attract investment must ensure there is an educated,
literate and skilled workforce. The manufacture, of say, televisions
may migrate to South East Asia but social reproduction in the realm
of healthcare or education cannot similarly be ‘lost.’ Of course
the privatization of pension provision, social insurance and
healthcare are eminently feasible and the Tories are assiduously
working toward this goal. But the success of this project would not
spell the disappearance of the public sector or the role of the
neoliberal ‘strong state’ (Davidson 2011).
Currently
lay reps are present in just 13% of workplaces with 10 or more
workers and even in workplaces where trade unions are recognized only
45% of these workplaces have an onsite lay rep – a fall of 10%
since 1998. The majority of reps are in the public sector (67%) while
the private sector shares 17% according to the 2004 Workplace
Employment Relations Survey (WERS).
Darlington notes that the majority of these stewards are male,
full-time and over 40 years though the proportion of women reps is
growing (44% in 2004). The 1968 Donovan
Report had
recommended the incorporation of lay representatives and shop
stewards to tame union militancy but incorporation or ‘participation’
as it was known as in some sectors (see Thornett’s account of the
baleful impact of the unions embrace of ‘participation’ at
British Leyland in the late 1970s) did not really start to take off
until Labour came to office in 1974 (Hyman 1978, Cliff 1979, Cohen
2006 and Thornett on ‘participation’ 2011). So with the state’s
encouragement employers pursued the integration of shop stewards by
granting facility time, sometimes on a full time basis, which took
reps away from the shop floor and their workmates. According to 2004
WERS
85%
of these full-time reps were in the public sector (mainly health).
Most were remote from their members but 1 in 10 received no pay for
time spent doing their union duties (Darlington 2010: 4-5).
In
an appreciation of Richard Hyman’s work, Darlington and Upchurch
have mounted a stout defence of the sociological validity of ‘trade
union bureaucracy’ against the tendency of late Hyman to dismiss
the concept as perjorative and unscientific. Indeed they convincingly
restate a concept that Hyman – now Britain’s pre-eminent
authority on industrial relations – had helped to develop when he
was a member of the IS (Hyman left the group in 1976). Basically
Darlington and Upchurch make the case, suitably reworked and updated,
that the division between the trade union bureaucracy or ‘full time
officials’ and the ‘rank and file’ despite the weakness of the
latter in recent years is still central to any appreciation of
intra-union dynamics (Darlington and Upchurch 2012).
Yet
the weakening of workplace organization and low strike levels
prompted a shift in the balance of what lay reps did - away from
bargaining on behalf of their workmates toward handling grievances
and disciplinary cases of individual employees. A relatively passive
rank and file has left workplace reps relatively beleaguered and
subject to various conservative pressures, more dependent on the
union office than they were thirty years ago. Also the union’s
willingness to play their part in such somnambulistic ‘New Labour’
schemes as ‘Partnership in Work’ could only dampen any
restiveness in the workplace. Significantly, lay reps and stewards
have not been able to provide the alternative leadership to the full
time officials they were able to in the past. Consider the era of
full employment when strikes could begin and end in victory before
the regional union office was even aware of it. The changing ratio of
stewards and reps to union members also tells a story, from 1:25 to
1:37 and this trend has been accompanied with the growing length of
tenure of union officials (Darlington 2010).
On
the ‘strength’ side Darlington considers the network of 150,000
health and safety reps that have improved workplace safety as area of
union advance. As we noted above more contentiously he also regards
the 22,000 ULRs or learning reps who promoted skills training and
employee development as providing an embryonic model of trade union
activism among individuals who in contrast to the union full timers
are younger and more likely to be black and female (Daniels and
McIlroy 2009, Darlington 2010 and Moore 2011).
How
has the trade union movement responded to falling membership and
declining influence? One response – prevarication dressed up as
decisive action – was merger. In 2007 the TGWU formed from various
general and transport unions in 1922 (Coates and Topham 1997), merged
with Amicus to create Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite. Derek
Simpson, the leader of Amicus, even declared: “we don’t need to
organize – that has failed. The way to grow our unions is merger”
(quoted in Cohen 2006: 156). Unsurprisingly, a ‘top down’
approach that omitted any scrutiny of the underlying weaknesses could
not halt the decline. With the abandonment of the ‘service model’
of trade unionism already well under way, the two unions had talked
of devoting 10% of their combined resources to recruitment.
Over
a decade ago as a new generation of senior full time officials on the
left began to emerge including some future General Secretary’s
there was a move from the failed ‘service model’ of trade
unionism (treating union members as customers requiring a range of
services, legal advice and so on) that came to dominate after
Kinnock’s embrace of ‘New Realism’. Criticism of the ‘service
model’ mainly focused on its failure to arrest union decline and
signaled the discussion on the merits of the ‘organizing model’
(this debate was mirrored in other advanced Anglophone economies that
had undergone similar declines in union density like the US,
Australian and New Zealand). The ‘organizing model’ chiefly
involved a significant commitment of time, personnel and resources
for recruitment campaigns in a strategic workplace or sector by
mounting highly visible campaigns and trying to foster confidence and
initiative among workers. But there are definite limits to this
latter goal as left critics and advocates of an alternative ‘rank
and file’ or worker-to-worker model for recruitment and union
building, have made clear (Cohen 2006: 152-56). More often than not
other beleaguered activists have tended to view the ‘organizing
model’, for all of its limitations, as the only show in town.
In
1999 in a move billed as a ‘return to roots’ the TUC launched the
‘Organizing Academy’ with various partner unions as it bid adieu
to the bankrupt ‘service model’. The academy was intended to
train a cadre of union recruiters and organizers and according to the
few evaluations examining its effectiveness the results have been
mixed (many of these evaluations have been conducted by these
researchers who have collected their research in Simms, Holgate and
Heery: 2013). The major unions also launched their own versions of
the organizing academy. Between 2005 and 2007 2,000 stewards went
through Unison’s One
Step Ahead
program whose focus was branch organizing and recruiting. Arguably
such initiatives in Unison are nugatory given the weakness of branch
organization and the passivity of the union rank and file. In the
last decade in the NHS Unison’s commitment to ‘partnership’
with NHS managers and the government has been nothing short of a
disaster for NHS employees fuelling demoralization and cynicism in
equal measure.
The
PCS trained 3,000 extra reps whilst its membership grew from 265,000
to 300,000 members (this was before the advent of the Con-Dem
coalition). Unite has combined recruitment while talking the talk of
revitalizing the union movement and even the importance of renewing
the networks of reps and shop stewards. This would involve a focus on
the major issues of concern to the target audience in order galvanise
existing and potential members alike in sectors like aviation and the
meat industry where an industry wide combine of 50 lay reps
representing 18,000 workers was successfully created.
More
recently the austerity onslaught by the Con-Dem coalition has
prompted Unite unfurl its ‘community union’ initiative among the
unemployed – the union members of the future in the eyes of Unite -
in an effort to canalize some of the energy of the anti-cuts ‘social
movements’ and groups like UK Uncut and Occupy. Appropriately Jerry
Hicks – Len McCluskey’s left-wing, rank and file challenger for
Unite’s top job – is a member of one of Unite’s ‘community
branches.’ Certainly in Liverpool, Unite and other trade unions
have placed their personnel and resources at the disposal of the
local Trades Council and a coalition of anti-cuts activists trying to
build the fight against the deepest cuts the Coalition has passed on
to any local authority in the country - Labour led Liverpool City
council – in an interesting extension of the campaigning aspects of
the ‘organizing model.’ Yet Unite’s initiative in Liverpool is
clearly driven by the actual Unite cadre on the ground and the sheer
scale of the local authority cuts as the union does not play this
role everywhere. More generally the unevenness across the country as
it is mirrored in the changing, jagged profile of the resistance to
the cuts in this or that region, city or town, points to the need for
one national anti-cuts organization. Yet for a variety of reasons
including fissiparous sectarianism of the main left groups, no such
national organization is on the horizon as we approach the third
anniversary of the Con-Dem coalition (Seymour 2013).
Returning
to the ‘organizing model’ - it will not revitalize the trade
unions though it could possibly play a subordinate part in
the process that will do so.
It was on the face of it a response with promise from the TUC-trade
union bureaucracy who recognized that something was needed as
membership (and income) continued to decline and ‘New Labour’
spurned all but ‘social partnership’ lite not to speak of Blair
and Brown’s refusal to repeal the Tory anti-union laws. Also it was
necessary for members to feel they ‘owned’ the union to some
degree even if this was to be under strict parental supervision. An
added impulse was the proliferation of anti-austerity grassroots
resistance and the example of the student anti-fees struggle in
2010-2011. These clearly helped push Unite to introduce Unite
Community union in an effort to harness some of the energy of that
activism and capture the attention of an age cohort of workers and
potential workers the unions will need to attract to have a future.
But ultimately these ‘top down’ initiatives will be insufficient
without
a major revival of industrial struggle.
Some
conclusions
I have suggested that Thatcherism or the ‘neoliberal turn’ had a
differential impact on the working class in the last 30 years.
Workers and trade unionism in the much larger private sector where
roughly 45% or so of trade unionists are still found (density is much
lower at 15.1%) experienced setbacks as a result of the loss of
millions of manufacturing jobs. In extreme cases whole industries
were virtually wiped out like mining which now employs only 5,000
miners. Sometimes industries were profoundly reshaped like the car
industry. In the 1970s there was no other section of the working
class that was more militant than the car worker – including the
miner, the building worker or the engineering worker. The high pitch
militancy of the car worker whose mass meetings addressed by the
plant stewards typically ended with a show of hands is so emblematic
of the period that it upended the complacent illusions of John
Lockwood’s ‘affluent worker’ (a sociological study of Luton car
workers of the early 1960s).
In
1970 the car industry employed 850,000 workers nationally. Today that
figure is 145,000 (constituting 0.5% of Britain’s total workforce)
in the factories and related suppliers. To put that in perspective
there are now 850,000 workers employed in Britain’s call centre
industry many of those located in former industrial heartlands and
cities. In Glasgow, the city that once built one in four of the ships
on the world’s oceans, one in ten are employed in a call centre.
The more productive contemporary car worker produces many more cars
than their 1970s counterparts and 80% of these cars are for export
reflecting another turnaround that contributes about 10% to Britain’s
balance of payments.
There
are some interesting implications in the extraordinary productivity
gains made in the leaner manufacturing sector that still exists in
Britain. One is that manufacturing – acutely sensitive to
rationalization and reorganization in the globalised economy – is
unlikely to be a key provider of employment
growth even
if we were to assume the Tory led coalition government’s stated
desire to ‘rebalance’ the economy was not a promise given in bad
faith. The Tories, whose main donors are hedge funds, are absolutely
committed to defending the City and Britain’s vitally strategic
financial industry and only ‘reforms’ designed to stave off real
reform would ever be contemplated by the party. Indeed such
considerations also extend to the other political parties belonging
to the ‘neoliberal’ club and the consensus that the economy, like
the weather and other natural phenomena, takes care of itself. This
‘neoliberal club’ includes Labour. Also if this quite
hypothetical ‘rebalancing’ was somehow to be achieved and
manufacturing’s share of GDP increased, employment levels would not
reach the levels of the past. Workers are far more productive in
manufacturing today. In the last decade manufacturing continued to
shed jobs. The working class looks different today than in our recent
past though the growth of ‘immaterial labour’, the white collar
working class, the expansion of the health, education, retail,
service and tertiary sectors were all trailed before 1979.
If private sector trade unionism especially in manufacturing suffered
major setbacks because of the imposition of neoliberalism then public
sector workers maintained pay and conditions far more effectively
until the Con-Dem coalition’s arrival in office in 2010 heralded a
major uptick in shedding public sector jobs. Not that there were not
any attacks on public sector jobs, salaries and conditions before the
2010 watershed (see below).
But
trade union organization remained relatively strong in this sector
though as we know the pay and the average pension of the overwhelming
majority of public sector workers in local and central government,
teaching or nursing, was modest in comparison with the headline
figures. The idea these workers were in some way ‘privileged’ or
‘feather bedded’ by the taxpayer as David Blunkett (ex-Blairite
cabinet minister) recently suggested echoing the crassest Tory
propaganda, is absurd. As we know, the NHS physiotherapist might be
living with the BT call centre team leader or the female primary
school teacher might be married to a bus driver with three boys and
so on, revealing the innumerable threads that connect the private and
public sector in working people’s real lives.
Obviously
for socialists it hardly needs to be underlined that the public
sector workforce and their trade unions are an integral and
established part of the working class and will be at the heart of any
future mass challenge to the bourgeois order. In other words, public
sector workers will be part
of the vanguard
when the major revival of industrial struggle finally arrives as it
will eventually do so in some quite unexpected fashion, perhaps as an
explosion of militancy following the pattern of strike activity that
has typified Britain’s industrial relations landscape according to
James Cronin (Cronin 1979: 45-73; 93-125).
Speaking
of that much misused and as a result suspiciously regarded concept of
the ‘vanguard’, it is important to state clearly what we mean and
what we don’t mean when we invoke the concept. Alternatively we
could simply forego use of the word as a word as irredeemably
compromised and tainted as the rest of the hollowed out, demoralized
concepts belonging in the junk room of ‘Leninism.’ But if we did
not use the word the thing and consequently the real world problem it
denotes would remain.
What
did the IS tradition mean when it pointed to the ‘vanguard’ in
the late 1960s and 1970s? Firstly it had something to point to: the
‘vanguard’ was embodied by those workers who practically led
their workmates on the shop floor, in the office, in the staff room,
on the ward, daily over many years. The unofficial shop floor
movement was viewed through the lens of the IS group’s
understanding of the ‘changing locus of reformism’. This grasped
Labourism’s faltering loss of direction in terms of declining
activism and votes from the 1945-51 highpoint. The long boom and full
employment allowed workers to aggressively improve their lives by
winning wage increases and tangibly improved conditions by means of
strike action. The political establishment dubbed this ‘wages
drift’ while the IS described it as ‘DIY reformism’ whose
greatest virtue in that specific time and place, was that it worked.
By
the early 1970s a putative vanguard was visible in a network of
militants, stewards and reps, provoked by the new determination of
the ruling class to curb shop floor power. A corollary of this
understanding of the vanguard was that any revolutionary socialist
organization that aspired to smash the bourgeois state in
contemporary conditions would eventually have a membership of
hundreds of thousands and that active
membership would be cadre, a rank and file of leaders. The ‘party’
was out
there
and it still had to be built and any serious revolutionary
organization would have to “root itself hand and brain” in this
layer. This was a view of party and class that was at odds with the
hyper-vanguardism of most groups inhabiting the ghetto of
‘marginalised Leninism’ (Hallas 1971: 9-24).
Yet
this scenario of strong workplace rank and file organization whose
enabling conditions were the long boom and full employment will
not be repeated.
A stable framework was created that only visibly started to break
down with the first Wilson led Labour government of 1964-70. As the
shop floor revolt grew it came into conflict with the corporatist
framework and strategies of capital deployed vis-à-vis the trade
union bureaucracy: an arrangement that had underpinned a certain
pattern of capital accumulation. That is not to say that the workers
fight for improved wages was responsible for the crisis. It is quite
possible to see the origins of the crisis as lying elsewhere such as
a global decline in the rate of profit while treating working class
struggle as a factor exacerbating the crisis. Capital with less room
than hitherto to manoeuvre was emboldened to attack wages and
conditions to restore profitability. Yet the neoliberal offensive
against the working class took some time to emerge – globally in
extremis
Chile in 1973 was one test bed, New York City’s bankruptcy in 1975
was another and there was aspects of Labour’s period in office
between 1974-79 that indicated the tenor of the following decade –
but neoliberalism did not emerge fully armoured or conscious. The
trade union bureaucracy was still expected to play its part in
policing the rank and file, urging restraint and ‘belt tightening’
in the interests of British industry and jobs.
Working
class revolt between 1968 and 1974 transformed the fortunes of the
revolutionary left. The renascence of Trotskyism in the industrial
sphere from the 1960s onwards was driven by the upsurge in struggle.
While most workers remained stubbornly loyal to Labourism and the
older Communist Party officials travelled to the right as they nested
in the trade union machines, a layer of young workers chafing at the
restraints of the ‘affluent worker’, repelled by Wilson in power
1964-70 and radicalized by Vietnam, were drawn to the miniscule ranks
of the far left where they swelled its ranks. Though relatively
marginal overall on the industrial scene, Trotskyism was a growing
force and lent a radical cutting edge to the shop floor struggle in
certain areas where it became established like BLs strategically
important Cowley car plant. Trotskyism and militant trade unionism
were potentially a fertile combination (McIlroy 2007: 259-96 Thornett
2011).
John
McIlroy has argued that in terms of perspectives and industrial
strategy there were inevitably weaknesses accompanying Trotskyism’s
effervescence: an overly sunny evaluation of the balance of forces,
an underestimation of the limits of shop stewards power, the absence
of a hard headed analysis of the rhythms of the capitalist economy,
its ups and downs and the lack of an appreciation of capitalism’s
resilience (McIlroy 2007: 260). But there was one group that showed
real promise and consequently shared these traits to a far lesser
degree and that was refreshingly heterodox Trotskyism of the
International Socialists whose rank and file strategy was tempered by a commendable realism.
Though
some believed the weakness of shop floor militancy in the 1970s lay
in ‘economism’, Sheila Cohen arriving at a quite different,
antagonistic conclusion claims the tragic weakness of the shop floor
militancy lay not in that militancy as such but in the pervasive
dominance of reformism as an ideology throughout the working class.
Apparently dissimilar Alan Thornett summed up the historically
abiding weakness of British trade unionism: strong on organization
and weak on politics. But in the absence of a properly articulated
politics perhaps reformism was the form of ideology that imposed
itself spontaneously or more accurately the form of consciousness
that arose spontaneously from the specific milieu and practices of
workers? Of course ‘weak on politics’ does not necessarily
suggest a vacuum or absence but something weak as an operative guide
in the world but whose hold on consciousness may, paradoxically, be
quite strong. Something like reformism. In Cohen’s view what was
missing among the shop stewards and the militants was a strategic
awareness that the movement was engaged in a ‘war of position’
with capital. In comparison the ruling class did not lack such an
understanding and this allowed them to ride defeats and setbacks and
plan for payback.
At
present it would be difficult to eschew realism when the ideal of an
independent movement across the class based
in the workplace
as distinct from the ‘networks’ of grassroots activists fighting
the effects of austerity and cuts in this or that town, remains an
aspiration. Given that the context for a strong workplace based rank
and file does not at present exist as it did in conditions prepared
by the post-war boom perhaps ‘political trade unionism’ is not
yet entirely redundant? In that sense the grassroots networks of
activists, socialists and campaigners remain important, linking up
with workplaces or providing the some of the cadre for rebuilding in
the workplace. So the picture is less stable than our recent past and
potentially more volatile. Perhaps resistance will be a more volatile
mixture of the ‘war of position’ and the ‘war of manoeuvre’,
of attrition and explosions of struggle? Perhaps we will see novel
forms of rank and file organization as we did in the highly
significant Sparks dispute during 2011-12 that led to the victory of
rank and file electricians over the construction giants and the
collapse of BESNA? It has been a characteristic of the history of the
working class that struggle has thrown up novel and unanticipated
innovations in forms of resistance.
Since
the financial meltdown in 2008 sparked the deepest, severest crisis
of capitalism since the 1930s volatility has characterized the
struggle in many countries especially in Southern Europe where Euro
meltdown, default and austerity have sparked serial general strikes.
Britain has seen nothing like the level of resistance of Greece,
Spain or Portugal where the crisis – in these ‘weaker links’ -
is far sharper. Since the Con-Dem coalition took office three years
ago take home pay has fallen 10% on average – an extraordinary
fall. The situation in Britain is potentially volatile though it
could be said that at present an inchoate rejection of major elements
of neoliberalism across significant swathes of the populace
comfortably coexists with a pervasive belief there is no alternative.
Without invoking the underlying ‘anger’ that is often said to
exist with its accompanying question begging assumption that this
‘anger’ will blow up, it is clear that with living standards
dropping sharply since 2010 the neoliberal consensus shared by all
the major political parties is under severe pressure and
neoliberalism is no longer the potent ideological chloroform that it
was once was.
The
protracted global crisis shows no sign of being ‘resolved’.
Indeed all the ills that neoliberalism was supposed to have been the
cure for, remain. In fact, updating Stuart Hall, the ‘resolution’
of the crisis might in fact mean having to adapt to the new
dispensation, even more subject to the vagaries of impersonal market
forces than under the social neoliberalism of the Blair years, where
your life is in your own hands as never before but every aspect of
your life chances – education, health, work – is also subject to
risk as never before. In other words, capital’s ‘resolution’
simply involves more of the same: shifting even more of the burden of
the crisis on to the back of the working class and poorest.
Keynesianism is long dead but ‘privatized Keynesianism’ for the
wealthiest lives on. What is striking about the present crisis is how
it seems to have taken us all back to some starting point to the
early 1970s when neoliberalism started to emerge blurry and
indistinct from the shadows.
In
terms of the public sector and the pension battle we must recognize
that the coalition government has succeeded in getting past a major
potential block to its plans to impose austerity. As Kieran Crowe
rightly argues the implicit strategy of the smaller unions (and part
of the left) of “bouncing” the bigger unions like Unison
somewhere Dave Prentis never had any intention of willingly going,
failed utterly. Though N30 succeeded in mobilising over a million
public sector workers Prentis was back at the table days later
conceding the pension argument to the government. Equally insidious
is the process that has seen thousands of public sector workers take
‘voluntary’ redundancy while young new entrants are faced with
worse pay and poorer pension provision (Crowe 2013).
There
was precious little rank and file initiative or pressure to prevent
the trade union officials capitulating. But seeing the problem in
this way was itself perhaps part of the problem – it implied a loss
of perspective that would have meant recognizing our weakness or
starting point - in the sense that strategy had to be simultaneously
cognizant of where we were as well as where we wished to go. A
strategy of ‘putting pressure’ on the officials smacked of making
a virtue of necessity. More importantly it prevented revolutionaries
from fully focusing on what could be done and what needed to be done
in terms of building on the ground and building or extending the
networks on the ground that might begin to provide the basis for
acting independently of the trade union officials. Of course much of
this was, and, is aspirational but it is still necessary. It is
necessary to go about the work of a building a workplace based
network of militants and activists. This is a central task but will
surely be linked to building the wider grassroots networks of
resistance to austerity and will only effectively be built with a
high
degree of collaboration and cooperation
across the diaspora of leftists, trade unionists and activists though
not all are likely to fully appreciate the importance of independent
working class organization. Some of those political differences are
already apparent in Left Unity where many of those drawn to the
initiative have emphasized the importance of reviving genuine working
class representation and constructing an electoral alternative to
Labour – not that these political differences should be any barrier
to working together.
Such
a perspective means selflessly building at the grassroots, in the
locales. Also encouraging rank and file initiative is now required
while eschewing the self defeating substitutionism and shortcuts of
the Leninist vanguards where socialists graft as foot soldiers for
the union officials as interests momentarily ‘coincide’ while
incidentally keeping the modest apparatus of the ‘party’ ticking
over.
There
has been some comment recently about the profile of the SWP – an
ageing cadre much like the CPGB of the late 1970s – with a
membership skewed toward the public sector with a heavy cohort of
teachers, lecturers, local government workers and public servants, in
areas where trade unionism retained its greatest strength. No doubt
this profile is in essence shared by other revolutionary and
socialist organizations. In part it reflects where we are. There
should be no shame in this as it is one index of what happened to the
working class and the major hammer blows inflicted on manufacturing
and the loss traditional manual occupations in the last forty years.
But it is incumbent on socialists to fully consider the implications
of such developments.
Only
recently the employment economist John Philpott has exposed the
challenges facing public sector workers compared to the previous
decade when jobs were also shed. At the end of 2012 there were 5.72m
workers employed in the public sector with the overwhelming bulk of
these in central and local government. Allowing for statistical
adjustments Philpott calculates that public sector employment fell by
410,000 (-6.5%) between 2010 and 2012, an indicator of the net impact
of the overall scale of job cuts carried out by the coalition.
Furthermore, Philpott points to the Office of Budget Responsibility’s
(OBR) forecast that indicates a further projected fall of 340,000
jobs between 2013 and 2015. The 1990s also saw falls in public sector
employment with 75,000 jobs disappearing annually (or 590,000 in
total). Philpott puts this in perspective by noting that the Con-Dem
coalition are cutting public sector employment at double the rate of
the 1990s.
As argued above the fate of manufacturing employment in the early
1980s does not represent a strict analogy with the problems facing
public sector workers but obviously the going will be tough. The
struggle to defend pensions as well as fighting the cuts is at the
heart of a confrontation where a strong ruling class seeks to
decisively tip the balance of forces even further in its favour in
the context of a profound global crisis. Insofar as the ruling class
succeed in such an enterprise this would represent a major setback
for all workers as it would not only mean worse pay and conditions
for public sector workers but also facilitate the goal of a far
reaching shift of the costs of welfare and social reproduction onto
the working class.
Yet
the majority of the working class is not employed in the public
sector and whole new sectors have developed in the last thirty years
where trade union organization is weak or non-existent. It is
necessary for socialists, militants and trade union activists –
ideally as a ‘community of militants’ collaborating and
cooperating closely together – to try to organize across the class.
Obviously socialists often organize where they are; they attempt to
root themselves among their workmates; to prove themselves the most
reliable, steadfast trade unionists but also, on the basis of this
starting point, ‘tribunes of the oppressed’. But that should not
blind us to the necessity to of trying to conquer newly emerging
sections or break through in those areas that have proven stubbornly
resistant to trade unionism. We should not unwittingly make a make a
virtue of organizing only the ‘strongest’ sections of the working
class. The disappearance or absence of trade unionism across swathes
of the private sector workforce has to be regarded as what it is: a
historically contingent product of defeat, an effect of the
‘neoliberal turn’, of the ruling class offensive and as a
strategic Achilles Heel of the working class.
A
grassroots orientation on workers in the private sector must
be part
of revitalizing the left and workplace organization. Despite the
extremely low level of strikes and other forms of industrial action
especially outside the public sector recent years have seen some
straws in the wind that dimly indicate the possible shape that a
broader return of industrial struggle might take such as the factory
occupations at Vestas on the Isle of White and Visteon in 2009. Both
indicated the frustration inside the class, the potential but also
the accumulated weaknesses. Similarly in February 2012 workers at one
of Mayr Melnhof’s packaging factories in Bootle in Liverpool’s
North End spontaneously occupied their factory against management
plans to make 49 workers redundant without any consultation with the
workforce.
The
workers ran through the factory gates and a few hundred yards to the
shop floor where they had a ‘sit down’ or, more accurately,
collapsed gasping. Sadly within hours the MM packaging workers had
been persuaded to end their occupation. The dispute was then
characterized by mass picketing at the factory gates to pressure the
management into negotiations on the planned redundancies. Eventually,
the management, still playing hardball announced it was to close the
factory down completely. This may well have been their intention
since losing major packaging contracts. MMP workers now embarked on a
courageous, high profile and well regarded campaign of “political
leverage” to win decent redundancy terms. Unite put their full
support behind this campaign and McCluskey – an ex-Liverpool docker
– made himself very popular with the Bootle workers with his
involvement. Delegations of MMP workers travelled Europe, picketing
the MMP’s corporate HQ in Austria, the HQ of high profile customers
and other MMP factories in countries like Germany or trying to win
the non-handling of MMP Bootle. It was an impressive campaign but
little effort was made to shut down Bootle’s sister factory on the
Deeside where the union only had a toehold and a bullying culture on
the shop floor existed. Self defeatingly “the lads” at Deeside
MMP were said to be “different” – a different culture and no
tradition. Clearly there were real obstacles facing victory in the
MMP dispute especially as it was quite likely the management has
always intended to close down the Bootle factory (most MMP workers
refused to believe management intended this from the start). The
action of the MMP workers in occupying took management by surprise
but it was a defensive reaction that sprang from much provocation.
Any realistic opportunity to reverse the redundancies or stop the
factory closure lay either in militant action and continuing the
occupation and sit down or winning effective solidarity at Deeside.
Or ideally both. On the other hand the premise of the “political
leverage” campaign that the union officials happily promoted was to
win decent redundancy terms for the workforce.
Closer
links and ties between the two factories – a half hour car drive
apart might have helped to establish trade unionism in Deeside long
before the dispute arose. More generally socialists and trade
unionists in the course of building networks and linking workplaces
need to adopt just this sort of strategic long view for building in
their locality, discovering the terrain in their locality and
creating links further afield.
A
major part of the grassroots activity of socialists who accept the
centrality of workers self-organization must be to recapitulate –
in new ways – the basic ‘from the bottom up’ tactics that
marked the efforts of socialists, syndicalists and militants to
organize the non-unionized and unskilled between the late 1880s and
1910. The rank and file networks created by the Sparks and the
militant, uncompromising course they pursued to defeat BESNA and
proposals to slash their wages by 35% point to what is needed more
widely across the class. Finally the last forty years demonstrate
that there can be no stable islands of trade unionism. Broad swathes
of the working class cannot be left safely unorganized thus leaving
existing union organization vulnerable to further encroachments by
capital. For such a situation to continue ‘indefinitely’ would
mean trade union membership continuing to fall and the further
erosion of existing workplace organization. And in these
circumstances ‘trade union consciousness’ would also wither. Such
a baleful vista would constitute a major loss to us all.
April-May
2013
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