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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Clare Fermont in Hidden Depth (November SR) was quite right to point to the hidden struggle taking place in workplaces. But there is more explanation required.
Resentment in workplaces throughout the country has got a lot to do with new management practices. How many of us have had to put up with Human Resource Management? We all now ‘own’ our own jobs. In other words we are blamed for every little thing that goes wrong. We are flexible, meaning we do more work for less money. We work in teams, meaning we are supposed to shop our workmates and screw each other into the ground. All this means, of course, is that we are empowered, in other words stressed out of our minds and exhausted. The new culture is supposed to be about overcoming the outdated conflicts of the past, but in fact is simply management by stress obscured by cuddly language.
The important point is that the ‘we are all in it together’ philosophy is obviously phoney, hypocritical and utterly transparent, and everybody knows it. As economic recovery, sleaze and tax rises fuel people’s confidence and anger, the situation may change. This will be fuelled by another effect, and that is one of the real changes that have taken place in many organisations in recent years – decentralisation.
Both in the public and private sectors there has been a tendency for top management to retain a tight rein over what are seen as strategic elements of control and then devolve responsibility for other functions down to plant or unit management. This is done in the name of flexibility and competition and is partly driven by a desire to undermine national collective bargaining.
It can lead, as we have seen in a number of authorities, to groups of workers acting independently and immediately (often ignoring the law). The action will usually be brief, bright and bitter, not always strike action, and thus hardly ever showing up in strike statistics (or even the local paper). These disputes will also act as training grounds for a new layer of militants willing to take action at a local level.
Crucially, such small scale unofficial actions are a nightmare for the union bureaucracy because they are difficult enough to control on their own, but also have the potential of spreading like a forest fire. The professional managers of discontent, the union leaders, cannot use the age old tactic of stifling action in procedure or taking resolutions to national level and then ignoring them.
Finally, the restructuring, decentralisation and resentments have another element. They are highly vulnerable to the actions of small numbers of strategically placed workers. Thus small groups of workers can not only bring whole plants to a halt quickly, but they can also bring whole interplant production systems to a halt very quickly. Small, bitter disputes can have devastating consequences.
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Al Rainnie |
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