Clive Jenkins on unions, today and tomorrow

104rardlY anyone understands the unions. Most Iv' the studies and books about them are ritten

della as if by white hunters who have un

ken a safari into a different culture and rc;tturn with bags with ill-assorted packs. k_hers are written by academics who seem to ue general secretaries manquj. bflJ1iS Macbeath's book* infuriates yet again tiY12"eing not quite right in detail. By having d union movement just out of focus, with a _ouble image. There are far too many small ITors or misunderstandings. But perhaps this ns what this election is all about. One a'resunles that Mr Heath, Mr Barber, Mr Prior Lord Carrington have never been :Mbers of unions. They must therefore be Itb,.cr,ibing to the unions behaviour patterns of Ilik' Large organisations which they know best, Inanufacturing corporations, banks and large estates. They must also be seeing :inns as having hierarchies and command Tir:actures which they do not really possess. an must lead to a basic incomprehension

ut the role and the experience of the trade n officer.

,u0 they really appreciate that every P0 they union bargainer sits on a pinnacle ti institutionalised indignation? He is vocaoriallY a gladiator as well, because the work guthe union is basically defensive. It really is eraitt! remarkable that one of the most mod

(and economically unsuccessful) trade IN

th n organisations in the world should be exe° subject of a national debate about fr tibrent“l;isrnOf course, unions do go to war ajn," me to time but until recently this has is -fl,nst always been in three basic ways. There hee "defensive of the job" which has mostly deep e in industries suffering from structural .,ne, such as shipbuilding; there is the tritnnnotony and strain" strike which is so tuUrich in the foreground of motor manufac fli disputes. Then there is the "change of sco,leadership" strike where shifts in perus'lanties over a period lead to a reappraisal of union's performance and often a sense of Tsatisfaction.

he miners' strike falls into this category.

t;_astonishing point about the miners' union at it has so rarely used its power, that it ev: sn understated its argument. There is th,:r1 the case for saying that by tempering sti`it_r demands over the years and providing a Cheap fuel that the nation has been done bo"ttsservice and that the present strike could 'enlY have been foreseen but is necessary. vior,nce Lloyd George's time, white collar bee,.,"ers in central and local government have beck encouraged to belong to unions. But Dart Use they were removed from the dynamic 1311e„nf British industry, this organisational por,+"nrnenon was never treated as being imor`,Vt. It has only now been noticed because e development of union membership in toirtlfacturing, transportation and whiteilionar fields has led to major gains in terms of stirneY and status there. This has had a to ulat„ Ing effect upon civil servants and borh hall clerks who saw jobs which were ° °n status and long on pay suddenly eioth 411d u Cap and After Innis Macbeath (Allen nwin £3.50)

becoming short on both counts. The British lower middle class now feels itself threatened and suffering relative impoverishment.

The man who travels in from Surbiton and saw his semi-detached house as his principal asset now fears it will be a continuing openended liability. But entering a trade union is not, for him, simply connecting up with a money manufacturing machine. In every case the new white-collar union recruits bring about a change in themselves and their thinking because of their changed relationship with their employer. Their work place, the office environment, is never the same after organisation has taken place.

In one major insurance company the old staff association committee room now has a plaque on the wall commemorating the declaration of a successful ballot to merge with my own union under the heading "Liberation Day." The second change is in appetite. The literate and numerate administrator or technician soon learns to put his training and gifts to work in negotiations. This means a sharp rejection of the old trade union bargaining technique of simply asking for more. It is now quite clear to me that the Conservative emphasis on incomes policy created a watershed for the middle-classes. Everyone became interested in everyone else's income. Not only that, but their status, their pecking order, their security of employment.

Britain is one of the last fully developed industrial states where workers can still be arbitrarily dismissed. But this right has already been limited in some white-collar areas where, in return for minor pledges of co-operation, firm guarantees against redundancy are written into agreements. It is not fanciful to predict a future in which the middle class refuses to be sacked. When this happens there is bound to be a reappraisal of the career as property — which would be a revolution in traditional union thinking.

But why not? There is bound to be a fresh approach to remuneration. The remarkable omission of the British blue-collar unions in failing to insist upon occupational pension schemes for their members has never been adequately dissected. But was this because of that constant insistence upon cash wages or simply that members left on retirement?

The middle-class employees also used to leave their staff association but often then set up pensioners' associations which maintained a dialogue with the old employers about what they got out of the pension scheme. The next jump is obviously going to be to a situation. where the union organises in the university and goes right up to the graveside with its member — bargaining all the time. This broad spectrum of approach is bound, as with a motorway, to generate its own traffic and to give flesh and blood to demands for a share in policy formation, and the administration of great companies. It has always been thought that the alien ideas of co-determination would stay at home in Germany. But the desire, the energy, and the capacity of a non-manual staff worker is .bound to give another huge impetus to this mood — not on ideological grounds, but because they think the management can do better.

Mr Heath has not unveiled a rational policy in asking for a Relativities Board; he has opened a Pandora's box. Has he not realised that the share of the national income that goes in wages and salaries has barely budged over the last 100 years? Has he not realised that there are bound to be not just disputes with the miners or railwaymen but agonised reappraisals in every union after every Rela7 tivities Board Report? The British nation is now going to be obsessed with rank and payments. But this in turn is bound to mean a fresh rough set of arguments about the possession of capital.

The problem that every worker faces, particularly in times of inflation, is that his capacity to form personal assets (always limited) becomes destroyed. The future of the unions is bound to involve demands for asset-forming and capital-sharing. Is this what the Conservative Party is about? If it is — why not sooner? It is curious that the Party never in some special way looked after its former huge constituency among the lower middle classes. But it has not, and must now be faced with their forming or joining, in millions,unions which will have to change their structure and programme to accommodate them.

There has always been a myth that this group would moderate union policy and somehow provide a gentling effect. My own prediction is that by the sheer vigour and momentum of their demands for a change and by their desire to catch up they will almost accidentally create a battering ram which will hammer its way through the old relationships and even the rigidities of our present class system. With ranks swollen by hundreds of thousands of young graduates with nonnegotiable first degrees, and inevitably becoming radically disaffected, the white collar working class is going to demand emancipation. This will take the present British trade union movement out of its present organisational ghetto where it represents ten million members out of twenty-five million unsaved workers.

This will have the most profound effect upon how people go to work and their working environment. Perhaps it is unreasonable for anyone to write a book about unions when all these key interior decisions have not been taken but clearly are about to be taken.

But one factor is central: the middle class, which 100 years ago would have sailed away and nursed, governed, irrigated and ruled all those great areas coloured red, are now starting to colonise the British trade union movement — surely one of the last of the world's great under-developed areas?