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THE UNIONS |
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Levels of working class struggle and confidence are low. Partnership dominates the agenda in the official union structures. How can the left turn this situation around? Here, Tom Haslam details the situation in the unions and argues that confidence can be rebuilt by patient work on the bread and butter issues facing trade unionists. He proposes "a movement for a shop stewards' movement" and discusses the Labour-union link and the need for a drive to keep class on the political agenda. |
There have recently been important disputes in the Post Office over victimisations and speed up, at Peugeot over Friday evening working, in the Benefits Agency over staffing levels, in the NHS over the Private Finance Initiative, and at a number of local authorities over new contracts. But, basically, we still have a trade union movement suffering from a profound crisis of direction.
The underlying causes of this crisis are, on one hand, the union leaders' commitment to a worn-out, impractical and profoundly unrealistic theory of "Social Partnership", and, on the other, the accumulated effects of two decades of industrial defeats, political betrayals and anti-union laws on workers' self-confidence. Each element reinforces the other, but the decisive role is played by the politics and ideology of the union leaders. This article will look at the cul-de-sac those leaders have taken the movement into, and suggest a route to renewal.
Today's Trade Unionists, the TUC's official analysis of the Government's labour force statistics, shows union membership rising for the first time in a decade. In autumn 1999 (the latest figures available) trade-union membership was up by nearly 100,000, and stood at 7.3 million. TUC-affiliated membership was 6.8 million, but the official TUC affiliation figures for 2000 show a small decline of 16,000.
Of the roughly seven million union members, 5.8 million work full-time and 1.2 million part-time. 33% of full-time workers are unionised, and 20% of part-timers. Women in full-time jobs are now marginally more likely to be union members (34%) than are men (32%). Because more women work part-time, the overall unionisation rate for women is lower, at 28%, than the rate for men, 31%. Temporary and agency workers show the lowest level of unionisation at just 18%.
The Thirty Years War against trade unionism which started with In Place of Strife, the Wilson Labour government's abortive anti-union laws, and reached its height with the second Thatcher government, has created a massive age gulf in the trade unions. Nearly 40% of workers in their forties are members of trade unions, while fewer than 20% of those aged 20 or less pay union dues. In sectors where the union is prepared to put up a bit of a fight at workplace level - construction, fire service, post office, railways and some parts of the civil service and local government - the core of activists is usually drawn from the 20-40 age group rather than the older generation. The problem is not that younger people have been intellectually convinced that trade unionism is an impermissible obstruction to the proper workings of the free market. The problem is that a whole generation of workers are largely outside the unions - or scarcely have any idea what a union is - because the unions have failed to fight back and deliver.
Despite the shrinking of the public sector as a result of privatisation and contracting out, the trade union movement is still predominantly based there. Union density stands at 60% for the public sector, compared with 19% for the private sector. Women are far more likely to be unionised if they are in the public sector (it accounts for 68% of women union members), whereas 61% of male union members are in the private sector. Union membership is higher amongst workers in larger workplaces. The unionisation rate is 37% in workplaces with 25 or more employees, and 15% in workplaces with fewer than 25. It is also higher among workers who have been in the job longer - 33% for those in the job between five and 10 years, and 12% for those in the job for less than one year. According to the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS), only 28% of Britain's new workplaces (less than 10 years at their present address) recognise unions. Overall, 45% of workplaces recognise unions - down from 66% in 1984.
African-Caribbean workers are more likely to be union members than any other ethnic group (34% density as opposed to 30% for whites). Among Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers unionisation has risen from 16% in 1997 to 22% in 1999. Some of this rise may reflect immigrants - or their children - moving on from sweatshop jobs to more skilled work or larger workplaces. But it also reflects some union success in recruiting among the most oppressed sweatshop workers.
The general decline of union membership over the last 20 years has affected black workers too. In 1990 union density for African-Caribbean workers was 46%. The rate has fallen by almost one quarter in the last 10 years.
London, East Anglia and the South-East have the lowest levels of union membership, at 25% of the workforce, while Wales, Scotland the North East and North West have union densities 10% to 15% higher.
When the trade union movement is defeated in important battles and goes through a period of decline it usually tends to become more dominated by the relatively secure and prosperous sections of the class. This trend is reflected in the figures. Those classed as "professionals" have the highest union density, at 49%, while "less skilled" workers are only 27% unionised, and "sales" workers only 11%. The 1999 Labour Force Survey reveals that for the first time ever, union density is higher amongst non-manual, rather than manual, workers. The figures are 30% and 29% respectively - a big change from 10 years ago when the figures stood at 44% and 35%.
According to the 1990 WERS, over a third of union workplace representatives now have a university degree, and the most widely read newspaper amongst reps is the Guardian.
A sector by sector breakdown of union density underlines the same basic picture of a trade union movement that rests on the better paid workers in the public sector - especially public sector professions - and old-established and larger-scale manufacturing industry, plus the exÐpublic-sector utilities (water, gas, electricity), transport and communications, and mining. Wholesale and retail trade is only 12% unionised, hotels and restaurants only 6%, real estate and "business services" only 11%, and within manufacturing the important "electrical equipment" sector has the lowest union density, at 17%. (All figures, 1999.)
These figures suggest, but do not fully register, the existence of important sectors that are more or less completely un-unionised. The largest and most important of these is Information Technology. IT specialist workers are just as likely as other specialist workers to be members of unions in the sector they work in, be it education or the car industry. But the IT industry itself has been a particularly difficult environment for union growth. Some explain this by the supposedly individualised nature of the work, but that's a bit of a red herring. The work actually pre-supposes a higher level of co-operation and integration of collective labour than just about any other form of economic activity.
It is an industry with many new and small workplaces; for qualified workers, the labour market conditions are such that they can just move from one well paid job to another if they get hassle at work; and, crucially, those unions, especially MSF, that see IT as "their" sector, have developed no visible strategy for recruiting the workers there.
To start turning around the fortunes of trade unionism, we have to start with a sober recognition of realities. The last 20 years have seen the most drastic and long lasting decline in trade union numbers and organisation on record. Between 1979 and 1999, TUC membership fell by 44%. There have been sharp falls before. Between 1920 and 1933, union membership fell by 48%, with the successive impacts of mass lay-offs after World War One, the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, and the slump after 1929. But by 1938 union membership had increased again by 40%, and was back to its level of the early 1920s. By 1950 it had increased by a further 53%, to surpass its 1920 peak.
In 1979 52.5% of the total workforce, or over 12 million people, were members of TUC-affiliated trade unions. After Thatcher's second election victory and the defeat of the steelworkers, miners and printers, that figure stood at 38.4%, or 8.6 million, in 1988. Not even the one significant industrial-action upturn since the 1984-5 miners' strike - the Ford workers' pay victory in autumn 1988, the rail and local government strikes of 1989, and the engineers' shorter hours fight of 1989 - could stop the loss of membership. By the time of the pit closure crisis of 1992, TUC membership stood at less than 7.3 million, hovering around the 30% mark. The aggregate figures for both TUC and non-TUC unions show a decline between 1979 and 1993 from 13.2 million, 57% of the workforce, to 8.9 million, or 41%. Then the 1990s saw a further decline, from 41% to 30%.
The percentage of workers covered by collective agreements has gone down from 75% in 1979 to 40% in 1999. Very worryingly, because it suggests an inability to hold on to, organise and mobilise existing members, union density in firms that recognise unions, and in which collective agreements operate, has gone down from 78% in 1979 to 56% in 1998. Part of this fall can be explained by the fact that many older establishments with something not far off 100% trade unionism have closed down. This has left the base of trade unionism in the public sector, where there has traditionally been a higher proportion of people willing to accept the benefits of collective agreements, while leeching off their workmates by not paying union dues. But even if this accounts for part of the picture, the problem still remains that the unions are failing to build even in their relative strongholds.
High unemployment, industrial restructuring, and hostile laws have been important, but leadership, or lack of it, has been decisive. Unions do not grow by osmosis, or by some process of molecular duplication. The trade union movement grows, and best overcomes its defeats, when it takes on the character of a movement - a conscious force bent on winning concrete improvements in the working lives of the great majority. The present leadership of the unions are the worst on record because they cannot do their job of building the unions. It is not that they build the unions badly. They can't even build the unions in the way that old-fashioned, politically-incorrect, corrupt, thoroughly un-modern, right wing union bureaucrats could. The reason is not personalities. It is political. The central problem is the all-pervasive, class-consciousness-numbing gobbledygook of social partnership.
Today the trade union movement has the same density as in 1917. But in 1917 it was capable of growing by roughly 50% in just three years. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, with a much weaker rank and file and a more conservative and cautious bureaucracy than in 1917, the unions made the same leap to recovery in little more than a decade.
The question is: can the same sort of spectacular expansion be reproduced at the beginning of the 21st century? The answer is 'yes, but…' and it's no small but!
The Government's new laws on union recognition appear to the union leaders as a great boon, not to be put at risk by militancy. The AEEU and the GMBU have used those laws primarily as means to sign themselves into "sweetheart" deals with new employers, while a few unions, notably the GPMU, the CWU and the ISTC, have made efforts to go out and organise actively. 4.8 million workers told the government's Labour Force Survey that they would like to have the protection of a recognised union, but it will take more than the weak and double-edged new law, and the current union leaders, to give them a chance of getting it.
The decline in union membership has gone along with a decline in workplace militancy. The number of striker-days has gone down from an average of 10.7 million per year between 1969 and 1983 to 235,000 in 1997 and 282,000 in 1998. The number of stoppages has been about 200 each year since 1994, dropping in 1998 to 166 (the lowest figure since statistics started in 1891) and coming back to 205 in 1999. In recent years a large proportion of the disputes - 40% in 1999, according to the Independent on Sunday (4 June 2000) - have been in the Post Office. The Workplace Employee Relations Survey, inquiring whether the workplaces it surveyed had seen industrial action in the last year, found that those which had seen action were mostly in transport, communications, utilities and public administration. In all of those categories, between 5 and 7% of workplaces had had industrial action. In manufacturing, however, only one workplace in a hundred had seen action.
Now as always, the official statistics exclude stoppages of fewer than 10 workers or lasting less than one day, and, of course, do not measure industrial action short of strikes.
The figures do not mean that class consciousness has disappeared. In the 1950s and 60s, a time of high levels of basic militancy, there were also relatively high levels of acceptance by workers of the traditional capitalist ideological illusions of social harmony. Today, although strikes are at a long-term low, more and more workers are coming to reject the idea that there is a harmony of interests between bosses and workers. A big majority Ð according to the Social Attitudes surveys - now believe that there is a "class struggle" in society, whereas when asked the same question in 1968 only a minority recognised the class struggle.
The growing power of capital within the workplace has led to an increased recognition of the class struggle by workers - but also an unwillingness to engage in battles that many see as unwinnable within the existing political and economic rules of the game. Strike statistics measure the level of confidence workers have in their unions, the strike weapon, and ultimately themselves. That confidence is very low. The history of the last 20 years has done little to boost it. Instead, experience has repeatedly seemed to "prove" the futility of militancy.
To preach defeatism would be to forget the fundamental laws of capitalist development, which constantly recreate the conditions for working-class organisation and militancy. But Marxists in the unions today must realise the tactical and strategic consequences that flow from this collective experience of the working class.
Confidence has to be rebuilt painstakingly. Issues have to be thoroughly prepared. Action has to make sense as a strategy for defeating the employer's plans. The Marxist left has to abandon any idea that there is a bubbling cauldron of militancy just waiting to explode into action if only the twin obstacles of bureaucratic sabotage and the anti-union laws could be removed. The points of resistance that do exist - in the Post Office, on the London Underground, or amongst the Jubilee Line electricians - are not expressions of pure militant spontaneity. On the contrary, they are islands of a consciously maintained shop-floor trade-union culture within which rebellion is the norm. For that kind of culture to spread across the class will require conscious leadership.
France's mass strikes of November-December 1995 have lessons for us here. Those strikes, and the street demonstrations during them, actively involved more workers than the huge general strike of May-June 1968. They certainly prove that the general conditions of modern globalised, microelectronic capitalism have not abolished class struggle. But the movement did not develop in the same sudden, explosive way as in 1968. It was built up deliberately, actively, step-by-step. Action started with the sections of the working class that had best maintained their militant traditions, in the first place the railworkers and the postal workers. They spread the action - from one rail depot to another, from rail depots to postal sorting offices, and then to other sectors - by sending large delegations to the workplaces, calling meetings, and arguing the case. Even then, few private-sector workplaces participated in the movement beyond one-off "days of action".
There is a lot of bottled-up anti-capitalist anger in the British working class. Given the right conditions, that anger can erupt into tremendous action. But, on all indications, those conditions cannot be created by a single spark. They will have to be built up, by consistent effort, through a whole series of small struggles and organising drives.
We need a "movement for a shop stewards movement", an alliance of all those in the trade union movement who see the root of trade union power lying in strong rank-and-file workplace organisation. But before we can look at the nuts and bolts of building such a movement, we need to look more closely at the union bureaucracy and its ideology of "Social Partnership" - the world view which a renewed stewards movement will have to confront and defeat if the unions are to become fully effective fighting organisations of the class.
Partnership is the name of the game at the TUC. Every initiative it launches, every appeal for money, every scam and dodgy deal, has the dreadful "P word" attached to it. A recent pamphlet, Tomorrow's Unions, published by Unions 21, a spin-off from the former Communist Party magazine Marxism Today, expounds the philosophy.
An article by David Coates, boss of the TUC's new Partnership Institute, sets the tone. He doesn't think unions should have anything to do with strikes, confrontation, class war, etc., but he can't quite work out what they are there for. He simply cannot accept that there is a basic conflict of interests between workers and bosses, and that workers must band together through strength in numbers to help themselves and their workmates. He babbles on about "outdated conflict models" and "adversarial roles", and instead wants to see a "new kind of trade unionism" which would "add value" to both the employee and the employer. Old-style right-wing union leaders would be concerned to leave the boss an "adequate" profit; Coates believes unions can justify themselves only by increasing the exploiter's gain!
Trade unions, says Coates, should "manage change" and "be at the forefront of helping their members cope with the uncertainties of the global economy". Translated, this means that trade unions should not fight redundancies. Instead, they should provide training for the soon-to-be-unemployed and help management explain the business case for job losses to the workforce. The only problem Coates can foresee with his strategy is whether or not the unions have the resources to make partnership work. What I think he is worried about is whether or not your average clock-watching, beer-swilling trade union official has the drive and commitment to actually help management run a big private company. You can see his point.
The most interesting read in Tomorrow's Unions is by TUC General Secretary John Monks. He has three basic ideas:
The first demand, for the same kind of consultation rights as exist in the rest of the EU, has become perhaps the key part of the day-to-day agitation of the union leadership over issues like Longbridge and Dagenham. This demand should obviously be supported, but as part of a fight for international solidarity amongst the global workforces of the multinationals, not as a way of trying to push Ford or BMW to sack foreign workers instead of British ones.
However, the European Works Council Directive is pretty weak. In force in Britain since January 2000, and elsewhere in the European Union since 1995, it requires companies with 1,000 or more employees across the EU, and at least 150 in more than one country, to set up European Works Councils and provide workers' representatives with some information. Unfortunately, the regulations implementing the Directive only require companies to start negotiating over bringing in works councils, so there is still plenty of room for delay and prevarication. The legally binding fall-back structure, which comes into play if those negotiations falter is pretty minimalist. The Draft Information and Consultation Directive 1998 could potentially be very useful, as it would force employers to enter into formal consultations on employment issues with workplace reps on the basis of a written document. Unfortunately there are two problems with the directive itself: first, the European Commission has allowed for national governments to bump up the minimum size of company that the directive applies to those employing 100 people or more. Second, the British Civil Service which has the responsibility for translating EU Directives into UK law has an impeccable record of emptying European social legislation of any radical content. For instance, the Framework Directive on Health and Safety stipulated that employers could not use "short term economic arguments" to delay proper health and safety measures. This was translated into British law in a much weaker form, which only asked employers to take action which is "reasonably practicable".
There is a more fundamental problem than the detail of the EU legislation however. It is that you can't have the sort of "social partnership" that operates in Germany and France without also having a domestic legal framework to constrain the capitalist "social partner". And the problem for the TUC is that the New Labour Government is opposed on implacably Thatcherite ideological grounds to introducing any such framework.
Thus, in the UK, this sort of "social partnership" does not mean a trade union veto on attacks on jobs and conditions, or anything approaching that, but just a bigger role for trade union officials in "managing change", i.e., selling the "business case" for speed-up, casualisation, redundancies, closures, or whatever is top of capital's agenda, to their own members. That is already happening at Tesco, Barclays, and more or less everywhere else that the "P word" is loud on the lips of union officials.
On the second demand, the TUC wants laws to compel capitalists to stop operating according to the profit motive. Limited, such laws are not in principle impossible. Any restriction on the employers' ability to exploit workers (i.e. shorter hours, minimum wages, bans on child labour, health and safety provisions) does force the company to come to terms with lower profit margins in the short term, even if in the long term it is a spur to the more intensive extraction of relative surplus value. The problem is the TUC leaders' idea that capital will restrict itself voluntarily, if only it is forced to consult with trade union officials and "take into account" the environmental and community consequences of business decisions.
The conscious agent that can bend the laws of capital is not some benign technocratic alliance of trade union officials and capitalist managers. It is the activity of the working class itself, through strong workplace organisation and through a political labour movement that can impose its collective strength on the capitalist class at the industrial and governmental level.
As to the third element of Monks' strategy - the problem for Monks is that union reps care about the problems their workmates face. Union officials care about maintaining cosy relations with the employers, even if those employers haven't given their members a decent pay rise in years. If the union were run by people who were close to the members and accountable to them, then God knows what would happen.
That's why we face a new round of attacks on the principles of trade union democracy. The first target will be what remains of the democratic structure of the engineering union, with the AEEU/MSF merger. Partnership agreements and attacks on union democracy go hand in hand. The "path-breaking" partnership deal at Tesco was driven through by attacking shopfloor union activists who campaigned against the agreement on the grounds that it removes the right of USDAW members at Tesco ever to vote for a strike over pay. The methods the officials used to push through the deal were hardly subtle. Dissident reps were told they would have their shop stewards' credentials removed if they campaigned amongst their workmates for rejection. Waverers amongst the union reps were led to believe that the union had to go along with the new partnership forums - bodies that remove USDAW bargaining role at the workplace level - because the alternative was total de-recognition. An interesting insight into the real meaning of "Partnership" for Tesco bosses.
The trade union bureaucracy is an intermediate social stratum sitting on top of and feeding off the basic organisations of the working class. It is not always incapable of leading a fight or using militant methods to win concessions for its members. The problem is that this particular trade union bureaucracy, at this particular stage of its evolution, is so militantly committed to confronting neither the employers nor the Government that the unions cannot be rebuilt without removing the bulk of them from office. Why?
In the first place, the bureaucrats, and a number of the leading lay activists behind them, are a generation shaped by defeats. Since 1979, the British economy has been restructured at a speed and to an extent without precedent. About a quarter of all manufacturing jobs were trashed in a few years after Thatcher came to power in 1979. Large industries, previously bastions of trade union organisation, have been destroyed or reduced to a tiny fraction of their old workforce - coal-mining, the Fleet Street newspaper industry, the docks, steel. Other sectors have been privatised and chopped up into competing units. New industries have been developed on "greenfield" sites, non-union from the start.
To deal with this turmoil, the unions needed to be bold, assertive, quick-witted and quick-footed. They were just the opposite. Left in the lurch by other unions, the one great act of resistance, by the miners in 1984-5, ended in an epoch-making defeat which crushes many trade unionists' confidence to this day: "No, it can't be done. The miners tried, and they got smashed into the ground."
That defeat, more severe than those suffered by the trade unions in other advanced countries in the 1980s, broke whatever spirit the union officials still had.
In the USA, the leaders of a trade union movement even more on the back foot against capital, in many ways, than our own movement here, have nevertheless been able to revitalise themselves to some extent. The US trade union leaders are still bureaucrats - usually with lusher privileges than their British counterparts - and their political vision does not extend beyond cutting a better deal with capital. Why are the British union leaders so much dimmer?
One reason is the great severity of the miners' defeat. Another is political disarray. In the US trade union movement, the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe tended to disarm the old "anti-communist" right wing, rather than demoralising the left. But in Britain the Communist Party and elements of the Labour left influenced by the CP had long provided the ideological backbone for most of the trade union left. The CP was always bureaucratic, often treacherous. Yet - tied primarily to the ruling class of the USSR, rather than to British capital - it was usually ready for a fight against the employers. It gave union officials a vision. In due course they would be able to push the private capitalists aside, and become important and influential people in an economy run primarily by the state.
That political vision warped and limited the trade-union left. The catastrophic collapse of the vision in 1989-91, when the old autocracies in eastern Europe and the USSR were overthrown and the Communist Party fell apart, laid it flat on its back. As the pamphlet Tomorrow's Unions exemplifies, many of today's leading ideologues of Social Partnership are old CPers. They have given up on class struggle and instead look towards creating a network of institutions of "partnership" within which the unions can survive as "service-providers" to help individual workers to win compensations and find opportunities within those institutions.
The ideological vacuum created by the implosion of Stalinism has been filled by New Labour. The British union leaders think that New Labour will give them a liveable niche in society after the horrors of Tory rule.
They have been convinced of this not just by Alastair Campbell's speech-writing but also, and more importantly, by hard cash. As well as giving virtually ever major national union official a seat on a government task force or review body, the New Labour Government has set up a £2.5 million per year Partnership fund which will make public money available to the trade union leaders to promote "Partnership at work". Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the first round included the engineers' and electricians' union AEEU, the bakers' union BFAWU, UNIFI, the banking and finance union, the rail unions RMT, ASLEF and TSSA, print union GPMU and UNISON. Some non-union companies like Pizza Hut have also received money to build non-union forms of employee/employer partnerships, but it is inevitable that the primary beneficiaries will be the unions - and the companies they have partnerships with. At this stage, a lot of the money is going into research projects that aim to identify "best practice in promoting social partnership". The longer term aim is to syphon off public money to enable unions to "sell themselves" by offering training courses and the like to their members, and potential members in the workforce, in partnership with the employer. If organising workers to fight the employers seems too hard - and, to the main union leaders, it does seem too hard - then unions can still survive as providers of services, from training through stakeholder pensions to legal representation.
On the whole, the old generation of union leaders is now a dead weight on the trade unions. Revival will have to come from below, through the rebuilding and revitalisation of the shop stewards movement.
According to the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, there are around 218,000 shop stewards or union reps across all British workplaces with 25 or more employees - one rep for every 28 union members. In addition, there are about 200,000 health and safety reps, some of them also being shop stewards.
They operate under adverse pressures. A lot of them spend most of the time they devote to union activity on handling individual members' disciplinary cases, making them more like unpaid workers' lawyers than organisers of collective working-class action.
The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey notes "the relative lack of importance [in union reps' own account of their union activity] accorded to that most traditional of trade union activities - maintaining wages and benefits - and the high level of activity and importance attached to dealing with problems raised by the treatment of employees by management and resolving disputes".
63% of union reps told the Survey that they had dealt with problems of treatment of individual employees by management over the past year, and 64% that they had dealt with health and safety matters, while only 48% mentioned dealing with wages and benefits. The 1974-9 Labour government's Health and Safety at Work Act, since strengthened by European Union rules, gives union reps a right to demand consultation on safety over all changes in work practices, and to stop the job if they are not satisfied. The weakness of this legislation is that the boss always has the option of sacking workers who complain or take action over safety, and then paying the compensation if an Industrial Tribunal deems it unfair dismissal. The Tribunal cannot compel the employer to reinstate the sacked workers. Still, union reps evidently feel some confidence in dealing with health and safety.
According to the Workplace Employee Relations Survey, "almost all workplaces" have formal disciplinary and grievance procedures for individual cases. Workers are allowed to bring a union rep or other workmate with them to a disciplinary hearing under 95% of such procedures, and to a grievance hearing under 97%. Here, too, the union rep has a secure role.
In anything more directly connected with collective workers' action, the position of the union rep is much more difficult. "On a number of workplace issues union representatives say they are given no information, let alone consulted, about events" (WERS). By the top union leaders' reckoning, this is normal. They themselves see taking up individual cases as the recipe for unions to maintain themselves without the risks and trouble of collective action. Anne Mitchell of UNISON told the Independent (6 August 2000) that unions are still relevant because they "help employees if they are put under too much stress at work. UNISON alone has won £38 million in personal injury cases on behalf of its members". The role of a union is thus defined, not as helping you organise to win decent conditions, but as providing legal representation to get you a compensatory pay-out after the bad conditions have given you your nervous breakdown.
Employment Tribunal cases have nearly doubled since 1984 (1.1 cases per thousand employees in 1984, 1.9 per thousand in 1999, according to WERS). Applications to ETs by workers, as opposed to cases, have gone up from 29,000 in 1987 to 80,000 in 1997. Cases handled by ACAS have increased from 43,000 in 1983 to 107,000 in 1997. Work-related complaints taken to Citizen's Advice Bureaux have risen from 469,000 in 1983 to 610,000 in 1997.
The fulcrum on which the trade union movement must be turned round is the conversion of individual grievances and disciplinary issues into collective disputes. If a worker in a factory has a dispute with a supervisor over being asked to run two machines at once; or a worker in a distribution depot complains about lack of warm clothing in the winter; or a fixed-term-contract lecturer at a college is concerned about what will happen at the end of his or her contract - there are two ways the union rep can deal with the issue. They can try to smooth it out as an individual case. Or they can make it a collective dispute, by calling a meeting, putting a general demand to management, or even circulating a petition. The second course is the road towards rebuilding a shop stewards movement that can oust the wretched bureaucracy.
Elements of the bureaucracy's agenda can be turned round within a drive to generalise and "collectivise" grievances. Yes, we want the information stipulated under the European Works Council directive, but we also want local negotiations on the issues. Yes, the unions should take up health and safety issues - but by recruiting health and safety reps at every level and demanding committees to deal with these issues in every workplace, by insisting on the right to stop the job when it is not safe, and by demanding that killer bosses be jailed, not just asked to pay fines they can easily afford.
Yes, the unions should deal with stress at work - but by integrating into their national pay claims demands for decent conditions. The one successful big union campaign of the last 20 years was the engineering unions' drive for reduced working hours - "the long weekend" - in 1989-90. That cause needs to be taken up in other industries, but can be done so effectively only if it is coupled with demands for large flat-rate pay increases which enable all workers to get a living wage without excessive overtime.
Yes, the unions should take up workers' individual rights, but by demanding a comprehensive package of full rights for all workers from day one (vast numbers of workers - temporary, part-time, on fixed-term contract, young, or just new to their jobs - are currently excluded from some or all of the existing rights on unfair dismissal, maternity leave and maternity pay, holidays, and so on). Yes, we want a law on union recognition - but an effective one, and one that also allows unions to operate effectively, in the first place to be able to take industrial action over issues of privatisation. There is a massive audience out there amongst workplace reps and activists for the key ideas of the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Union Laws, which aims to build support for the abolition of anti-union laws and its replacement with a new charter of workers' rights. Taking those ideas into every workplace and union body that we can has to be a key priority for all those who want to build support for the core values of independent and effective trade unionism.
A rank-and-file organising emphasis is not at all incompatible with political campaigning for general, legal rights. In the late 19th century the demand for the Legal Eight Hour Day - and the Marxists had to fight hard against many trade unionists, including militant ones, to establish the point that the demand was for a working day limited by law - was a central goal and reference in the development of a multi-faceted and active labour movement. Similar demands must be developed today. A big official union demonstration for Rights at Work - even one that demanded no more than the minimal version of those rights written into official union policy - could boost the shop stewards movement by giving an example of mass action for immediately winnable and popular demands. An example of what is immediately possible here is provided by the 1998 UNISON demonstration on the minimum wage. The UNISON leadership was forced by conference into calling a national demonstration over the level that the minimum wage was set at and at the long list of exemptions. Bickerstaffe et al did everything in their power to sabotage it - including holding the event in Newcastle, rather than London - but still, well over 40,000 workers turned up to answer the call. A similar call today by a big union (or unions) for a national mobilisation over the broad issue of rights at work would get an even better response. It would give union activists in every workplace something to agitate for. It would provide some activity to enthuse the minority of union activists and give them something to argue support for amongst their workmates. Building delegations from the workplaces for such a march would provide a much needed chance to give wider layers of workers some sense of being part of a trade union movement, rather than the "union" being the workplace rep and her or him alone.
By the yardstick of a lot of the current trade-union work of the activist left, a primary orientation towards rebuilding workplace collective action and challenging the bureaucracy by offering an alternative, collective, mode of battle for what they claim to achieve by individual "servicing" of members, may seem very minimalist and "rightist". So also may the effort which Workers' Liberty has consistently made to organise the activity of socialists in the workplace around the production of workplace bulletins reporting and commenting on detailed workplace issues, even the smallest, thus constantly laying the basis to make those issues collective ones.
But the bulletin is not just its detailed commentary. It is also its political editorials. Serious attention to "minimal" demands does not exclude politics. To build an effective shop stewards movement we also need to scrape away the debris of ex-Stalinist demoralisation and New Labour social-liberalism currently littering the trade-union scene, and develop a vital minority of socialist and Marxist trade-unionists, well-attuned to their workplace issues but also able to formulate a vision which links the struggle now with a view of how the working class can emerge from being a beast of burden to liberate itself and remake society.
Central here is the argument for a workers' government and for working-class political representation. The immediate battle is over the union bureaucrats' drive to pay extra money to New Labour in the run-up to the General Election, a move already knocked back by the CWU conference. To propose unions disaffiliate from Labour is no answer. "Success" for such a policy would just mean a couple of small left-wing unions hiving off and depriving themselves of the chance of rallying other unions to use their remaining rights within the Labour structure to raise protests against Blair. To go along with the bureaucrats is to acquiesce in their reduction of workers' ambitions to schemes and palliatives which will help "manage change", it being assumed without question that those who drive the change which workers and unions must then "manage" are untouchable higher powers. Instead, we should demand that union leaders fight for their union policies within Labour's structures, insist that money should be withheld unless the leaders can report specific progress on those policies ("no say, no pay"), and work for union political funds to be restructured so that money for election candidates goes only to those supporting key union policies - including independent working-class left candidates.
To make this perspective real the revolutionary left will need to review the way we work in the unions. A thorough-going, open and non-party partisan discussion amongst the far left about how collectively we can strengthen our work in the unions might sound like wishful thinking, given the record of much of the left, but it is necessary nonetheless. The purpose of such a discussion would be to assess the situation we are now in and to look at possible cross union initiatives that can tie together the work of the three or four thousand or so conscious organised Marxists who will have to form the initiative taking force that will be required to move bigger forces - like the quarter of a million or so union workplace reps who are so poorly led by the existing leadership.
Of course it would be sectarian and ignorant to believe that only the organised Marxist left can contribute to the rebuilding of trade union workplace organisation. As we noted earlier, some of the most inspiring militant actions of the last few years have come from sectors with a strong shopfloor tradition of collective organisation, but where the revolutionary left is a small, if not marginal force. We need to find ways of uniting with and organising all those people in the unions who want to fight. That means positioning ourselves so that we can help to organise a broad based reform movement in the unions. We need to look towards creating a "Movement for a shop stewards movement". A broad body which presses for a serious fight around the key day to day bread and butter issues and which takes on itself the responsibility of educating and training the new generation of workplace activists who will be the backbone of a new shop stewards movement. An immediate start could be made by calling together a major national meeting of all those in the movement who want to build strong, independent and active trade unions and who have doubts about the realism of the TUC leadership's failed strategy.
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