POLITICS
The waiter and the porter and the upstairs maid
FERDINAND MOUNT
Brighton ur activists know that trade union- ism is not just about scrambling for a few extra pounds in the pay packet,' says John Edmonds, leader of the General Municipal and Boilermakers Union and the rising star of this year's TUC. 'It's about fighting exploitation, correcting disadvantage and, most of all, it's about protecting the women.' Well, activists may know it, im- bibed respect for The Sex with their mother's milk no doubt, but I didn't know it, did you? Not so much the New Realism as the New Chivalry. I should have spotted it when we all stood up for the lady mayor of Brighton (with the exception of a few uncouth scabs in the press balcony). Note: not just protecting 'women' but 'the women'. Next thing you know, it will be protecting 'our women' — from American multi-nationals, Japanese semi-conductors and other hyphenated intrusions.
All the same, the TUC always used to give the impression that a real job was something lasting 40 hours a week for 45 years or more, and usually done by a man. Part-time women workers were, of course, an oppressed minority and a top priority, but one of those top priorities that was discussed at teatime on Thursday after- noon. Now all of a sudden there they are up front in the great debate on the TUC- Labour Party agreement. The heroes of labour now seem to be not so much the miners and the railwaymen as the low-paid workers in the service sector, predomi- nantly female, embarrassingly non-union and often anti-union. The Triple Alliance of trade union mythology would today be composed of the waiter and the porter and the upstairs maid. The difference is that the old lot believed they needed the TUC; the new lot do not; it is the TUC that needs them.
Membership down from over 12 million to 91/2 million inside the decade, from more than half the workforce to no more than two-fifths; hundreds of thousands of new workers untouched by or positively recoil- ing from trade union beliefs and practices; the Government's trade union legislation unmistakably popular, not least among trade unionists themselves; the TUC un- loved, unconsulted, exiled from the corri- dors of power. The situation has been privately recognised for several years now as bleak, but this is, I think, the first Congress (even including Len Murray's splendid post-election outburst in 1983) at which these unpleasant facts have been spoken of so frankly and frequently.
As for the famous fiercely contested constitutional battles of yesteryear, Mr Edmonds said and nobody uttered a peep of protest, 'in retrospect, don't they look like phony wars?' All afternoon on Mon- day, painstakingly sober union leaders from finance and higher education and the civil service and telecommunications troop to the rostrum to utter frightfully moderate appeals and pleas. Mr Leif Mills even resorts to quoting Hume and Cicero on the horrors of avarice. Is he really the right sort of chap to run a banking union? Or do tellers now flock to join BIFU, chattering excitedly as they change into their peacock-blue Barclays frocks, 'our branch secretary's really a Hobbesian, but he thinks Nietzsche's great too'?
Even this year's president,' Ken Gill of Tass, is in genial, pliable mood. Mr Gill is described by the beautifully surnamed Rodney Bickerstaffe of the public em- ployees as 'a man of unswervable convic- tion' — TUC-ese for 'too hard-line for the Communist Party'. But there we have him adding a little sweetener to his prepared text and promising that if the next Labour government is progressive enough and represents the social demands of the work- ing class properly, then 'the workers will respond in framing their immediate econo- mic demands'. A new social contract on a plate for Mr Kinnock, just like the one that was such a help to Mr Callaghan.
The yearning for a Labour government — which alone can hope to bring back something like the good old days — is palpable and poignant. There is scarcely any attempt now to disguise the fact that all the concessions on offer — most obviously the ramshackle arrangement for pre-strike ballots — are simply face-savers to make Labour look respectable. Mr Edmonds, who carries candour almost too far even for this TUC, admitted 'everyone here would prefer that we went back to the happy days before ballots, but we have to face facts. By our own ineptitude, we managed to get on the wrong side of the argument. We managed to give some people the impression that we were against democracy in the unions.' Norman Willis — in a far better opening performance that last year, aided by the Reagan invisible autocue — said equally candidly: 'You know what we are trying to achieve, a pullback from these things which have been pointed at the heart of our move- ment.'
And if you actually read the terms of the concordat, a more or less total pullback is what Mr Kinnock is now committed to: the complete repeal of the 1980, 1982 and 1984 Acts; the restoration of legal immunities for trade unions; the abolition of the restrictions on picket numbers and secon- dary picketing; the restoration of most of the last Labour government's job protec- tion legislation. However you look at it, Mr Kinnock has secured a pretty poor bargain. His rapturously received speech did nothing to dispel the impression that these ancient institutions are to be restored to most of their former glories.
And how ancient they are. Sogat, Bren- da Dean tells us, is 203 years old this year. Ignore that '82 tacked on to the union's title; just as Pitt the Younger was forming the Mince Pie administration, the first Brenda was getting the lads together, at a time when 'Wapping' was merely a vulgar term,for sexual intercourse. As Dr Johnson said to the printer's devil who refused to accept some late copy from him, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile member of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades.'
This new-style TUC is altogether more engaging than the old. Its leading lights bear a closer resemblance to members of the human race. I am growing especially fond of Mr Willis, whose wry, self- pitying, rambling tendencies began to surface again as soon as he had to reply impromptu to the debate. Mr Edmonds balding, moustachioed, energetically ordinary — has the chirpiness of an H. G. Wells hero.
Yet despite its genuine strivings for realism, there is still something implausi- ble, pietistic, ritualistic about the whole business, and everyone knows it. Mr Tony Dubbins and the printers are feted and Mr Eric Hammond and the electricians are cursed. Yet everyone knows that the prin- ters brought calamity on themselves, that the Wapping cause is a lost one and that Mr Hammond's customer-friendly union- ism represents the shape of the future. Nuclear power will continue, whatever resolutions Mr Scargill manages to pilot through Congress. And the waiter and the porter and the upstairs maid will continue. to prefer low wages to no wages at all.
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