POLITICS
The survival of the fitters, the engineers and the electricians
NOEL MALCOLM
The blood rises when they start on me,' Mr Eric Hammond once confided to an interviewer; 'I do enjoy it, it gees me up.' To my mind, the phrase 'gee up' is associated with good-natured nags from the pony club; but the electricians' union, which Mr Hammond leads, is surely a thoroughbred among modern trade un- ions, and for Mr Hammond himself an altogether more carnivorous comparison is needed. When he likened Mr Scargill to a donkey in 1985, Mr Hammond was quickly compared in turn to a jackal. And his presence on the General Council of the TUC has been described by one trade unionist as like installing a cat in a racing pigeon club. Nature, clearly, is red in tooth and claw at Congress House — with hardly a dinosaur in sight.
There is a popular myth which says that Mr Hammond's dispute with the TUC is simply a showdown between the new ways and the old, between the advanced species which will inhabit the earth in future and the primaeval monsters which have ruled it in the past. Mr Hammond himself has a rather different view of the matter. The strongest hostility towards him comes not from unions stuck in the old ways, but from unions which have adopted the new methods of competing actively for mem- bers and for jobs. What they cannot bear is the fact that Mr Hammond is a more successful competitor: that is what has forced them to turn in desperation to the creaking disciplinary machinery of the TUC. And it is the reason why Mr Ham- mond, with a mixture of righteous indigna- tion and mischievous pleasure, uses the word 'hypocrisy' again and again in every speech he makes.
The truth here is indisputably on his side. When the TUC tightened up its anti-poaching regulations with a new rule about single-union deals in 1979, the reason for this measure was not the actions of the electricians but the novel methods of touting for membership developed by Nupe. In 1984 the General and Municipal Boilermakers' Union offered a single- union deal to a firm which was planning a loud-speaker factory in South Wales. 'I was pleased to go for a one-union arrange- ment', said one GMB official, 'because it would mean more membership for us.' The TGWU, led by Mr Hammond's favourite figure of fun, Mr Ron Todd, has made several such arrangements, starting with a deal with the Norsk Hydro energy com- pany. And in 1985, when Nissan proposed building a major car factory in the north- east, both the TGWU and the GMB competed (unsuccessfully) against the en- gineers, all three of them offering single- union, strike-free deals as their dowries.
It is no coincidence, then, that Mr Hammond's fiercest criticisms, and the most acidic specimens of his Gravesend gravedigger's humour, are reserved for Mr Todd and the GMB leader, Mr Edmonds. Most people would describe Mr Edmonds as a proponent of 'new realism' in the union movement; and that is precisely why Mr Hammond regards him with such suspi- cion, accusing him of wanting to 'raid the electricians into insignificance'. He regards with extreme distrust Mr Edmonds' predic- tion that a series of mergers will lead to just a handful of 'super-unions' surviving by the end of the century. By a nice irony of history, this prediction resembles nothing so much as Marx's theory of capitalist accumulation, which supposed that businesses would become ever larger and fewer as they gobbled one another up. Nowadays, it seems, the best examples of unbridled competition often come from the fraternal comrades in the trade union movement.
The basic marketplace principles of supply and demand can be used to explain this state of affairs. The recession of 1978-81 forced many unions to go out and tout for members, and therefore to consid- er more carefully what it was that workers actually wanted from a trade union. Some unions, inhabiting hard-pressed heavy in- dustries such as shipbuilding and mining, became preoccupied with protecting their members (and their own membership fi- gures) against job-losses. But in the growth areas of new technology, as the recession finally began to soften, the engineering, electrical and technical unions found that they had to sell themselves on two fronts at once: to the workers, who knew that their skills were sufficiently in demand to earn them employment without union help, and to the employers, who knew they were offering their new factories to the unions in a sellers' market.
Putting it all like this may make it sound as if the new unionism has come about automatically and inevitably. But that would be to do an injustice to the skill with which people such as Mr Hammond have woven together their offers and their de- mands, trading their promises of strike- free deals with concessions from employers over job-security, retraining and consulta- tion. They have cleverly sold their unions to the workers as suppliers of financial services, and they have even more cleverly sold themselves to the employers as a sort of in-house personnel management team from whose services the company could only benefit.
Thatcherites may feel a glow of self- satisfaction when they contemplate these changes, telling themselves that the princi- ples of the free market are at long last taming the unions. The new system may be more convenient; but on closer inspection it is a good deal less Thatcherite than it seems. The 'pendulum arbitration' which lies at the heart of the no-strike arrange- ments is the opposite of free-market bar- gaining; instead of negotiating freely, each party has to base its demands on what it imagines that an independent arbitrator will judge to be 'fair'. Would anyone sell a tin of beans on the basis that the price he asked for it would be subject to this kind of 'arbitration' between him and the public?
Again, the single-union system is a sort of sanitised 'closed shop', with the element of compulsion removed — or rather, half removed, since although workers are not required to join the union, they are re- quired not .to join any other union. One EETPU official is reported as having said: 'I'm elected by our people, and I serve our people, and sod the rest of them' — an approach which might be summed up as 'Our people are all right, Jack.'
In the 1979 election, the Conservatives were loud in their defence of the right to free collective bargaining: a classic case of ideological purity walking hand-in-hand with brazen political opportunism. But the Tories' position on the role of the unions is becoming less and less coherent, as they become increasingly uncertain over whether to treat them as free associations (with powers over their members) or, as Clause 3 (the 'scab's charter') of the new Employment Bill suggests, as coercive protection rackets whose powers must be removed. Mr Hammond will not solve the Government's problems. As the new un- ionism goes from strength to strength, the Government's need to make up its mind on these issues will become more acute, not less.
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