Thatcher's previous term of office had the effect of:
removing the right to picket by re-
A new and fundamental assault on the rights of Britain's ten million trade unionists is being launched by the Thatcher government.
will be enacted which aim to radically weaken the traditional ties between the trade unions and the Labour Party. Legislation already introduced by the Tories in their 1979-83 term of office will be used to decimate trade union membership by destroying the 'closed shop' system.
The trade union movement, led by the Trades Union Congress, the single confederation to which the overwhelming majority of unions are affiliated, is in poor shape to resist. In the first serious test of the new trade union legislation last December the printers union, the National
Graphical Association, suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of the gov.
ernment. Far from drawing any lessons from the experience, the majority of the union leaderships have now approved a new strategy which aims to compromise with the Tories, moving along the road to American-style
'business unionism'.
However there is an increasing polarisation between the right and left in the trade union bureaucracy as a reaction to this policy of capitulation.
At the base of the unions 'Broad Left' currents are winning increasing support for their platforms of union reform and are linking up with the left of the Labour Party.
The coming year will pose major tests for this new left. 1984 could be the year which sees the face of the British labour movement undergo its most fundamental change for fifty years.
Steve ROBERTS
Mass unemployment has been a potent weapon for the Conservative government in their battle with the unions.
Even using the official statistics, which understate the true total by over a million, unemployment has risen from 1.2 million in May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power to 3.2 million in December 1983.
The level of economic militancy has declined accordingly.
NO. OF STRIKE DAYS
YEAR
LOST (IN MILLIONS)
29.5
1979
1980
12.0
1981
4.3
1982
5.3
1983
3.6
The level of trade union membership has dropped from its high point of 12.2 million in 1979 to below 10 million to-
But the effect at the rank and file day.
level has been even more radical.
number of shop stewards (trade union representatives elected in the workplace by section) has declined from 130,000 to 80,000 in the manufacturing sector over the same period. Among those, the number of shop stewards who work full time in their union activities has fallen from 4,000 to 2,000.
12
In 1984 laws
In British Leyland, where the workforce has been reduced by nearly 100,000 and where the number of shop stewards has declined by over 50, the management have managed to jack up productivity from six cars a worker in 1979 to 40 cars a worker in 1983.
However, despite all this, the Tories have not so far managed to crack the fundamental organisational strength of the trade union movement. The proportion of the workforce in trade unions in 1979 stood at 52 percent. This has declined only marginally to its current level of 49.6 per cent largely due to the continuing influx of new female membership.
Living standards of those in work have risen by seven per cent in the last four years, while hours worked, although still among the highest in Western Europe, have declined from an average 46-hour to a 44-hour working week for a male
This latter figure is attributable in part to the effects of the recession rather than victories won in collective bargaining And the average incomes of families taken as a whole have fallen by two per cent in the last four years. But it is by no means the case that the British working class have suffered any defeat comparable in its effects to the defeat of the General Strike of 1926 — the traditional bench mark for assessing the health or otherwise of the labour movement in
The Tories aim to inflict precisely this type of defeat on the unions in the period stricting numbers on each picket to six;
removing legal immunity for secondary' action by unions in cases where either workers in dispute picket other branches, suppliers or customers of their own firm, or where workers take solidarity action in support of other strikers;
outlawing the closed shop system whereby one has to be a member of a union in order to work in certain workplaces;
making unions and their leaderships liable for up to £250,000 damages to anyone who can claim to have suffered loss as a result of many different types of trade union activities. Union-busting bosses
All these facets of Tory policy on the unions were deployed during the dispute between the National Graphical Association (NGA) and the Stockport Messenger group of newspapers. The battle between one of the strongest and richest unions in the Trades Union Congress and a particularly belligerent newspaper employer was rightly seen as a test case in the confrontation between the unions and the gov-
The dispute has to be seen against the background of attempts by all the news paper proprietors to introduce new technology into the industry. successful resistance of the unions to the effects of changes in working practices made the newspaper employers one of the most vociferous sections of the bosses in demanding an end to the closed shop. So when Eddie Shah, a newspaper group northwest of England, decided to sack six of his employees belonging to the National Graphical Assothe most aggressive sectors of capitalist class rallied to his side, organisation, the Institute of
Shah hired scab labour to replace the sacked workers and mass pickets of up to 4,000 militants battled with police out side the plant. The NGA called on the Trades Union Congress to back them with industrial action in line with previous policy. But both the TUC and Labour Party leadership refused to support the NGA beyond the limits of the law. Both the picketing and solidarity action taken by the NGA during the dispute were outside the terms of the 1980 and 1982 Employment Acts. Any effective
International Viewpoint 27 February 1984
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BRITAIN.
action by the NGA in its own defence was ruled out by the terms of support dictated by the Labour and TUC leaders. The NGA caved in and the government claimed a famous victory.
The second front on which the government has attacked union organisation in recent months has been the right to strike in the so-called essential services'.
The unlikely arena for the government to begin its attacks on the public sector unions
REGION 3 in the health service, the fire brigades, the power stations and elsewhere was the secret communications centre in Cheltenham. The 7,000 staff at the centre are to be banned from trade union membership
KILL *in the interests of national security'. The workers are to be offered $1,000 as an inducement to give up their rights. Those who do not accept are to be transferred to other government offices or sacked.
The TUC leaders correctly saw this move as having more general implications for public sector trade unionists. Following the announcement thousands of other civil service staff went on strike to protest against the government's decision. However, without taking any further action and despite government confusion on the issue, the TUC leaders offered the government a 'no strike' clause in return for the right of union organisation. Given that such a clause is exactly what the government is looking for elsewhere in the public sector, the TUC's attempted compromise, like their betrayal of the NGA, is a major blow. New Tory laws
The public sector unions are sure to be in the front line of the government's attacks. In the health service, for example, independent trade unionism is under attack with the growth of Joint Consultative Committees with management which militate against independent trade unionism. In addition the widespread "privatisation' of public services which contract out to private capital, either in part or whole, services previously supplied by the state has as one of its principal objectives the destruction of union organisation in the public sector.
However, it is the very structure of the labour movement that the Tories mean to change with their next round of trade union legislation.
Legislation currently before Parliament would:
demand ballots within the unions to ensure that union executives should be directly elected by their members at least once every five years;
make industrial action called by the union without a secret ballot of the members involved subject to legal action by employers;
require union members once every 10 years to ballot on whether they can have a political fund' which allows them to contribute to the Labour Party.
Given the undemocratic structure of many of Britain's trade unions, the Tories feel that they command widespread supInternational Viewpoint 27 February 1984
/HE BILL
ATTACK
INJUSTICE
port for the first of these two clauses. But their overall effect will be to allow the state to intervene at will into the internal functioning of the unions with demands of secret ballots and court actions taken by individual union members who claim irregularities in the functioning of the unions.
But it is the clause relating to the Labour Party which will have the most farestablished by the unions in order to carry out the fight to defend living standards at the political level. From the very beginning the orientation of the Party has been controlled by the union leadership, checked only by the tendency Parliamentary Labour Party (consisting of the party's MPs) to be responsible to the state apparatus.
Given that 77 per cent of the party's funds comes from the unions, a significant reduction of that amount would force the Labour Party to turn to state funding, which would be used to establish an even greater autonomy of the Parliamentary Labour Party from any form of labour movement control.
The attitude of the TUC to these attacks has undergone a major change in the four years of Thatcher's rule. When the government's intentions were first announced the TUC adopted policy to oppose them, up to and including industrial action to support unions who ran foul of the laws. The TUC also refused to have any discussions with the government on the question of laws restricting trade such collaboration would give the legis-
THE
BILL
Mobilisation against Tebbitt's anti-union law (DR)
The first major change in this policy occurred at the TUC Congress which took place in September 1983. The Congress was the first opportunity for the labour movement to assess the results of the June general election where the Tories won a massive 144-seat parliamentary majority on a reduced share of the vote, thanks largely to the large number of won by the Social Democratic Alliance which finished only 2 per cent behind the Labour Party. (See International Viewpoint, No 33, June 27, 1983.) Coalitionist strategy
At the Congress, instead of accepting the policy urged by the miners' leader Arthur Scargill of the necessity of extra-parliamentary action to confront the Tories massive majority, the delegates voted for a major step to the right. On the advice of Len Murray, the TUC general secretary, the Congress voted to meet the government to discuss the proposals
Murray went on to talk of the need to discuss with 'any political party which has a chance of forming a government in the future? This was a clear endorsement of proposals made by the right-wing leaders that the trade unions should break their political strategy of exclusively pursuring their political goals through the Labour Party and instead also relationship with the candidates of bourgeois parties, particularly those of the
This political line of coalitionism has a long and dishonourable tradition in the
13
creases in return for a cut in the working week.' He went on to call for a general
This reflects the current action of Britain's miners who are fighting pit closures through an overtime ban.
British labour movement.
founding of the Labour Party in the
Labour Representation
Group in 1900, the trade unions pursued a policy of backing the Liberal Party.
Even after this date many trade unions continued to back both Labour and Lib-
Even at the 1983 Congress almost one-third of the TUC was not affiliated to the Labour Party. Five major unions have a majority of their members opting out of the political levy for the Party and recent opinion polls show that other major unions like the Transport and General Workers Union, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, the General and Municipal Workers Union, the electricians' union, the shopworkers' union and the National Union of Railwaymen would also disaffiliate if ballots of the membership were held. Among the major unions polled, only the National Union of Mineworkers and the National Union of Public Employees would continued affiliation to the Labour Party.
When the government's proposed legislation is passed it will compel the affiliated unions to hold 'mini-general elections' in the form of ballots to decide whether Labour Party affiliation is to be
Obviously, given the decline commitment to Labour within the unions (the 1983 general election saw, for the first time, a majority of trade unionists vote against Labour), a major campaign will be needed to reverse the trends evidenced above.
However, the present leadership of the TUC are not prepared to lead such a cam-
In response to calls by Frank Chapple of the electricians union and other right wing leaders for wholesale changes in the trade union movement to 'blunt the attacks made on us...and strengthen our appeal in the final part of the twentieth century' general secretary Murray produced a document entitled Strategy for the Future.
Approved by the council of the TUC, the paper calls for collaboration with governments and parties of all political colours, polemicises against the use of strike action and implies strongly that the unions should again advocate an incomes policy.
General Council acceptance of the plan was unsurprising since leadership had moved radically to the right at the 1983 Congress.
partly due to constitutional changes which diminished the weight of smaller and traditionally more militant unions, it also reflected a growing shift to the right amongst the major unions.
Even in the mine-workers union the recent election for general secretary pro-
La wafer-thin majority for the candidate of the left. Another close result is predicted for the result of the upcoming election for the general secretary of the million-strong Transport and General Workers Union, the traditional bastion of the left-centre within the labour Polarisation in unions vitally important union to swing to the right in the last decade was the AUEW, the metal workers union, once a motor force of the left under Hugh Scanlon at the beginning of the 1970s, now a major force of the right
With the exception of Arthur Scargill, the reaction of the left bureaucracy to the trend to the right has been at best acquiesence and at worst active collaboration in such major betrayals as that of drivers and healthworkers
But the NGA dispute produced a polarisation within the general council of the TUC. The left strongly opposed the overturning of TUC policy by Len Murray and called a separate meeting to discuss how to support the printers union in the dispute. The meeting produced nothing, partly due to the defeatist attitude of the NGA leadership. However, the division revealed major tensions within the union movement and the potential for the left to organise itself in opposition to towards apolitical business
The forces that could fight for the organisation of a new Minority Movement (1) in British trade unions certainly exist among the rank and file leadership. Their through the growth of new 'Broad Left' formations in a certain number of unions.
Broad Lefts have emerged most in the telecommunications engineers union, the civil servants union and other white-collar unions, the electricians' union and one has been recently founded in the Transport and General
Such formations have existed before in the unions, most notably in the AUBW. However, previously they have served as a mechanism for the British Communist Party to cement their alliance with the left trade union bureaucracy and most degenerated in the downturn of the latter part of the 1970s into networks of middle-layer bureaucrats.
While these features are not absent from the make-up of the new Broad Lefts, the dead hand of the Communist Party does not exercise decisive control over them. This reflects the decline of both the numerical and industrial strength of the CP. In the last 15 years the membership of the party has declined from 28,000 to 15,000. From 1967-73, through the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, the CP was able to call conferences of thousands of rank and file delegates from workplaces and even, on occasion, to call unofficial industrial action.
The impetus for the growth of the new Broad Lefts has not come from the CP therefore, but from the impact of the rise of the Bennite left inside the Labour
The Bennite current set out in 1980 to reform the Labour Party in such a way that there could be no recurrence of the disastrous experience of the Wilson and Callaghan governments of 1974-79.
Their platform consisted of direct election of the leader by the party instead of by Labour MPs, reselection of MPs by the local branches of the Party and the drawing up of the election manifesto by the party's national executive on the basis of conference policy rather than by the parliamentary leadership.
While the reform programme succeeded in the first two of its objectives, the struggle for leadership of the Party by its author Tony Benn, foundered on the rock of the block vote exercised by the unions in the Labour Party conference. The block vote, which entitles the unions to six million votes in the Labour Party
Trades Union Congress debates 35-hour week The Trades Union Congress held a national conference in London on 3 February to discuss how to achieve the 35-hour week. Ernst Breit, secretary of the West German DGB trade union federation.
Len Murray, TUC general secretary called on the British trade unions to accept "solidarity contracts' of the type that now cover 100,000 workers in France and 30,000 workers in Belgium. Murray rejected a pay cut to get shorter hours but said: 'There is a trade-off here. It is a trade-off between incomes and jobs... workers choosing between pay increases alone or smaller pay increases with shorter
Opposition to this policy came both from Breit and Arthur Scargill, the miner's
Breit, whose metalworker members are currently launching a struggle for the 35-hour week, called for no loss of pay and for 'social control' to curb technological unemployment.
Scargill said, 'I do not believe that we should refrain from pressing for pay inban on overtime to cut the dole queue.
The main guest at the conference was conference as opposed to the 600,000 exercised by the local parties, gives the union bureaucrats an effective veto to left advance.
A section of the Bennite left, therefore, turned its attentions to the problem to overcome this veto and to take on the right-wing leadership of the unions in an analogous way to that of the Labour Party leadership.
However, as is traditional with British left social democracy, the Bennite cur-
The Minority Movement was founded Communist Party guided by the Comintern. its height it represented over a million industrial
It declined after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike and was wound-up in the
International Viewpoint 27 February 1984
rent was not organised efficiently at the base of the unions. The one figure who could have given such a movement national leadership, Scargill, was focusing exclusively on the miners
The major new force that benefited from this Bennite impulse was Militant, a the Labour Party, whose number of supporters now ironically for a Labour Party tendency, the Militant has not sought to direct the engagement within the Labour Party and instead has concentrated supporters elected to high-ranking positions within the trade union movement. While its gains in this respect have been the growing of the Militant's politics in general (they refused to call for the recall of the British task-force from the Malvinas) and their economistic practice inside has meant that they have been unable to offer a distinct line from that of the Communist Party - still the major force on the trade union left. Left alternatives
The decline of the Socialist Workers Party, the 1,500 strong organisation led by Tony Cliff, in the trade unions also diminished the possibilities of the left alternative being built. The SWP diagnosis of a downturn in the class struggle while based in a reality led them to a sectarian and abstentionist policy towards the battle in the unions. While they closed down their frontist 'rank and file? International Viewpoint 27 February 1984 organisations, they declared their indifference to the outcome of the left/right fight inside the Labour Party and concentrated their fire on 'exposing Scargill, Benn and Livingstone.
The SWP analysis that nothing could be built at a national level also meant a. de facto boycott of the Broad Lefts. Instead they concentrated on rebuilding basic trade unionism in the workplace.
attitude towards the Labour Party led their militants to oppose affiliation to the Labour Party in as the local government This orientation has meant that many of the numerous shop stewards who joined the organisation in the 1970s have now left, some of them taking the SWP's advice at face value and devoting themselves exclusively to trade union work, others drifting out of activity altogether.
Supporters been a significant component of Broad Lefts in some of the unions. Their general strategy was spelled Hickey, the paper's industrial correspondent, in the 6 January issue of the paper.
'What the defence of the trade union movement now depends on is the effective organisation of the left wing within it. Furthermore that left - those forces which really fight for independence and Labour-affiliated trade unionism - has to be organised at every level.
'Attacks such as that on affiliation to the Labour Party, or on the closed shop, cannot just be fought on the local level -although the struggle starts there. It deorganisation of those prepared to independent Labour-affiliated trade union movement and basing that on local organisation at every level.
"This perspective for reversing the whole right-wing trend inside the unions is today a minority one within the trade unions - there is no doubt of that. But the right wing can only be defeated if that minority is organised to lead the fight back against the Tories at every level.
'It needs a quite different type of organisation to that which the left trade union leaders have relied on. Arthur Scargill and others have opposed the right wing mainly on the committees in the TUC or their own particular sectors. They have not challenged the right wing across the trade union movement as a
"There is no point in waiting for an initiative to come from the top. The left on the TUC has talked much of its opposition to Thatcher and to the present line of the general council. Action has come
'In order to win the ballots on affiliation to the Labour Party and on closed shop organisation, locally and in each union preparation has to start now.
constituency Labour needs to establish a campaign to win the ballot on affiliation to the Labour Party locally. Every trade union branch, every Broad Left needs to campaign to win the vote on affiliation and the closed shop. Coupled with support for every individual struggle which takes place, these are the single most important issues facing the trade union and labour movement in
The fact that the basic organisation of the British working class remains intact means that the Tory offensive will be met by major struggles in the next period. However, given the predominance of the right wing within the leadership of the trade union movement and the pos sible loss of jobs involved for those who do fight, many workers will be cautious before taking on the employers
That caution will be reinforced by the debacle of the NGA dispute.
A dual process is needed to combat this pessimism. Firstly a national lead, however inadequate, has to be given. Secondly those militants who have drawn the lessons of the succession of defeats suffered by the labour movement at the hands of the Tories need to be organised, as a minority, to struggle for the leadership at every level. It is within such a current, in action, that workers will begin to draw revolutionary socialist conclusions and decide on the necessity to break with all varieties of reformism.
Neither are such hopes utopian. Plans are afoot for Benn and Scargill to launch a joint newspaper which will ally the left in the unions and the left in the Labour Party in a much more durable way than heretofore. The ability of revolutionary Marxists to project a line of march within the forces attracted by such focii will be an important factor both in influencing the struggles and the face of the left in the years to come.
15
In 1957, Congress secured 49 per cent of the seats and 42 per cent of votes from the Hindi heartland.
In 1971 the proportion of seats and votes was 47 per cent and 40 per cent. In 1980 Mrs Gandhi secured 30 per cent of the seats and 31 per cent of the votes in the Hindi heartland. Her dominance had become dependent on the massive support from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka where she virtually swept the board. As the Rudolphs pointed out in their study, the Congress (I), from being a party of the north, has become a party of the south.
This is not a stable or long-term trend as the remarkable debacle of the Congress in these very two states during the legis lative assembly elections showed. N. T Rama Rao came to power in Andhra Pradesh on a tidal wave of support com pletely routing the Congress (I). In Karnataka, electoral support for Mrs Gandhi was more stable but a united opposition headed by the Janata party was able to win easily with the new incarnation of the Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), getting 18 seats and making some claim to having acquired a national stature. But it is as significant as the regional shift in 1980 that Congress (I) can no longer rely on
The