Edgar Hardcastle
Source: Socialist Standard, May 1978.
Transcription: Socialist Party of Great Britain.
HTML Markup: Adam Buick
Copyleft: Creative Commons (Attribute & No Derivatives) 2007 conference "Be it resolved that all material created and published by the Party shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs copyright licence".
Trade unions arise out of the class struggle between those who own the means of living and the working class, "between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess".
On the industrial field the struggle takes the form of agitation and the use of strikes to influence bargaining over wages and working conditions. Eventually political action will be taken to establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by, and in the interest of, the whole community—the purpose for which the Socialist Party of Great Britain exists.
United front
Workers early realised that they could strengthen their position by forming organisations to present a united front to the employers, to conduct strikes or resist lock-outs, and to give protection to individual members against victimisation. This did not mean that the struggle became one between equal forces, for in the background was the government, always there to use its control of the legislature, the police and armed forces, to protect capitalist ownership. Power is in the hands of the government but how, and with what degree of ruthlessness they use it depends on a variety of political and other considerations. In the general capitalist interest they will, on occasion, put pressure on particular employers to make concessions to strikers (as President Carter is reported to have done in the American Miners' Strike) but never so as to jeopardise capitalism. It was possible in India for Mrs. Gandhi's government to break a strike by ordering the arrest of tens of thousands of railwaymen, but it was not practicable for President Carter's administration to contemplate arresting 160,000 miners, even though they defied a court order to return to work. In Britain we have seen a Labour Government use troops to break a firemen's strike.
Alongside the general purpose for which Governments use their power in industrial disputes is the question of the extent to which, and the way in which, practice is governed by trade union laws. A simple, but erroneous, view held by some politicians and some trade unionists, is that the law is the last word on any trade union activity, so that if the law prohibits something it will not take place and that if the law permits something all will be well.
It is erroneous because there are occasions when masses of angry workers will strike in defiance of even savage penalties. During the two world wars there were large numbers of illegal strikes many of them successful. Governments sometimes chose to turn a blind eye and refrain from enforcing laws, as with the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 and 1919, which prescribed a fine or imprisonment on electricity and gas workers for certain strikes. It was hardly ever used, and when the Labour Government in 1950 prosecuted some gas workers under that Act and under Emergency Power Regulations and a conviction was obtained, the Government had second thoughts in face of protests from their supporters, and the proceedings were dropped. (These provisions were repealed by the Heath Government.) Also, it is hardly necessary to say that the fact that strikes are legal does not mean that the workers are bound to win.
Limitations of law
The early history of British trade unions shows the limitations of the law. Before 1824 trade unions were illegal under the Combination Laws, but they went on being formed and operating.
That was the difficulty which both the employers and the government faced. Pass laws against Combinations as they might, spy on the workers as they in fact did, nothing could stop the workpeople from organising to resist the degradation of their standard of life". (Two centuries of Trade Unionism, TUC 1952, p. 15)
The question of trade union law has been raised again by a court decision, confirmed in appeal to the House of Lords, that under the Post Office Act, postal workers commit an offence if they "wilfully delay or detain the mails", and therefore cannot legally strike. A Bill to remove this disability is before Parliament with Government backing.
Periodic setbacks
This repeats a familiar pattern in trade union history; a pattern of relaxation of trade union law, interrupted however by periodic setbacks, often brought about by court decisions upsetting accepted interpretations; as for example the court decision in 1867, depriving Unions of legal protection against theft of their funds and the decision in 1906 in favour of the Taff Vale Railway Company in its action for damages against the railway unions. The way in which these setbacks have been dealt with through amending legislation also follows a pattern; that of the unions doing a deal with a political party; with the Liberals in 1906 and 1913; with the Labour Party in 1946 (repeal of the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, passed by the Tories after the General Strike) and with the Labour Party in 1974 (repeal of the Tory Industrial Relations Act).
The concessions in the form of relaxations of the law made during the past two centuries have not been made without expectation of compensatory gain; some members of the government which legalised strikes in 1824 had even been persuaded that unions would not take advantage of it. When a political party has made a deal with the unions about amending the law, it has counted on electoral support in return, but the employers have also had an interest. As the unions established themselves under the protection of the law and increased their membership, the big employers of labour not only came to terms with the unions, but saw that they too have need of trade union organisation because they must have some body with which to negotiate, and because unions can be drawn into schemes for raising productivity.
Frederick Engels, surveying the changes in the second half of the nineteenth century, had already noticed the new attitudes of employers. While commenting on the way the conditions of the workers organised in trade unions had "remarkably improved since 1848" Engels had this to say about the employers:—
Thus a gradual change came over the relations between the classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into Acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves at their own time. (1892 Preface to Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844).
The process has gone further since Engels wrote.
Running capitalism
The unions are more occupied with promoting productivity schemes and export drives and more closely involved with the Labour Party in the running of capitalism than ever they were with the Liberal Party in its heyday. Spreading (capitalistically) "sound economical doctrines" among the workers through the unions flourishes still, as witness the way the "wage restraint" has been put over by successive Labour and Tory Governments.