A new era for the unions
Peter Paterson
By winning his case against the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), Mr George Ward of Grunwick. may, ironically, have presented the Labour Party with a splendid end-of-year bonus. Of ..course, others will see this legal"victory in a different light. Those who indulge in taking snapshots over the Christmas dinner table will have no difficulty in getting them developed by Mr Ward and his faithful band of union-resisters: indeed, it looks as though they will be all right for the summer, too.
The pickets will be disheartened, but not deterred. And the TUC, which has displayed a typical pusillanimity throughout the affair, must start lobbying vigorously to get its treasured Employment Protection Act patched up. But the government has not the Parliamentary strength to press through anything that looks like more prounion legislation. Nor, with a general election looming, would this be an auspicious time. So the necessary amendments to the Act will have to rely on the rather chancey business of a Private Member's Bill. The odds are therefore against the TUC getting the Humpty Dumpty of ACAS together again before the election. And that, in turn, means that it must start by restoring the Party's fortunes to enable it to mount an effective campaign for re-election, this time with a working majority. .
Not that the Grunwick affair is the only worry facing the trade union movement as the new year opens.. The firemen still crouch over their braziers, unable, or unwilling, to realise that they've achieved all they can hope by their strike, but somehow incapable of calling it a day and getting back to • work. If the firemen cannot be shown by the other unions where their best interests now he, they will have to be left to stew, Of more immediate significance is the fratricidal mood of the National Union of Mineworkers. where Mr Arthur Scargill is using the opposition of his Yorkshire area to productivity schemes as a naked bid for the leadership of the whole union.
. With his mind firmly fixed on some glit.tering and probably unattainable socialist :future for Britain, and his heart rooted. 'deeply in the romantic trade union past, Scargill seems quite prepared to sacrifice all for a principle: and, if Mr Joe Gormley, the NUtvl President, has anything to do with it, the price will be exacted in full. 'But Mr Gormley is far from certain to have his way. In recent times, he rarely has. So if Mr Scar cheeky resilience gets him out of trou,11e once again, we' shall be back to the tIoomy preoccupation of the trade union novement at the moment with its per sonalities.
Mr Scargill has been, and is, taking the risks of some reincarnated industrial Prince Rupert because he is playing for high stakes. He wants to be President of the miners in place of Mr Gormley. Unless the most extreme kind of disaster overtakes him, he should make it with votes to spare. He is thus a'good bet for those who look ahead to the kind of leadership the .trade union movement can expect over the new few years.
Some well known personalities will, after all, be shuffling off the scene in 1978. It will be goodbye to Mr Jack Jones, and goodbye to Mr Hugh Scanlon, and, therefore, goodbye to an era. The two were indissolubly linked in the public mind when they reached the top of their respective unions — the Transport and General and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering workers—in the 'sixties. They were the 'terrible twins', the first representatives of the newlyemancipated shop stewards' movement to reach the top. But that was a misreading. The two were, and are, entirely different in character and outlook. Neither was a typical product of the shop stewards' movement. Nor did they even like each other much.
Of the two. Jones has had the more glittering career — comparable, indeed, only with that of Ernest Bevin as a trade union leader of influence far outside the industrial sphere — but that had a great deal to do with the union he (and Bevin) led. Mr Scanlon's Engineers are a difficult bunch, locked into a rule book of immense complexity, jealous of sectional rights, constantly engaged in internal politicking. Mr Jones, on the other hand, earns the sobriquet 'Emperor' because of the immense power his union's constitution allows him as the only elected national of who, once in office, can stay without further challenge until he reaches retirement.
Even if Mr Scargill had enjoyed such a free rein, he is unlikely to have played the kind of role we associate with Mr Jones. He is a superb industrial negotiator, an expert on procedure, a cunning player in the elaborate match between management and labour. Mr Jones, on the other hand, is a natural politician, with a politician's ideas, ideals and ambitions, who has been fortunate enough to acquire a power base which , allows him greater security, more overt power and less elective responsibility than any Cabinet minister.
Nevertheless, the towering figure of Mr Jones has left the unions with certain problems. He has exerted great influence over a Labour government, but he has been forced to deliver on certain promises in return. The disillusionment of union members with union leaders is at least partly due to the extent to which the TUC has been lacked into the government system —a step towards corporatism which remains incomplete only because of the feebleness and ineptitude of the employers' organisation, the CBL What Mr Jones ha bequeathed the trade union movement, however, is a security system based on the entrenched rights of the Employment Protection Act and the two Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts passed by the Labour administration. There are obvious shortcomings and weaknesses In these measures, which are amply demonstrated by the way Mr Ward of Grunwick has cocked a snook at the allegedly mighty unions.
But in essence the new laws provide a base which will allow the unions, in time, to exorcise the neuroses which sometimes make diem behave so badly. The idea, clearly, is that in due course their attitude will become more responsible, and that they will concern themselves with the smoothrunning of industry, higher productivity, and the introduction of niore modern equipment and techniques.
In the meantime, there are a great many matters which have to be sorted out. It sometimes seems that the most important of these is the capture and distribution of those sections of the working population which are not yet fully unionised. This is what causes so much of the intense competition, fragmentation of bargaining, overlapping representation and general chaos that gives British unionism such a had name.
The unions are coming to realise that it will not be sufficient simply to change the law to allow ACAS the power it was thought td possess to bring employers like Mr Ward to heel. In spite of the reluctance of the present chairman of ACAS, Mr Jim Mortimer, to acquire the right to compel in recognition issues, the purpose behind it probably cannot be fulfilled without a degree of compulsion.
But once this painful and disruptive recruitment process has been completed — and it will not happen in 1978 —the way will be clear for the first time since the early days of trade unionism for a rational re-ordering of the movement, perhaps along industrial lines, with one union for each industry. If that is what the Social Contract eventually leads to, its architects, and particularly Jack Jones, will be remembered with gratitude.
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