Trade Unions (2)
Regenerated and optimistic
Clive Jenkins
The overwhelming feeling within the British trade union movement is one of confidence. It would not be an overestimation to say that the unions have a new but exceedingly well-developed sense of their own competence and influence. This is not true of many other Labour movements in the western world. They are either locked in violent disputation with authoritarian or shaky governments or, as in the US, immobilised in the great private sector and only showing signs of growth in public employment. Every national trade union centre needs a growing and technically comprehensive membership base. It is now clear that British unionism is growing every year and may well be the only movement of its kind to be in this happy state in any developed country. The old carthorse is rounding up the literate and the numerate in British society. The composition of this organisational growth is of immense social nriPortance: while white collar unions in local government and the civil service have looked after senior executives for many years this has been unique. The new twist in Britain is that relatively highly-paid managers in great Private enterprises are being formed into bar,gairring units. R in our own union we have recently established negotiating rishts for a group on more that £10,000 a year to follow such public sector managers as those in civil airlines. This means that the middle class is now being ideologically Perietrated by the startlingly new concept that the collective bargain is superior to any Menvidual ad hoc arrangement about pay and security. This has always been socially true but nOW the size of the figures is bigger in the union contract and revised more often and methodicallY. This means that the result of twenty-five Years of attempts at regulation of incomes has been to create a whole series of recruitment sergeants from freeze to inflation. But there ,swas. always another unorganised sector of
ritish citizens who were professionally qualined and vocationally dedicated and who • ,SoMehow saw their problems as quite unaftected by market forces.
The most recent example of their new aPpreciation of their role is the action of the radiographers who, when driven to it and with 'Ereat distaste, shut down so many hospital r'-ray departments throughout the country. It is not yet generally realised just how many of the socially sensitive groups of self-selected social service workers are now organised. This
l means that the erstwhile "free" markets are
✓ • e. °ming more influenced by generalised trade 'rno,o Policy and that everyone's incomes are getting related to everyone else's—but always Providing that they are collectively represent l. white collar groups have cottoned on to tc,lie fact that in every wage and salary freeze, nie blue collar workers can protect themselves In payment-by-result schemes or simply arranging to-work more overtime. tolliese defensive stratgems were not available the unorganised salary earners who, together with the pensioners, always lost out. But all this is changing and out of the tens of thousands of separate bargains annually settled for clerks, technicians, foremen, rn.anagers and scientists is emerging a discernible pattern. This now-free play of market force is showing up all anomalies of the poor PaYers in the private sector where union Planners can then concentrate. It seems extraordinary, but my union alone nas spent around £150,000 on forty-two strikes
this year so far. Almost all of these were directed towards straightening the line. But union bargaining is no longer just about straightforward cash returns; the days of the staff spokesman with the slim file in front of him confronting a well and bulkily briefed high-powered management team have gone. We are moving to a stage where the union appreciation of the employment situation and relativities between skill, responsibility and effort is much more sensitive and deep than the managements'. It is also true that the union predictions of inflation and investment have been more accurate than the government, employers or the famous (and usually wrong) economic forecasting institutions. With this new sense of assurance goes a heightening of the appetite of people to control their working lives, This comes in two ways. People are no longer willing, for example, to leave the scope of a pension fund and its management to company trustees alone. There is a widespread insistence, sometimes backed by strikes (such as those in the British Aircraft Corporation), for the right to settle all occupational pension schemes details as equals. I go further; there will be a demand for majority worker control of pension funds on the basis that the monies put in represent a deferred salary. There is also bound to be a move towards satisfying the pent up demand for longer holidays. Our media have nourished the myth that our working hours are short and our leisure is long. The truth is we are the worst in Europe, and our blue collar workers lag far behind Scandinavian standards. But will collective bargaining about terms and conditions of employment satisfy the newly organised groups of articulate people now flooding into the unions? Should it not be understood that the kinds of ideas being put forward for supervisory boards and other instruments that provide the power sharing will be warmly welcomed by all those careerorientated people who have fretted at their lack of opportunity to influence their company's policy and reconstruct their general working environment. They are no longer going to accept — as in the Rolls-Royce or Court Line situations — that they learn of their collapsed futures from press headlines. There is also the point that the whole workforce is getting better and better educated. This is why some unions are now making detailed pacts with student organisations so that the whole idea of trade unionism becomes accepted as the normal and standard course of action while still at university. It may also be that the graduates who might otherwise have been frustrated will then have a social vehicle so that the problem of "over-education" simply will not arise.
The political implications of all this mass activity are fascinating. Political scientists have argued in the past that the voting base of the Conservative Party rested on the deferential working class vote plus the lower middle classes. But doesn't this now stand a very good chance of being totally eroded away? And with the pensioners being championed by Mr Jack Jones and the Trades Union Congress, another reservoir of aversion to the unions is progressively being drained.
The ideas of the Labour Party as presented by Mr Tony Benn are likely to get firmly rooted in this fertile new soil, for the concept of a public stake will meet with no automatic or prejudiced reaction.
The lesson that repeats itself to union organisers is that when people join the union for the first time they carry very little political baggage. The union becomes an on-going seminar on the British economic condition. But not all state interventions are welcomed. It now seems obvious to all that the regulation of incomes in a free society is not just aggravating but distorting and inefficient. The most famous attempts in history to do this from Emperor Diocletian (in the year AD 301, who was forced to abdicate) to Mr Anthony Barber (who was also forced to abdicate) shows that incomes policy and freezes create dams behind ,which pent-up pressures for more purchasing power build up and finally flood out.
But what about the immediate battles? The problem of the freshly recruited middle-class workers is that they want to catch up quickly. This is why such struggles take place over recognition, because employers are fearful about the size of the first settlement. The first settlements are large but, even so, are no more than a start. This is why social contract considerations are very difficult for expanding white collar unions to take on board. Their members urgently want to make up lost ground, they will then want to be properly valued and priced in a second stage while at the same time demanding protection from inflation, which means that for someone now earning E3,000 a year an increase of 27.7 per cent per annum will be necessary to cope with a Retail Price Index rise of (say) 22 per cent. So the union tacticians have to juggle all of these problems at once.
But they think they can do it if they get a Labour government which is flatly committed against any new freeze, with promises of the possibility of withdrawal from the Common Market and two heavyweight pieces of legislation aimed at protecting individual employees from the gigantism and lofty manoeuvering of the multinational companies. The trade union movement is regenerated, inventive, hungry and briskly optimistic.
Clive Jenkins is General Secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs
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