More Work from Trade Unionists
By PETER WILES
This is the first of a series of articles in which a number of economists, sociologists and journalists will consider the problem posed to the British by trade unionists who are not working as hard as they could and should. Other contributors to the series will be I. R. L. Anderson, K. G. I. C. Knowles, Mark Abrams and Graham Hutton.
IN 1824 Francis Place, the left-wing radical, held that if only oppressive labour laws were repealed the trade unions would wither away. Moreover so they should, for they stood in obvious contradiction to individualism and free com- Petition. But Place had never been inside a factory and he did not understand the industrial revolution. By 1924 the dockers had won their tanner, the Webbs had written their book and the House of Lords had delivered the Taff Vale judgement. 'No liberal-minded person '--whatever that means—questioned the desirability or the permanence of the trade unions. Thirty Years later again, we live in a Welfare State and an Age of Inflation. Social justice has—nearly—arrived, unemployment has ceased, and the urgent need is for more work and fewer wage claims. What is the 'liberal-minded person' (a bour- geois, of course) to think? What does the trade union member (no contrast implied) actually think ? IN 1824 Francis Place, the left-wing radical, held that if only oppressive labour laws were repealed the trade unions would wither away. Moreover so they should, for they stood in obvious contradiction to individualism and free com- Petition. But Place had never been inside a factory and he did not understand the industrial revolution. By 1924 the dockers had won their tanner, the Webbs had written their book and the House of Lords had delivered the Taff Vale judgement. 'No liberal-minded person '--whatever that means—questioned the desirability or the permanence of the trade unions. Thirty Years later again, we live in a Welfare State and an Age of Inflation. Social justice has—nearly—arrived, unemployment has ceased, and the urgent need is for more work and fewer wage claims. What is the 'liberal-minded person' (a bour- geois, of course) to think? What does the trade union member (no contrast implied) actually think ? Of the latter there can be little doubt. The nineteenth-century attitude is entirely unimpaired. This is loyalty to the working Class and to the unions as their organisation—a loyalty much stronger than that felt towards the Labour Party. Its practical expression is to restrict entry into the trade, to demarcate Skills and prevent overlapping, to work no faster than the Weakest, to prevent all innovations that disturb existing jobs, to shorten hours and to raise wages. For these purposes trade unions were founded, and such their purposes remain. Put thus baldly, the reader will note, a formulation of the aims of trade unionism constitutes, in today's climate of opinion, an attack upon it. Yet how else can the aims be formulated? Political revolution, for instance, is no longer an aim. Even further nationalisation is not often an aim„ And the Webbs' definition, a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of Ftaintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives,' IS not precise enough. For there are many things trade union members could accept to 'improve the conditions of their working lives' which cut right across trade union policy : for instance profit-sharing, co-ownership, technical progress, over- time. A trade union endorses only those methods of enriching oneself that show solidarity among workers : a wholly honour- able attitude, be it noted. Comradely honour is the essence of the movement: hence precisely its enduring strength and its intense conservatism.
Superficially seen, then, trade union aims have become anti- social. Many trade union leaders are uneasily aware of this. They often admit, for instance, that trade unions gain nothing from continuous rounds of wage increases, as prices always rise purl passu. This is quite wrong, of course: wages are only one-third of the national income, and many non-wage incomes are fixed in money terms, so that not only a strong individual union but also all unions together undoubtedly benefit from an aggressive wage policy. The prices of all goods do not rise as !ast as wages, if wage increases are at the time the sole cause of Inflation. Nevertheless, the widespread belief in this untruth. and the consequent call for wage restraint, show both that trade union policy remains what it was and that many of the leaders are troubled in conscience about it. .Wage restraint, then, is one mitigation of existing policy. It Is difficult and it often breaks down. All honour, then, to the leaders who have pursued it. Another mitigation has existed for very much longer and is, therefore, less noticed. But it is equally important. It is the amalgamation movement, and the concomitant substitution of general or industrial for craft Unions, The advantages of large scale organisation have nowhere been more evident than among trade unions, though ftere as elsewhere very large scale brings new problems which, unless methods and organisation are adapted, make it a failure. Now craft unions are amalgamated, or non-craft unions formed de,novo, simply to strengthen labour's bargaining power. But the process brings with it a notable decline in craft demarca- tions and restrictive practices, so that productivity is raised as well as wages. True, the wage differentials are also narrowed between skilled and unskilled, but that is not a complete offset.
Thus for the mitigations. And so deeply rooted in all classes is the conviction that trade unions are a good thing that it seems enough to show the undoubted facts of reform and new thinking. Satisfied that trade unions are adapting themselves to new circumstances, we might leave it at that. But that which has to be mitigated is itself evil; wHere reform leads merely to the watering down of tradition, the question arises whether the tradition is worth preserving in the first place. If we want wage restraint, why have collective bargaining at all? If we want productivity surely we should substitute for craft unions not industrial unions but no unions? Once these questions are put, and the mental Rubicon crossed, we enter a world in which revolution and reaction have indeed joined hands to mock the status quo.
The trade unions as we know them behave as if, and are only justified in existing if, first, the individual employer is the sole source of a worker's income while the state does nothing for him, and, secondly, the community has no overriding pur- poses (such as the cold war or the development of backward areas, or, quite simply, making Britain prosperous). Both conditions have vanished. Since the-state has entered the field of income provision we must revise altogether our ideas of how to get social justice. It is no longer a matter of such simple divisions as social classes—employers versus employed. To analyse the distribution of income in such terms is too crude; it is a sort of Marxism. If all wages gain at the expense of all profits many rich men gain (skilled bachelors, for instance) and many poor men lose (e.g., private pensioners). A really finely regulated social justice is the product of income taxes, family allowances, death duties and the like. To leave the redistri- bution of income to trade unions is like entrusting an appen- dectomy to a lumberjack. The Welfare State has made this function of trade unions completely obsolete. Keynesian economics, moreover, has made the employment-preserving function equally obsolete. Manipulation of the Budget, the Bank Rate and the foreign. exchanges has for nine peace-time years in succession equated the number of jobs with the number of men. We can now rely on full employment without ca' canny, spreading the work, resisting new machinery, etc. The new collective way is altogether better than the old, reactionary, individualist trade union way.
As to the broader economic effects of trade unionism, e.g., on economic progress or the general price level, there never has been any pretence that it was beneficial. At all times and in all societies trade unionism has stood for less work, a slower rate of technical change and higher wages; with occasional exceptions in the USA and the significant and total exception of Communist countries. It has therefore always retarded economic advance and always tended to raise prices. We may notice these things more today because it is more than ever urgent to increase productivity, -and inflation is with us con- tinuously instead of only now and again; but trade unions have always had these effects on the economy as a whole. Their only excuse has been—and it used to be valid enough—that they protect the poor, a function discharged today more deli- cately, more efficiently and more thoroughly by the state. The unions were wiser than they knew in resisting the Webbs' scheme for social insurance, which was more radical than Lloyd George's, and Eleanor Rathbone's demand for family allow- ances. It is not that the Tory Party and the capitalists cannot be trusted with such powers over the incomes of the poor: it is that they can, and the unions will be out of a job. As the aim of revolution has been given up, political and administrative responsibilities have been heaped on the unions. Royal Commissions, for instance, should contain non-political representatives of the working class : the unions are an ideal source for them. Employment exchanges, the social services, safety regulations, the Budget, the national dock labour scheme : it is unthinkable that these things be administered without consulting trade unions. Or is it? After all, we have a Labour Party, which is surely a sufficient watchdog for working-class interests. Moreover, many of these functions conflict with the primary bargaining function. For instance, the unions have always refused direct representation on the boards of nation=s alised industries, lest their representatives, serving two masters, be put in a false position; and the national dock labour scheme, the great exception to this rule, has led to just the sort of trouble that other unions have predicted, for it has made the TGWU a quasi-employer of its own members. The remaining political activities, which lead to less tension, are of course much less important. To keep the whole union apparatus, with its subscriptions, meetings and officials, as a recruiting ground for Royal Commission members : that would indeed be a mountain in travail for a mouse.
This is not to say that the role of the unions in politics is bad. Quite the contrary, it is -most admirable. In political maturity and restraint our unions are on a level with any in the world, even the German and American; and that despite an ambiguous and difficult connection with one political party, which tradition has not imposed on these other unions. The union leader, backed by his ' unfair ' card vote, is far more representative of the Labour voter than his opponent, the con- stituency activist. This is merely the greatest of many reasons why a union-less world is a never-never-land. No institutions are more strongly rooted, and to expound the excellent case for abolition serves in practice only to strengthen the case for reform. If the required changes contradict the. whole essence of a trade union, that does not mean they cannot be made, especially in this country. How is our unionised, tradition- ridden labour force to be made more productive? This is the main question we face. In the articles that follow a number of solutions will be suggested. Here it is enough to note that the problem is very genuine and very serious. Ask anyone. British or foreign, who has worked or managed in Britain and abroad, and he will say that the workers work harder abroad, except in Australia. Of all white men, with that one exception, it seems that the Briton works least. Of all trade unions. the British are the most restrictive. Even the French Communist unions are less of a hindrance to technical progress. 'When I rise all men rise with me' was once the much admired phrase of a labour leader. He meant, of course, he would await the revolution before improving his status. But there is to be no revolution, only steady economic advance. Where would we all be if James Watt had thought like that ?
(Mr. Peter Wiles, the author of the above article, is an economist and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. The next article in this series will be by J. R. L. Anderson, who will deal With the trade union attitude to security of employment.)
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