Brighton, January 5, 1985
'T
HE President then said `Brothers . . . I mean Gentlemen . . . The wind- ing-up of the Integrated Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Workers' Union is an historic, even if it be a melancholy, occasion; and it is fitting that these proceedings should be brought to a close by a review of the main events that have led up to it.
Many great movements in the past have been killed by failure; they have not succeeded in achieving their expressed aims. Many, too, have been killed by success. This was notoriously true of the Liberal Party, and of the first Labour Party; having achieved their expressed aims, and satisfied the groups they represented, they simply died away. Ours is an unusual case. Our Union has achieved its expressed aims— but it has not satisfied the groups we represent. As you know, we have always fought to shorten working hours, to raise wage levels and to improve labour conditions. Even as late as the 1950s these aims were still generally held by our mem- bers. (Laughter.) You are right, gentlemen! These aims are now anathema.
Ever since the great work-on strike against the thirty-five- hour week in 1968 it has been clear that we could no longer satisfy our members by bargaining for a leisure they did not want. The strike (like All others in the past thirty years) was, of course, unofficial. Indeed. it was conducted first and last by renegade workers, in unholy alliance with the employers, against your officials. The present thirty-seven-hour minimum week, with six hours' guaranteed overtime, may be said to have had its roots in that strike.
It was as a consequence of the work-on strikes, too, that the notorious bench-butty movement arose. It is amusing to flip through the reports of old congresses and to see that at oriel time shop stewards were actually represented as Com- munists and saboteurs, a danger to the trade unions! By 1965, as full-time paid officials, they were doing admirable work. Unfortunately the bench-butties were able to seize occasions when a shop steward was on union business to stab him in the back. The bench-butties—let us admit it—were sometimes in closer contact with the views of the rank and file than we were. It was they who organised the opposition to our project of a thirty-five-hour week. They were able to play on the cupidity of our members by persuading them that earnings would be higher if there were no restrictions. The fact that they turned out to be right was, I am sure you will agree, fortuitous.
Still more serious was the onslaught on the second of our aims—the raising of wage levels. The agitation against col- lective wage agreements, I have to admit, caught us unprepared. As early as 1952, our research department tells me, some London employers were finding it worth their while when advertising for labour to say that they kept non-union shops where there was no restriction on a man's earnings save his will to work. We paid little attention, being certain that the majority of workers, less ambitious, would continue to crave the protection of collective bargaining. We did not realise— how could we? —that the world had entered upon the Age of Inflation (younger listeners will excuse me if I remind them that this phrase was once new), an age when no man—except, I must say with sorrow, a trade union official—can work him- self out of a job. We could not know that in the new age the worker, and not the employers, would have the upper hand in the labour market.
The employers, to give them their due, realised this before we did. They strove to protect themstives from their own blacklegs by forming the Amalgamated Federation of Em- ployers, with its maximum wage agreements. Some of you will remember the sensation of the first picketing of a scab manufacturer on the Great West Road. Our sympathies were naturally with them; it was a sad blow to us when the Federation was dissolved by the Act of 1970. Indeed, it might be called the final blow. After that we no longer had anybody who would negotiate with us.
As for the campaign against improved labour conditions, its recent success is too much in our minds for me to need to say much about it. It may be true that the employers' discovery that better conditions meant 'better profits has led them into an excess of zeal in promoting schemes to look after workers not only while they work but during their leisure. The pro- vision of sports palaces. television sets and creches perhaps proceeded too fast, giving the bench-butty the chance to insinuate that these benefits are taken out of the, pay packet. Last year's strike against the National Coal Board's proposed £50,000,000 recreation centre at Durham will, I fear, prove the death sentence on schemes of this nature.
But long before this, I think you will agree, the axe had been laid to our roots by the ill-fated Wages and Earnings (Stabilisation) Act of 1958. The cold war was more tense then than, I am happy to say, it has been since; and the Bevan administration did not shrink from the most draconic laws in their anti-Communist fervour. With their usual disregard for realities, they froze all wage-rates and job-classifications at the level of January 1, 1958. We in the unions have received much criticism for the part we played, but how could we have avoided the burden of enforcement placed on us under the Act? After all, we are—or were ! —responsible public bodies, and our good relations with the state would have been prejudiced by refusal to co-operate. The fact remains that the Act put a premium on non-membership and individual bargaining, teaching our members a lesson they were never to forget. I shudder to think what might have happened had the proposed Order 143367 under the Act (Registration of Blacklegs and Compulsory Declaration of a Closed Shop) been signed by the Minister. As it happened, the repeal of the Act, as soon as it was found unworkable, gave us a reprieve. It has at least enabled us to commit hari-kiri gracefully.
All these events have left the modern trade union as little -more than an employment agency. And for that, experience teaches us, the modern worker is not prepared to pay even the greatly reduced contributions we. require. Possibly the beginning of the end can be traced back to 1954. It was then that the idea may be said to have taken root that social wants should be covered by social services; and that over and above this level, wages should be left free to respond freely to productivity, changes in supply and demand, etc. Once this view gained a hold on public opinion our days were numbered. It remains for me only to describe the arrangements for our liquidation. A soup kitchen was set up in readiness beside the Daily Worker offices in 1984 when the first rumour spread of our impending demise; I understand that the Central Com- mittee of the Party has been expanded to a strength of over 1,000 to accommodate our redundant staff. The rest of us are to be happily absorbed' in the new Parish Productivity Councils, the tactful and opportune inspiration of the Govern- ment. We have long been told that there is nothing we can do to increase productivity except stop hindering it: we will now be able to give this criticism the lie. I am happy to announce that the final liquidation dividend from the strike fund is at the rate of £15 3s. 4d. per notional share. Shareholders who are present may collect their cheques as they leave, in the Samuel Smiles Memorial Room.'
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