20 August 2015
“Now I’m a Union Man”
by J R Thomas
So sang The Strawbs in 1973, at number two in the charts in February that year. Jeremy Corbyn must be singing the same song in the shower as he contemplates the extraordinary surge of success propelling him towards a clear first round win in the Labour party leadership contest. But there were many who thought The Strawbs were singing a sarcastic dirge when they praised the might and influence of the unions, and many of Mr Corbyn’s intending voters may be taking a similarly cynical view of this Union Man. Mr Corbyn is the unions’ preferred man, but it is a modern version of entryism that has propelled Jeremy to within grasp of the top job. A huge surge in applications to join the Labour Party (£3 buys a vote and all the party meetings you can bear) is causing suspicion in the back rooms of Labour Party head office that many new members may not be that committed to the cause of another Labour government.
But whatever the motives of the new mass membership, the possible elevation of the bearded one to leadership is causing the dusting off of the histories of the last time Labour was leaning seriously leftward. The initial years of the Wilson government in the mid 1960’s offer a few clues, but for the pure heart of Corbynism one has to look back to the Labour victory of 1945.
That was another totally unexpected result – it was assumed by most of the political commentariat (and the politicians themselves) that this would be a major victory for Winston Churchill and the Conservatives, to reward the great man for winning the war. The voters had other ideas. In came Clement Attlee and a left wing cabinet on a socialist manifesto which they proceeded to implement with great energy. Churchill and the Tories were back in 1951, it is true, but Attlee and Labour had won the battle of ideas and captured the landscape of ideology; the continuing received wisdom until another unexpected shift in the great themes of politics brought forth Mrs Thatcher to radically re-landscape the politics of Britain in 1979.
With that 1945 Labour accession to power came the rise to the political stage of the trades unions. Perhaps “to the stage” is putting it too simplistically. The unions remained mostly offstage, noises off perhaps, often very loud noises. Their role was more subtle than to heave the levers of power directly. Various unions sponsored a large number of M.P.s (more than a hundred at one point), paying some of the costs of their support offices and research. The Trade Union Congress, the union’s union as it were, was a frequent participant in inner Labour decision-making and policy-formation. Frank Cousins, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union from 1956 to 1969, became Minister for Technology in Harold Wilson’s 1964 government, though neither an MP nor a member of the House of Lords (causing outrage, though he was elected MP for Nuneaton in 1965), but this was not a success – he resigned as both MP and minister in 1966, preferring the more subtle power of his TUC position. It was a lesson well learnt by other union leaders, who realised that direct political power brought responsibilities which could closely conflict with their representation of their membership.
Their other limitation, though, was a more subtle one, perhaps noticed by the union leaders before it was by the wider world; the decline in union membership as Britain’s old industrial base declined. Increasingly the growth in employment was in services and technology, workers had college or university qualifications, wore suits and worked in offices. The old industries were dirty, dangerous, and fast declining – and unions were seen as something backward and unfashionable. Wilson’s “white-hot technological revolution” was to undermine union power as much as it modernised old Britain. In 1969 Barbara Castle introduced “In Place of Strife”, new legislation to halt the increasing militancy of the unions and the strikes which were damaging industry. The legislation failed, but it symbolised the changing world in which a Labour government was prepared to take on its own union backers. Mrs Thatcher finished the job in the 1980’s – pushing at an open door indeed.
The rise of Mr Corbyn brings the unions back into new prominence, maybe king-makers once more, consulted by the Labour leadership, even the prospect of beer and sandwiches at 10 Downing Street, just as in the old Wilson days.
But how will the unions respond to this new role in the political firmament? Their long term problems remain – their membership slowly declines, their members’ average age increases, whilst their incomes decline (we exclude London Underground drivers from this generalisation). What is needed by them is a new approach to the collectivisation of labour.
It is of course not true to say that the middle class is un-unionised – many of the professions successfully operate closed shops that any foundry or shipyard union would have been proud of, protecting members interests and keeping incomes very high. Lawyers, doctors and accountants have all kept their professions tightly closed and benefited accordingly – without any input from the TUC. But maybe this is where the TUC should look for the future of the union movement, to the unionisation of middle class professions, to shop stewards in every office, and constant threats of go-slows on the keyboards.
The decline of middle class incomes has become a significant factor over the last ten years or so. Economic power is increasingly with the owners of capital, as it was in the last years of the nineteenth century. Maybe a time is coming where the interests of labour will be rebalanced with those of capital, some of that wealth forced back through wage structures to the shop assistants, executives, waiters, managers who make up the bulk of the electorate.
It would require a new approach by the unions to understand the needs and ambitions of modern workers, and even more so, an acceptance by modern workers that collectivisation of labour, and a more united and aggressive approach to wage and condition bargaining could work, and be socially acceptable. For a start – and a clear breach of the past traditional union approach – it would almost certainly have to work on a company basis, and not a trade one, and mean that withdrawing labour might bring long term advantage even if in the short term it meant a few issues with paying the mortgage and that second holiday to Tuscany.
All this is not so fanciful as the modern BMW-driving employee might think. In Germany, indeed in the BMW works, there is a strong workers’ council that represents not just those on the shop floor – though there aren’t many on the shop floor now and most of those are highly qualified engineers who tend the robots – but also those in the extensive offices that run the car company. Even German banks are unionised – with workers’ councils which exercise serious power, with seats on supervisory boards and rights of veto over senior appointments, over changes of directions for the business, over acquisitions and disposals. The workers councils behave (usually) highly responsibly, are elected by popular vote, and focus on the protection of their members’ interests. They are mostly non-political, focusing on enhancing the economic returns to employees. And it works. The German economic miracle – and many Scandinavian ones – have been greatly helped by this approach to distribution of business wealth, exercised responsibly on both sides. It has done much for greater equality of incomes– and for spending power within the domestic economy.
That approach could lay a foundation to a popular but leftist appeal to a New (New New?) Labour Party, a truly radical approach which might be the foundations of what in 2030 we will be looking back on as Corbynomics. Will it be so? You may take the view that it requires a strongly expressed vision of radicalism that could not spring from Mr Corbyn, a profound traditionalist of the left, or the trades unions, conservative to their cores. It might indeed be a long while before a Strawbs revival:
Now I’m a union man
Amazed at what I am
I say what I think
That the company stinks
Yes I’m a union man.
