The working class faces massive attacks on its jobs, its living standards and its services. What is needed is resistance on the same scale: a militant movement based not just on those sections of the working class whose jobs and pensions are at risk, but including all those whose benefits are being slashed and who are losing the vital public services on which they depend. In the face of this challenge, the response of the trade unions has been woefully inadequate for all their fiery talk. In the run-up to the 26 March TUC demonstration against the ConDem government cuts, General Secretary Brendan Barber spoke of the ‘end of the Phoney War’. At the demonstration itself, Unite’s Len McCluskey declared: ‘We’re not prepared to stand idly by and let them dismantle our society… This is only the start. We need a plan of resistance including coordinated strike action,’ while Communication Workers’ Union leader Billy Hayes said: ‘We will be defined not by what we say from this platform but by what we do. If we have to fight, so be it.’
Yet what have we seen since? A single day’s strike action by public sector workers against the assault on public sector pensions under which millions will have to pay more, work longer and get less when they retire. There is no plan of resistance, and no further strikes are planned until the autumn. Only 152,000 work days were lost through trade union action in the year to May 2011 (722,000 in the year to May 2010), during which local councils sacked tens of thousands of workers. Strikes have been limited to those councils like Southampton and Doncaster which have dismissed their entire workforce in order to re-employ them on worse conditions. Faced with falling membership (down 20% since 2007), Unite is seeking to draw in students and the unemployed as ‘community members’ paying 50p a week to boost its numbers.
It will take more than a single or even a series of one-day strikes to hold off the ruling class: it will need a vast mobilisation of working class resistance. This will not be led by unions which represent middle management and the better-off sections of workers in the public sector. The claim by leading Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member Martin Smith that the 26 March demonstration showed that ‘the organised working class has become a central player’ in the resistance to the cuts (International Socialism Journal No 131) is a fantasy. He has no understanding of the structure of the trade unions in this country and the people it organises and represents. Hence he completely ignores key social characteristics of trade union members: that 50.3% have a higher education qualification (compared to 34.4% of non-members), or that 53.6% are managers, professionals or associate professionals (40.5% of non-members). It is reasonable to suppose these proportions to be even higher amongst overwhelmingly ‘white collar’ public sector trade unionists.
A better understanding of white collar trade unionism was provided nearly 25 years ago by the SWP’s Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos (The changing working class, 1987). Despite their rejection of the concept of the labour aristocracy, they had to acknowledge that:
‘…the massive rise in white-collar trade union membership over the past 40 years cannot simply be equated with a growth in unionisation of the lower more “proletarian” grades… A study of union membership in a bank, an insurance company and a local council, concludes… in all three institutions the level of union organisation rose with grade level’ (p69).
Stating the obvious, that ‘some routine white-collar workers do have a very real chance of moving out of their lowly jobs, in a way which manual workers do not’, they pointed out that even in a union organising amongst lower-grade civil servants, the Civil and Public Servants Association (CPSA), the ‘attraction to some of the ablest militants of upward mobility… presents a big obstacle to sustained rank-and-file-led organisation’ (p72). They report a survey of Sheffield local government workers which found that 48% of shop-stewards described their work roles as managerial (p73) and a further study that found 41% of stewards came from middle level jobs (p77), and conclude: ‘…the most trade union-conscious white-collar workers are often those with greatest hopes of moving up the career ladder, eventually into jobs in which they will supervise other workers. This explains [why] those who are most committed union activists, whose activity leads them to play a key role in union branches, are often those who end up in managerial positions’ (p78).
The situation they describe is even more pronounced now. When they were writing, the proportion of trade unionists in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations was around 30%. It has now risen by more than half, from 34% in 1991 to 53.6% today. Unions which specifically organised amongst the low-paid have disappeared: the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) in 1993, along with the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), merged with middle-management National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) to create today’s Unison. NUPE had been in the forefront of the challenge to the 1974-79 Labour government during the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and included a high proportion of black and Irish workers. In 1978 its conference debated a motion to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. COHSE was central to the 1982 NHS battle over pay, the consequence of which was the Tory drive to out-source NHS cleaning and ancillary services and so break trade union organisation amongst low-paid NHS workers. The Civil Service Union, which organised manual workers, merged with the Society of Civil and Public Servants, the middle management union, in 1988; and the CPSA merged with the combined union to form today’s PCS in 1998. No wonder a former Unison organiser at Manchester council could say, ‘many of the [union] bureaucracy come from middle or senior management – they are clearly not the same level as many of the ordinary workers’ (Manchester Mule, January 2011).
The main organisations on the left supported this process, and, with their strategy of obtaining elected national positions within trade unions, have become part of the very trade union bureaucracy they affect to denounce. They either dominate or are a substantial minority on the lay national executives of the PCS (Socialist Party), the NUT (SWP), UCU (SWP again), and to a lesser extent Unite and Unison.
There is an additional factor which the left ignores with its fairy-tales about fighting trade unions. In 2001 27% of trade union members were aged 50 or over; today it is over a third (34.7%). Many will have 20 or more years of service (23.2% of union members compared to 8.0% of non-union members), particularly in the public sector. With their stake in the system, and with conditions at work deteriorating, they are far more likely to support voluntary redundancy and early retirement deals with local councils than to respond to the appeals for a general strike some on the left are making. Indeed, the only purpose of such a call is to cover up for the lack of action today.
The trade union leaders will continue to talk a great fight. But as the ‘labour lieutenants of capital’ (a term coined by Daniel de Leon in the US and used appreciatively by Lenin) they will stop anything from happening. Unite’s drive to recruit students and the unemployed is as much to ensure control as to boost union membership, and it is doubtful anyway that they will have the rights of full members. The significance of the events in Glasgow reported on this page is that the main organisations of the left have joined the labour lieutenants of capital in policing the movement and excluding those who really want to fight. The truth is that it is campaigns such as Save the Accord Centre and Black Triangle, expressive as they are of working class anger at the ruling class onslaught, which represent the future of the struggle. They must be supported.
Robert Clough
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 222 August/September 2011
