26.03.1998
Reclaiming our rights
Trade union bureaucrats are not so happy with Blair now - but they distrust the rank and file far more
As the Socialist Labour Party initiated ‘Reclaim our rights’ conference convenes this weekend, leaders of some of Britain’s biggest unions are threatening - in word if not deed - to do battle with Tony Blair’s anti-working class New Labour government.
In a speech to the Trades Union Congress women’s conference on March 12, TUC president, and general secretary of the General, Municipal and Boilermakers, John Edmonds, talked of mobilising huge demonstrations, matching the recent Countryside Alliance rally - should Blair renege on Labour’s manifesto commitment on union recognition.
Then, last week, Transport and General Workers Union general secretary, Bill Morris, stated his intention to call for an emergency TUC congress should Blair’s proposals, to be published in a white paper in June, favour employers. Morris’s militant talk came after TUC leaders met Blair on the issue, and was immediately backed by Ken Jackson, leader of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, and Lew Adams, of the train drivers’ union, Aslef.
The pledge to create a statutory requirement for an employer to recognise a union, where a majority vote for it in a ballot of the workforce, was the thin sugar coating on a general election manifesto which affirmed that the key elements of the Tories’ anti-union legislation of the 1980s - on ballots, picketing, and industrial action - would stay. In an election campaign during which Blair made it clear that New Labour was now “the party of business”, he made great play of the fact that, even after all his proposed legislation had been enacted, Britain would still have the most restrictive trade union laws in the western world. Taken together with all Labour’s other promises to attack the working class on behalf of capital, Blair’s commitment to continue the Tory subjugation of the unions was crucial in securing the backing of key sections of big business for a New Labour government to replace John Major’s deeply divided Tories.
Now, Blair’s capitalist backers, quite understandably in view of the current balance of class forces in Britain, see no reason why any concession should be made to a pathetically weak and ineffectual trade union movement. The Confederation of British Industry is pressing Blair to water down his union recognition proposals to a point where some existing recognition agreements could be undermined. The CBI’s main demands are: that a majority of the whole workforce which is eligible to vote, rather than a majority of those voting, should be required in recognition ballots; that all firms with fewer than 50 employees should be exempted from the legislation; that industrial action in recognition disputes should be outlawed; and that the employer shall decide which groups of workers are to be ballotted.
The union leaders fear that Blair favours the CBI view. Seeing how he is the leader of the “party of business” this is hardly astonishing. According to The Guardian’s labour editor, Seamus Milne, writing on March 17 1998, Morris has suggested that the views of press baron Rupert Murdoch may have been particularly influential with Blair. Murdoch’s News International led the way in the 1980s, driving the unions out of what was then Fleet Street, and it would not be keen to see union recognition at its Wapping plant.
From the perspective of effective trade union organisation, statutory union recognition procedures are unlikely to be at all useful. The evidence from the USA, where such a system exists, is that most recognition ballots are lost, and that recognition campaigns have often been accompanied by the targetting and victimisation of union activists. Such procedures are no substitute for building workplace organisation, and actually exercising the right to strike from a position of strength - including solidarity action - law or no law.
The union recognition proposal, together with Blair’s pledge to introduce a statutory minimum wage, the level of which is to be decided “according to the economic circumstances of the time, and with the advice of an independent Low Pay Commission”, was necessary in order to at least show a semblance of a difference between Labour and Tory on industrial relations. It was also necessary to allow the supine trade union bureaucracy to maintain an iota of credibility. To the latter, who are confronted by the loss of 5 million members in the last two decades, statutory trade union recognition is a necessary complement to the “social partnership” agenda, as the bedrock of their desperate survival plan.
The alternative strategy, that of smashing the anti-union laws through making propaganda and preparation for a generalised working class political and industrial offensive, is of course unthinkable to the bureaucracy, since it would mean a head-on clash with the New Labour government. Given the build-up of discontent from below - for example on London’s underground - here is Scargill’s opportunity .
The thinking of the trade union bureaucracy was illustrated in the exchanges in the letters page of The Guardian, immediately following the ending of the Liverpool dockers’ dispute. Answering charges that the TGWU leadership had betrayed the dockers by refusing to either mobilise, or to sanction, support for them, and to simultaneously launch an assault on the anti-union laws, Bill Morris suggested, “That the dockers’ solidarity and resilience did not succeed in securing their just demand for reinstatement is down to the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world, not the T&G ... The view that victory could have been achieved if only the T&G had been prepared to ignore the law and put the entire union at risk is a fantasy, disproved by the history of the last 20 years” (The Guardian January 30 1998).
Possibly because he viewed Morris’s contribution as being open to criticism from the right, TUC general secretary, John Monks, weighed in with the following, “No union today is going to ignore the boundaries of the law. That is because they know from the 1980s what happens when you do ... No group of workers can expect to take action in breach of the law and then expect their union to ride to their rescue. To act unlawfully immediately gives an employer, set on union busting, a golden opportunity and, as at Liverpool, such employers are quick to take advantage ... The future of unions depends neither on lawbreaking nor on selling insurance. Our job is to work in partnership with good employers to expand opportunities and improve rewards for their employees, and to take on the bad employers, showing that unions can make a real difference to the way that people are treated at work” (The Guardian February 4 1998).
Monks has already described his philosophy, entitled ‘New Unionism’, as being based upon “unions becoming part of the solution for companies coping with change and competitive pressures”. This is unashamed business unionism and you can guarantee that its champions are not going to confront the government with demonstrations of Countryside Alliance proportions, nor take any such militant action. We can be fairly certain that backroom contacts are continuing between all three parties aimed at producing some face-saving compromise for Monks and co.
Will the ‘Reclaim our Rights’ conference then, become “the beginning of an historic trade union initiative to repeal anti-union laws” and “the start of an organised fight back against the damage done to workers and unions by years of savage legislation” as its organisers, SLP national executive committee members, Bob Crow and John Hendy QC, promise (Socialist News April-May 1998)?
Eight national trade unions have backed the conference, together with a flood of regions and branches, the Socialist News article tells us. But the term “conference” appears to be a misnomer. The event is clearly a rally, with a lengthy list of platform speakers, headed by Tony Benn MP and of course SLP general secretary Scargill. There is no facility for participating organisations to submit resolutions on the way to build the movement that will be required to confront the state. It seems unlikely that anyone on the floor of the “conference” will have any opportunity even to speak.
Probably the true purpose of the event is to try to rebuild the somewhat reduced political stature of Scargill. The type of working class organisation that can smash the anti-union laws will have to be fully democratic and accountable. We need a National Militant Movement of the rank and file not a jamboree of the left talking Labourites and trade union bureaucrats.
Derek Hunter