“Slowly but unmistakably, the trade unions are inching their way back,” Seamus Milne tells us in The Guardian. There are indeed signs of revival. But the evidence for resurgence, as we reflect on the TUC and Labour Party conferences, is far from unmistakable. Membership of TUC-affiliated unions fell again in 1996, as it has each year since 1979.
The decline (2% compared with 6% in 1995) highlights the continuing failure of recruitment drives and further erosion of the unions’ base to 6.75 million members. Just as worrying is the profile of those members. Women make up half the labour force: only a third of them are union members. The average age of the British worker is 31 but the average age of the union member is 46 — a damning statistic which raises big questions about the movement’s ability to renew itself. TUC unions increasingly represent the better off workers. Membership is heavily skewed towards the embattled public sector. Only 20% of workers in private industry now hold union cards.
Industrial action is certainly reviving — days lost through strikes topped one million in the year to June. This was five times the figure for the previous twelve months and the highest figure since 1990 — if still well down on previous decades. A number of disputes — most prominently the action of British Airways cabin crews in the summer — showed trade unionists are still able to stand up to aggressive employers threatening the use of legislation, carry public opinion with them and win a victory of sorts. The heroic litany of Liverpool Dockers, Hillingdon, Magnet, and Critchleys demonstrates that the fight has not been knocked out of “ordinary” workers. Increasing at 4.6% over the year, average earnings for full time workers are rising at almost double the rate of inflation — a process helped by the continuing drop in the official unemployment figures to below 2 million.
All this reflects the situation Labour inherited from the Tories. The Blair Government’s contribution to a union comeback has been minimal. At Brighton Blair listed as achievements the restoration of union rights at GCHQ, signing the Social Chapter and the establishment of the Low Pay Commission with the minimum wage “on its way”. On closer scrutiny they are slim achievements, particularly for those old enough to remember the pace at which the Wilson Government moved to extend workers’ rights in 1974-5.
The pledge “to restore normal trade union rights to the staff at GCHQ” has not been redeemed. The new agreement is subject to “no strike, no disruption” clauses. The draconian prerogative powers have been maintained which enable the Government to “take such action as [it] deems necessary for overwhelming reasons of national security or public interest”, the very powers that caused the problem in the first place. This is far from normal trade union rights and far from justifying John Monks’ approbation: “a highly satisfactory deal”.
Signing the Social Chapter is a welcome move, but at present is largely symbolic. The Chapter is a set of aspirational principles, not a code of already existing EU legislation simply to be extended to the UK. It will take effect here in two years’ time. It excludes the development of legislation on issues of pay, rights to union membership, strikes and lockouts. Its immediate impact, at the turn of the century, will be in relation to works councils, rights for part-timers and parental leave.
The minimum wage, likewise, remains a matter of deferred gratification for the millions of low paid, casualised workers. George Bain, who chairs the Low Pay Commission, recently observed it could be the year 2000 or later before legislation is implemented. The Commission is scheduled to report in May 1998. The earliest a bill could be introduced would be 1999. In relation to remarks by Mandelson, Bain confirmed the Commission has the power to exclude workers up to the age of 25 from protection. The key question of what level it will be set at remains unclear.
There has been progress elsewhere. The legislation requiring authorisation of deduction of union dues from pay packets every three years will be repealed in 1998 — a measure advertised by Margaret Beckett as “removing burdens from business”. But the proposals on union recognition have been put back. A White Paper will now appear in early 1998 based on the election pledge to ensure unions are recognised by employers where a majority of workers want it. As with the minimum wage, Blair has stressed the importance of employer consent and urged the TUC to agree the details of legislation before a bill is drafted. Negotiations on these have not yet got past first base. There is no consensus on how bargaining units should be defined or what the threshold for triggering recognition should be. Nor is it clear what penalties will be agreed to be imposed on recalcitrant employers. Sequestration of company assets?
It remains uncertain whether the 1998 White Paper will include proposals to extend unfair dismissal protection to part-timers and strikers or abolish the qualification periods so that rights apply from “day one”. What is clear is that the core of Thatcherite legislation described by Blair as the most restrictive in Western Europe will be maintained, as will the Conservative economic strategy (centred on enhanced competivity, flexibility, low pay and low taxes) and social policy (centred on greater inequality and a slimmed down welfare state).
For the unions any improvements will be marginal and slow to emerge; they will have to be bargained for. Yet the unions don’t seem to be bargaining with Blair. Why not put forward more forcefully a fair framework for recognition which the polls show has strong public support? Is it not more than time to put a figure on a minimum wage and a date for its implementation? This year’s TUC carried a commitment to the right to take solidarity action — why not publicise it and argue for it?
And yet union leaders are busy giving away their best bargaining cards. The timid acquiescence of all the big unions to Partnership in Power, which qualitatively diminishes the influence they could exercise on the Government, indicates their failure to protect members and appeal to potential members. The AEEU, having kicked up at Blair’s reforms, now announce they are in favour of dismantling the remnants of union influence in the Party. The TUC delete from an opinion poll they commissioned the fact that 55% of the public now support a one-day strike over public sector pay. At the very time a figure should be put on the minimum wage, the TUC ensures a UNISON resolution which did just that was not passed. The TGWU executive justifies inaction over the dockers by citing the anti-strike laws. Where is their campaign to repeal them? The unions are back in Downing Street — but where’s the product?
Union decision-takers are disabled by the illusion they can subvert the Blair agenda from within. They are locked into social partnership and flexibility in the delusion they can inject an element of regulation and civilisation into market strategies. They refuse to confront Blair’s insistence that regulation must not impede flexibility, that flexibility is essentially about deregulation. They refuse to confront the simple fact, part of the everyday experience of workers, that there is a conflict between flexibility on the one hand and job security and decent pay on the other. They brush aside the vivid evidence documented in a recent National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux report that flexibility, positive or otherwise, means cost-cutting, casualisation and speed-up. They ignore the overwhelming research findings showing employers are, on the whole, simply not interested in real partnership with unions. Behind the unions’ rhetoric about partnership, union membership, recognition and collective bargaining have all declined. Attempts to marginalise workplace organisation and management hostility to working with unions have increased. History teaches us that the only way you change that is by building up power and exercising pressure, not by giving employers — and a government which increasingly identifies with them — carte blanche.
Signs of unrest are surfacing. There were tensions, unease and dissatisfaction with Blair at recent union conferences and at the TUC. A honeymoon period was to be expected. Labour’s incomes policy could generate conflict as Blair goes for the soft option of hiding behind Tory policies on pay and resources. An explosive situation is developing in our hospitals and schools. In the Party there may be further moves against collective union involvement. Despite PiP the unions still have a strong presence and still donate 45% of Party income, with Blair conscious of the unpopularity of state funding.
We need to build an alliance of all those who believe there is still the necessity and opportunity for a fightback in both unions and Party. We need to develop not only a critique of Blairism but detailed alternatives. Fragmentation is a problem. As Bryn Griffiths argued (LLB, July 1997, Campaign Group: what next?) the Campaign Group has a key role to play in developing opposition and co-ordinating it in the Party and unions. Otherwise each small group does its own thing ineffectively. If we can bring the campaigns together and fuse the fight for a minimum wage, union recognition and defence of the welfare state, we will have started well.