The Crisis of Trade Unionism

By CHARLES CURRAIS1 BRITISH trade unions today look remarkably like the Monasteries on the eve of the Reformation. They are rich, powerful, dominat- ing; they enjoy a privileged status that exempts them from legal obligations imposed on all other groups of citizens; they administer their own disciplinary codes through their own tribunals, using expulsion and excommunication as their supreme sanctions; they strive to extend their Authority into every department of our national life; and their leaders deny, as vigorously as mediieval ecclesiastics, that the layman has any right to criticise them or meddle with them. But the beliefs on which all this is based are crumb- ling. For the trade unions have outlived their age of faith.

• Like the monasteries, they began as groups of poor men. In the freezing climate of nineteenth- century industrialism, they fought for survival. They were part of that great surge of working- class enthusiasm for social change by means of c011ective self-help—which also produced the friendly societies, the consumers' co-operative movement, bodies such as the Workers' Educa- tional Association, and seventy years of constant electoral pressure for remedial legislation. Now the surge has ended. In our full-employment Wel- fare State the enthusiasm has turned into bore- dom. The unions . have become • functionless mammoths.

In theory, a trade union is a democratic body controlled by its members. This is now about as plausible as the similar fiction that a capitalist company is controlled by its shareholders. In fact, trade unions like companies, have fallen into the hands of the managers. Two examples will ••• illustrate the process.

Britain's biggest labour organisation is the Transport and General Workers' Union, which has more than one and a quarter million members. But, as Mr. Joseph Goldstein showed, in his book The Government of British Trade Unions (pub- lished by Allen and Unwin in 1952), no'less than 80 per cent, of the members were disqualified at - that time—by subscription arrears and other forms of non-compliance with the rules—from holding any office, paid or unpaid, in the union. The TGWU managers were drawn from one-fifth' of the nominal membership. In the Amalgamated Engineering Union, with 965,000 members, the gap between democratic theory and oligarchic fact is just as wide. A London trade union group called IRIS (industrial Research and Information Services) has recently made a detailed survey of national elections inside the AEU between 1953 and 1957. During that period there were twenty- four such elections; and in none of them did more • than one-eighth of the members vote. The AEU president was elected on a 12+ per cent, poll; the general secretary on an 8.9 per cent, poll; an assistant general secretary on a 6.9 per cent, poll. Contrast these figures, and others like them, with the 76 per cent, poll in the 1955 general election, and the 84 per cent, poll in the 1950 election.

Once in office, the managers can perpetuate their authority. in a perfectly lawful way, by means of the union constitution. How this is done is exemplified' by the Communist-controlled Electrical Trades Union. The ETU is governed by a rule-book of 142 pages, which is far more complicated, and far more voluminous, than the Constitution of the United States. It forbids the members of one branch to communicate directly with any other (all communications must pass through the managers' office). It denies a personal right of appeal to a member who is fined by a union court; he can appeal only if he can persuade his branch to do so on his behalf. Rule 30 carries the device of legislation by reference to a peak seldom glimpsed even at 'Westminster; for it re- quires a right of appeal to be reconciled with thirteen other rules listed in a footnote. With such a constitution, challenging the ETU managers is a task that would daunt both Hercules and Sisyphus; it is comparable to crossing a minefield blindfold.

Now any layman who comments on trade union democracy may count on two stock responses from the managers and their 'mouth- pieces. The first is to tell him to mind his own business; The ETU managers, for example, have replied to their recent critics very much as Mr. William H. Vanderbilt did to the critics of his Pennsylvania railroad—The public be damned.' They insist that the way they run their union is no concern of newspapers, broadcasters, the users .of electricity, or the legislature from which the managers' powers are ultimately derived.

The other stock response is to lay the blame on the members' apathy, and to say that they have the remedy in their own hands. No doubt they have. But the result of their apathy is (to quote Mr. Herbert Morrison at the Labour Party Conference in 1948) : Too many of our so-called democratic institutions are little better than shams, which are run by small minorities in the name of large bodies of citizens who take not the least practical interest.' For apathy is not a disease; it is a symptom. It shows that the mass member- ship no longer feels any need to participate; and it is this fact that has brought British trade union- ism to the point of crisis.

Today, the trade union movement has stopped moving. With full employment and universal State social services, it is like the Anti-Corn Law League on the morning after the Corn Laws were repealed. Its traditional objectives have been reached. Where does it go from here?

You can study this perplexity in the columns of the trade union press—a field of journalism oddly neglected by investigators. There are altogether ninety-two periodicals published regu- larly by the unions affiliated to the TUC—one weekly, three fortnightlies, fifty-five monthlies, twelve bi-monthlies, nineteen quarterlies, two annuals. Of those with which I am acquainted, the most intelligent is Man and Metal, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation organ; and the most competent in terms of presentation is the ETU's Electron. For many years, the TGWU's monthly Record was the most unreadable periodical in Great Britain; according to a speaker at the union's 1947 conference, quoted by Mr. Goldstein, it was impossible even to give it away. But it has now been improved and remodelled as a pocket-size tabloid. The liveliest is the NUR's weekly Railway Review; it prints readers' letters and it allows union candidates to advertise (two things that few union journals do). Its correspon- dence pages are conducted with a genial editorial tolerance for all sorts of viewpoints; and this makes it required reading for anybody interested in mass opinion—since railwaymen, by the nature of their work, tend to be sensitive indices.

One broad conclusion can be drawn from the trade union press: that the intellectual level of the movement is extraordinarily low. There is no thinking, no controversy, no current of- ideas, good or bad. With few exceptions, these journals are about as inspiring as a performance of Romeo and Juliet by a Last drawn from the Co-OP Women's Guild. Most of the writers are content to regurgitate the slogans of pre-1939 Socialism.

A generation ago, the kind of man -who went into union politics did so partly because he had a sense of mission, partly because it was almost the only career open to his talents. Both these reasons have vanished. Today, this kind of man is creamed off into grammar schools and universi- ties, to pass into the new class of technicians, administrators and executives. The unions refuse to recognise that, if they are to get talent noW, they must pay for it at competitive rates; and, con- sequently, they are becoming, more and more, a depository for people who cannot pass the eleven plus examination. This trend will continue. A socially mobile society, with careers open to talent, will presently produce in this country a rough correlation between intelligence, income and status. The unskilled worker at the bottom will become, in fact, what the Victorian bour- geoisie imagined him to be: someone who is where he is because he is not fitted for anything better. The implications of this for trade unionism are revolutionary.

Some of them are already visible—such as the disappearance from our politics of gifted, embit- tered men with no outlet for their powers excePt agitation. Anyone who recalls prewar Trade Union Congresses and contrasts them with, for instance, the Blackpool congress last autumn, is likely to agree that the younger delegates now are inferior both in personality and in intelligence to their elders. As the present generation of trade union leaders—Sir Thomas Williamson, Mr. Harry Douglass, Mr. Arthur Horner, Sir Alfred Roberts—moves towards retirement, the qualitY of their successors becomes a matter of national importance. It is pretty low. By comparison with 1938, or even with 1946, the rising men are dull, torpid, second-rate. They are not improved by the fact that, since they have no new ideas, they are driven to repeat slogans that they know to be out of date. (The habitual profession of beliefs that you do not in fact accept is as destructive to union leaders as it is to clergymen.) Trade unionism is now living on its intellectual —and still more its emotional—capital. Both are being used up. One mark of its sterility is its failure to find new functions for itself, to replace those lost or atrophied by the creation of the Welfare State. During that golden decade, 1945-55, opportunities were lost that are unlikely to recur. The unions might, for instance, have Won from the State the right to administer some of the social services—pensions, legal aid, sickness and disability payments—on behalf of their mem- bers. They might have won from industry, as the American trade unions did, severance pay, com- pensation for lost jobs, grants to finance the re- training of members displaced by technological change. But they failed to do so.

Now the British sky has changed. The union managers have no ideas about the vast threat that automation makes to the present employment pattern, the far vaster threat that will come when atomic power remodels the location of industry.

For a few weeks last year the TUC fell into a flurry of confused concern about automation; but it achieved nothing, and it has now sunk back into coma. In a Britain on the eve of industrial revolution, the union managers see themselves only as a veto group. They are diehards, with a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

Humanly and intelligibly, they are the Bour- bons of the status quo. Why, after all, should the railway union managers welcome any change in the transport pattern, or the mining union mana- gers any change in the sources of power? As well expect a man to make voluntary payments of income tax. For all such changes will diminish their membership, their revenues, their prestige, the authority they now exercise as paymasters of the MPs who sit for their pocket boroughs— boroughs that will be broken up when the voters move from old jobs to new.

Since 1945 they have been straddling the dilemma presented to them by the clash between their slogans and the world around them. They call for a planned economy while they realise uneasily that the words mean the supersession of collective bargaining by the State. They demand simultaneously frozen full employment, no infla- tion, no national wages policy and the right to bid up wages without limit. But they will not be able to straddle the dilemma much- longer. For they are a barrier across the path that leads to the industrial revolution.

When the Webbs published their History of Trade Unionism in 1894, it was translated into German. The translator, Eduard Bernstein, was thereupon censured by his German Socialist Party colleagues for wasting his time—since trade unionism, they told him, would have no place in the Socialist State, and it was therefore unneces- sary to trouble about it. Mr. Webb related this in 1920 as a jest. But, as Shaw said, every jest is an earnest in the womb of time. As it is led at present, there will be no place for trade unionism In the atomic-energy State—except in museums.