Notes of the Month

Trade unions

The angry silence

From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Although the Tories have long since been in any fit state to carry through the kind of ritual coercion of the unions normally associated with Thatcher, commentators continue to play up the images of a movement on the verge of extinction.

Nevertheless, the internal debates of this historical relic are still regarded as important enough to merit live coverage during TUC week, the key decisions still make front page news, and the slightest hint of a more radical stance than usual is instantly condemned as potentially calamitous. Hence the uproar over the big unions’ relatively mild questioning of John Smith’s plans for one member one vote.

One key strand of the argument, which has been repeated ad nauseam for most of the last 10 years, has been to embroider the available evidence for declining trade union membership and offer up structural, rather than political, explanations for the weakness of the TUC.

This year we were told that total union membership in Britain is now down to seven million. Match this against a total working population of around 21 million and you come up with an average trade union density of 30 percent.

But, unless you are out to deliberately put the worst possible complexion on the figures, it is pure baloney to match up the lowest available figure for union membership against the highest available for the overall workforce, especially when the latter includes several million self employed, another few million barred from union membership (police, armed forces and GCHQ staff, for example) and when the figures take no proper account of the allegiance of about four million unemployed.

The new magic figure of seven million comes from the annual report to the TUC conference. The TUC’s own estimates are always the lowest available because they exclude all unions not affiliated to the TUC. Add in organisations like the RCN, AMMA and breakaways like the UDM and you increase the total by two million.

This figure of nearer nine million is confirmed by all the official censuses and records produced by the Department of Employment, the Labour Force Survey and the annual report of the Certification Officer. Despite all the losses, no other organisation in the country could claim even a fraction of this scale of membership.

It’s still a marked drop from the figure of just under 13 million recorded in 1979, but that was a peak year. Union membership today is at much the same level as it was in the 1960s, more than double the level of the 1930s, and four or five times as large as at the turn of the century.

It is important to challenge the usual distortions, if only because the usual litany of disaster can be a bit demoralising. The personnel departments of Britain’s biggest companies are not so easily hoodwinked. Their everyday experience is of high concentrations of union membership, from the shopfloor right up to the lower levels of management. In the public sector, employers nowadays have to contend with levels of union membership and a framework of union organisation undreamt of 20 years ago. In health, education and local and national government, average union density is between 55 and 70 percent. In British Rail, the fire service and all of the public utilities this figure rises to nearer 90 percent.

Without this, it would be difficult to explain the wholesale opposition to John Patten amongst teachers earlier this year, the fact that not a single train ran during the recent one day stoppages on British Rail, or even why UNISON is now the single largest union in the country, with well over one million members (including the 350 in Tower Hamlets prepared to walk out over the BNP).

Even though much of their recent growth has been achieved through mergers and acquisitions, rather than successful membership campaigns, the five big ‘super unions’ – AEEU, TGWU, GMB, MSF and UNISON – are every bit as powerful as anything which existed in the past.

There have been important structural shifts during the last 20 years, notably from manufacturing and to the public and service sectors, and with a much higher proportion of women working both full time and part time. But none of these factors really helps to explain the decline in morale which has been most evident in the leadership of the TUC.

Essentially this arises from its political cowardice during the Thatcher years, the performance conditioned at every turn by an even more timorous Labour leadership. Political judgements determined compliance rather than defiance of union laws and it was refusal to mobilise industrial action in support of the miners, not the lack of real power, that led to the pit closures.

The deafening silence which greeted Norman Willis’s long overdue departure may demonstrate that at least some sections of the bureaucracy now recognise that the rot has set in a bit too far. It’s getting to something, after all, when an enormous sigh of relief goes up simply to discover that the new General Secretary, John Monks, can put a few sentences together, in roughly the right order.

Whether the shift in presentation can be matched by effective action will be put to the test very soon as a result of the Tories’ decision to press ahead with a clampdown on public sector pay for the second year. First time round the leaders of virtually every public sector union blankly refused to ratify a whole series of ballots for industrial action.

Again this was a political judgement, based on the promise that the first year limit of 1.5 percent would not be repeated. That this is no longer the intention has created a genuine sense of shock and betrayal among leaders of all public sector unions. – Let’s hope it may just be the final straw which forces the TUC to start fighting its ground instead of crying about its self imposed impotence.

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