Grunwick revisited

Peter Paterson

The mass pickets were outside Grunwick again on Monday, and the organisers promise that they will be there every Monday until the company gives in, or is forced to close down. Middle class, middle of the road anxieties will no doubt be rekindled as the police scuffle with the pickets and the Special Patrol Group paddy wagons roll off with their cargoes of delighted lefties earning picket line accolades for insulting behaviour and obstruction.

Yet something has changed. A oncea-week mass picket is itself no mas picket at all in an industrial sense. All the familiar landmarks may be there: the company bus with its complement of scabs to be shouted at; the sweating constabulary; the banners; the committed youngsters; the ritual scuffling. Even Arthur Scargill and his faithful band of Yorkshire miners were there on Monday — a final sitting, perhaps, for a devotional work in the epic style, 'The Apotheosis of Anhui Scargill', destined to be hung in the boardroom of NUM headquarters in Barnsley.

But it is all hollow. The trade union movement has, in effect, withdrawn to nurse its wounds. The picket is no more than a tourist attraction, like the one that held its vigil for donkey's years outside a Dublin pub, interfering with no one — indeed, increasing the takings.

Everything now hangs, as he always thought it would, on George Ward's final legal fling: the impending House of Lords decision on whether ACAS, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, acted legally in the way it canvassed the views of Grunwick workers on their attitude to trade union membership and recognition.

If ACAS wins, George Ward's goose will be cooked. His two-year battle to deny bargaining rights to APEX (Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff) will be over. Counting the one third of the labour force who were dismissed as being solidly for the union, every precedent suggests that ACAS will duly recommend recognition.

On the other hand, if ACAS were to lose, the law will have to be rapidly amended to give it the legal right to ascertain the views of a company's employees towards union recognition, whether the employer likes it or not. After that, given patience, APEX will be able to use the machinery of the Employment Protection Act to secure its ends.

The dispute has done immense damage to the trade union movement, and by extension, probably to the government as well. Last summer's nightly television spectacular, when the mass picketing had some meaning, compounded the public unpopularity of the unions. To most observers, the picketing was a terrifying demonstration of union power. To the unions it held the reverse meaning. All the legislation they secured as part of the social contract, and for which they were to pay a high price in wage restraint, could not crack one small anti-union nut. Lord Scarman relapsed into French to describe Grunwick's attitude at one session of his Court of Inquiry — the findings of which were to be rejected by Ward because they were not legally binding: `Cet animal est tres mechant: quand on l'attaque, il se defend.'

To small employers all over the country, fed up with what they see as vast new privileges for the unions to interfere in their paternalistic ways, George Ward has become a hero. To the unions he is a squalid nuisance, but one towards whom they have badly overreacted.

An account of the whole affair by Joe Rogaly of the Financial Times has just been rushed out by Penguin* and a highly competent and interesting book it is. Fairmindedly, and stylishly, Rogaly has examined all the complex strands that went into the dispute: the racial issue, the role of the left, the alleged pusillanimity of the• union, the degree of violence used by the police and pickets, the attitude of television and the newspapers, the panic the whole thing caused to ministers and union magnates, and not least, the role of the National Association for Freedom.

Unfortunately, however, he seems to me to have drawn entirely the wrong conclusions from the evidence he has so carefully sifted. Rogaly is appalled at the vagueness and imprecision of the Employment Protection Act as far as it affects the workings of ACAS. Like many other people — including the unions — he is unhappy about the state of the law on picketing. And where the new laws are in his view faulty, he puts the blame squarely on the unions themselves.

His theory is, broadly, that while the unions want all the goodies that a benign Labour government has bestowed upon them, some sacred areas must remain untouched by the law. Thus, for example, to prevent industrial tribunals adjudicating on the rights and wrongs of industrial disputes, the anomaly has been allowed that led to Grunwick refusing to take back any of the workers it dismissed. Had they done so, as George Ward frequently pointed out, the action would have been discriminatory as between one striker and another and he would have been exposed to a number of actions before the tribunals for unfair dismissal.

It is a fair point to make, but was the anomaly created at the express insistence of the unions or was it faulty Parliamentary draughtsmanship? After all, the merits of disputes are frequently examined by tribunals in individual cases of unfair dismissal, particularly where the grounds concern the sacking of trade union activists.

As to the vagueness with which ACAS operates, that is the nature of the institution, run as it is jointly by unions and employers with a sprinkling of academics. It was intended that it should work by mediation and conciliation, that the voluntary path to agreement should be preferred. To invest it with legally-backed powers would fly in the face of the entire philosophy of British industrial relations over a bumpy century or more.

But that is the key to Joe Rogaly's unhappiness. He is a law and order man, approvingly quoting Dicey's condemnation of the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, and crying Halt himself. What he seems to want is nothing less than a re-run of Edward Heath's 1971 Industrial Relations Act, or something on the lines of Barbara Castle's previous effort that got no further than the White Paper In Place of Strife, as part of a new constitutional settlement.

But hard cases like Grunwick make bad law reform much more likely. The fact is that after several years of turmoil the country has set out on a new course in industrial relations. Everyone — or nearly everyone — realises that we have a national problem, that we do badly compared with the Germans, the Japanese, or the Scandinavians (though rather better than the Australians, the Irish and the Americans).

Of course the orderly mind longs for . .a clear set of rules (setting out) what actions are against the law — in letter, spirit, meaning and intent.' But the chosen road is to reinforce individual employment rights with considerable specificity, while allowing unions and employers to reach a more peaceful accommodation by gradually increasing the trade union role in industry. It must be given a chance.

The unions are gradually being enmeshed in a web of responsibility. Things are changing, as we should notice if we could only look beyond Grunwick and Leyland and the iniquities of the closed shop.

British trade unions will reform and adapt — are indeed doing so — but the process will not be speeded by legal coercion. There is much to be done: inter-union competition must be curbed; sensible mergers encouraged and mad ones discouraged; the closed shop, where it is necessary, given a human face. But Grunwick-style confrontations will disappear, perhaps, only when the unions themselves realise that the George Wards of this world enjoy them so much.