Trade unions in Britain: unparalleled stagnation and decay

Despite the ConDem government’s determination to implement tens of billions of pounds of state spending cuts within a few months, the TUC at its September Congress could only come up with one firm commitment to action: a national demonstration, to take place in March next year. There was plenty of radical phrase-mongering, although General Secretary Brendan Barber slapped down Bob Crow’s call for a campaign of civil disobedience, saying members had to stick to the rules – that is, abide by the anti-trade union laws. Robert Clough reports.

All this was enough for Seamus Milne to enthuse in The Guardian:

‘For the TUC … the threatened onslaught has brought a new sense of purpose to a movement largely anaesthetised under New Labour … The TUC showed this week it has rediscovered the role not only of representing members but of speaking for millions as the centre of a national campaign, uniting service users and providers, workforces and communities.’ (16 September 2010)

Socialist Worker (18 September 2010) was also moved, saying that when TUC General Secretary Barber ‘along with other union leaders, calls for coordinated industrial action and mass demonstrations against the cuts, Socialist Worker backs him. The shift at the TUC this week is significant because it shows there is now near-universal awareness of the importance of the battles to come.’

Yet in truth the TUC got away with the absolute minimum – it was always bound to oppose the cuts in words. What socialists should be explaining is how little the declarations of the trade union leadership amount to, and how history tells us that it will undermine and sabotage every serious struggle by the working class along with its Labour Party allies.

Trade unions and the Thatcher government

The 1979 Thatcher government came to power committed to a programme of rationalising industry, cutting state expenditure and punitive action against the trade unions. By 1982, unemployment had soared to over four million; the Tories had passed the first two of four anti-trade union laws. Yet what was the response of the trade union leadership? To abandon the steelworkers who were on strike for 13 weeks at the beginning of 1980, and then low-paid NHS workers in 1982, thereby paving the way for the privatisation of ancillary services.

There was no shortage of militant declarations by trade union leaders: the 1982 TUC congress committed to taking action against anti-trade union laws ‘without regard for legal consequences.’ This was just deception. When the following year the National Graphical Association approached the TUC for support after it was threatened with the use of anti-union laws in its dispute with Eddie Shah, it was told to get lost. The 1983 TUC congress adopted a policy of ‘new realism’, of avoiding confrontation at all costs. The following year, the RCG concluded in its Manifesto:

‘[the] inability of the trade union movement to defend the British working class arises from its dependence on British imperialism. The evolution, growth and ‘success’ of the British trade union movement has been the foundation of the massive apparatus – luxurious premises, conference halls, full-time staff, newspapers, pension funds etc – that are the dominant characteristics of the British trade unions. They are not fighting organisations.’ (The revolutionary road to communism in Britain – Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist Group, Larkin Publications, 1984)

The 1984-85 miners’ strike was to prove this point. In order to defend itself against the National Coal Board, the National Union of Mineworkers had to mobilise allies outside its ranks, in the communities, critical amongst whom were the women support groups. It took over 12 months for the Tories to break the miners: they could only do so because of the treachery of the TUC and Labour Party leadership. The defeat of the miners accelerated the retreat of the trade unions: privatisation followed privatisation and the electricians’ trade union agreed a sweetheart deal with Murdoch’s News International in order to destroy the 1987 print-workers’ strike.

The fruits of the constant capitulation of the trade union leadership were the rise of New Labour and the triumph of Tony Blair on the one hand, and on the other, the collapse of trade union membership: from 13.2 million in 1979 to 7.2 million in 1997, and a fall in the levels of strike action to unprecedentedly low levels – no more than 600,000 days being lost on average per year from 1991 to 1997. The question is: is there any evidence that the trade unions and their leadership have changed over the intervening period? Are there any grounds for imagining they will behave any differently when they face ruling class pressure in the months and years to come? The answer, as we shall see, is a resounding no.

Trade unions today

Socialists have a duty to support all working class struggles to defend jobs and living standards. But we differ from the opportunist left in that we do not regard this elementary duty as a strategy for socialism, and when it tells us that trade unions organise all workers, we respond that trade unions in Britain do not organise amongst let alone represent the poorest sections of the working class inside or outside of work. There are more trade unionists in full-time employment earning over £1,000 per week than those earning less than £250 per week (see Table 1). This is at a time when the TUC has calculated that there are 5.3 million workers earning less than £6.75 per hour – £250 per week for a 37-hour week.

Table 1 shows that nearly 2.9 million trade unionists who are full-time employees earn £500 per week or more, 12.3 times as many as those who earn less than £250 per week. This was at a time when median income for full-time employees was £469 per week. Such figures are consistent with other data which show that:

• 48.8% of trade unionists have a degree or other higher education qualification compared to 32.9 % of non-trade unionists and 36.7% of all employees;

• 53.6% of trade unionists are managers, professionals or associate professionals and technical staff (40.3% for non-trade unionists and 43.6% for all employees).

Table derived from 2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Table 1.2a, and BIS Trade Union Membership 2009 Table 2.2. The total trade union membership who were employees in 2009 was 6,715,000 (Labour Force Survey). The degree of error incurred in deriving the last three columns of the table is therefore small – less than 5%

The character of trade union membership has certainly changed over the last 20 years: in 1991, 34% of trade unionists were managers, professionals and associate professionals; in 1995 it was 41%. Now the majority of trade union members fall into these categories; they outnumber those in unskilled occupations such as plant operatives and ‘elementary occupations’ by three to one. This change towards a more middle-class membership is a corollary of the increasing proportion of trade unionists working in the public as opposed to the private sector (see Table 2).

61.2% of all trade unionists now work in the public sector; scarcely any work in hotels or restaurants where there are scandalous rates of low pay (0.7% of all trade unionists), whilst only 8.6% of trade unionists now work in manufacturing. So trade union membership has changed over the last two decades in the direction of organising the more privileged strata of the working class and indeed petit bourgeois layers in the state sector.

Coupled with this development has been a continuing atrophy of basic trade union struggle, both in terms of its scale and what it achieves. The level of strike action has been at historic lows (see Table 3).

Over the past 15 years being in a trade union has made less and less difference. The so-called trade union premium (the wage differential for those in a trade union compared to non-members) for workers in the private sector has fallen from 15.3% in 1995 to 5.1% in 2010; it has fallen for those in the public sector as well, but by a lesser proportion – from 30.4% to 19.1%. In 2009, when the income of the three largest unions was £386.5 million, they spent only £3 million on strike pay. These unions are giant monopolies, making up over half the TUC membership of near 6.5 million, with huge investments in properties and shares (see Table 4).

Whilst membership of these three unions fell slightly from 2005/06 (pre-dating the merger between Amicus and the T&G to form Unite), their annual income over the same period increased by 20% and their gross assets by 35%. These are not organisations which will risk their huge assets to defend workers: they did not do so under Thatcher, they did not struggle against the anti-trade union laws under Labour, so why would they risk them now?

The opportunist left and the trade unions

The opportunist left completely glosses over this in order to justify its view that socialists should work first and foremost among the more privileged sections of the working class within the trade union movement. As a consequence, it will not challenge the alliance between the trade unions and the Labour Party. For example, both the left candidates for November’s election to the post of Unite general secretary oppose disaffiliation from the Labour Party. Len McCluskey wants to return ‘Labour to its roots as a radical reformist party.’ whilst Jerry Hicks argues that disaffiliation would ‘alienate the very best of Labour members, MPs and councillors.’ But the Socialist Party, despite claiming to reject the Labour Party, supports McCluskey, whilst the SWP, making the same claim, supports Hicks. In practice neither is prepared to break from the Labour Party.

In his collection of essays From Chartism to Labourism, a history of the British working class movement up to 1910, the communist Theodore Rothstein concluded that:

‘the [1880s and 1890s]…represent the lowest point in the class consciousness of the English workers…The last quarter of the last century stands out in the history of the labour movement…as a period of unparalleled stagnation, decay, and complete absence of any vitality.’

Rothstein was describing a period where opportunism had triumphed in the trade union movement and created a completely reactionary pro-imperialist party – the Labour Party. What would he have made of the last 25 years, where levels of strike action have become a tiny fraction of what they were in the last years of the 19th century or any other period since, where following 13 years of an utterly reactionary Labour government, the dominant forces of the left continue to cravenly defend Labour? Whilst socialists must be engaged within the trade unions, they must also be clear that resistance to the ruling class onslaught must involve much broader working class forces, and that the mobilisation and organisation of these forces is essential if the unions are to escape their state of stagnation and decay.

FRFI 217 October/November 2010