New Labour and the trade unions
Posted on Thursday 25 January, 2007
Filed Under Trade Unions
Don’t write them off as Trolley Dollies. British Airways cabin crew – some of them on salaries as lowly as £10,000 – are set to strike next week, in protest at management moves to force them to work when they are sick.
Listen up, Willie Walsh. Unilateral attempts to impose major changes in working practices in this way are just not acceptable. Employees should be able to negotiate these issues in good faith, with an employer who respects their rights and concerns.
Yet resort to industrial action in Britain is increasingly rare. As another blogger has pointed out this week, there are fewer strikes now than during world war two, when patriotic fervour was high and both Labour and the then-influential Communist Party worked flat out to prevent them.
Liam Mac Uaid summarises the current situation well when he argues that the working class is suffering from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win, and puts forward three main reasons in support of that conclusion.
The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory attacks of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the continuing effect of the anti-union laws.
Meanwhile, I’d like to look at some of the political dimensions of the question, particularly the relationship between the labour movement and New Labour.
Britain’s trade unions remain by far the largest organisations in civil society today. Yet after a decade of New Labour government, they are marginalised to the point where they have become – at best – one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors.
Blair’s supporters point to the national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that Britons still have substantially fewer rights at work that workers in any other industrialised country.
Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message. That’s what happens when you have the most lightly regulated labour market in Europe – and the most tightly regulated trade unions.
Understandably, some of the smaller unions revile New Labour. Witness the expulsion of the RMT and the disaffiliation of the FBU. But the continuing failure of the left to build a credible socialist political formation has ensured that neither have a realistic organisational alternative to join.
It is not immediately apparent to me that disaffiliation has strengthened these unions politically. True, they are saving the cost of the affiliation cheques. But otherwise, what are they now able to do that they could not do previously? I’d be especially interested in opinions from activists in either of them in the comments box.
Meanwhile, the biggest and most important players – TGWU/Amicus, GMB, Unison – are heavily committed to support for Labour, albeit critical of Blairism. Their leaderships will be solidly behind Brown, public sector pay freeze or not.
The key strategic perspective for the serious left remains what it has been for the last two decades, namely a fight to secure a charter of positive employment rights. Popularising such a demand is probably the first step. Any other ideas?
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10 Responses to “New Labour and the trade unions”
The conditions at the moment remain very favourable for the creation of a new party. It is difficult to see where the impetus for it will come. It looked for a while that the imperialist wars and an increasing understanding of how far right Labour has moved would do the trick. That opportunity has been comprehensively blown for reasons that I have discussed in detail. Just for good measure Labour will regain Bethnal Green at the next election.
I think that we may have to wait on a group of workers is willing to take on its own bureaucracy and the anti union laws and then draw very sophisticated political conclusions. Maybe it’ll be the BA staff. Here’s hoping.
Unlikely to make a radical difference, or even probably happen, but TUC sponsored Trade Union Freedom Bill proposal would at least be a start:
http://www.tuc.org.uk/law/tuc-11539-f0.cfm
The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory attacks of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the continuing effect of the anti-union laws.
All these are true and important but I don’t think one should underestimate the degree to which feelings and ideas of working-class solidarity, and the political practices arising from them, have really shrivelled over the past two decades. This is a really deep-seated process, it’s really not anybody’s fault (though that won’t stop the Left from denouncing one another for being responsible) and it means that the audience to which the Left, for more than 150 years, was primarily trying to speak, is much diminished. Organised labour doesn’t mean all that much now. Compare the situation when people like myself of the author of this blog were young and becoming socialists – it’s unrecognisable.
Now this may well change over time: the great struggle of us and them has a tendency to remake itself over and again and I’m certainly not mtrying to tell you the working class has disappeared or that left v right is a thing of the past or that “modernity” has supplanted old-fashioned politics. But we need to face up to it: in some countries, at the moment, the audience simply isn’t there, regardless of what line we take or what organisations we create, and what we’re doing is much more defensive. Defending the welfare state, defending the public sector, defending egalitarian ideas. Standing up for the NHS, for social housing, for comprehensive education. A more general approach, rather than “forward, comrades!”.
I certainly agree with much of what ejh says.
What can we do?
For socialists now paper sales and suchlike is nowhere near sufficient for turning the situation around. Instead the situation demands we rebuild the basic organisations of the class, and in so doing we will build ourselves.
One of the things we’re putting into motion into Stoke is building a trade union forum where TUists from whatever background can get together, network, listen to presentations (and no, not from SP HQ in case you were wondering), coordinate activities, and so on. I hope this cooperation will pay future dividends for the local labour movement and help the class find its feet again.
Phil, when you say: “building a trade union forum where TUists from whatever background can get together, network, listen to presentations (and no, not from SP HQ in case you were wondering), coordinate activities, and so on.”
Isn’t that a Trades Council???
It’s funny, that’s not the first time Phil’s said he agrees with me when he doesn’t, really.
It’s got really very little to do with “paper sales” or “rebuilding the basic organisations of the class” when the whole thrust of what I said is that currently, by and large, “the class” neither thinks of itself as such nor wishes to see those organisations rebuilt.
I suspect it is a trades council in all but name; perhaps an official trades council does exist but is completely ossified and setting up something new is the best way to do something (t)here an now instead of (immediately) getting bogged down in trying to get ‘invited’ to possibly semi-secret meetings and getting elected to enable it to happen as it should?
I obviously know nothing about the situation in Stoke, but it could be a plausible explanation, surely?
Liam: “The conditions at the moment remain very favourable for the creation of a new party.”
Is there a ‘do not’ missing from that sentence?
What are the favourable conditions in your view?
Some of the favourable conditions are:
1 Labour moving quickly in the direction of becoming a neo-liberal party.
2 An understanding among many militants that it is no longer a party that delivers reforms for the working class.
3 An anti-imperialist, anti capitalist consciousness that has been sharpened by the wars.
4 The relative success of similar projects in some European countries.
5 The good votes that Respect got in some working class areas.
6 The existence of all sorts of radical networks, blogs and organisations that want an alternative but don’t see a viable one yet.
The idea that Bob Crow and the RMY were, somehow hounded out of the Labour Party, is revisionist bollocks: Crow *wanted* to get the RMT expelled, and engineered their expulsion. I was present when he gleefully gave a “Ten-nine-eight” countdown to the momenmt of expulsion. As a fake-left poltroon, it suited him perfectly. That last thing he wanted was a serious fight within the Labour Party. The place for the RMT/FBU (leadership) fake-left, now, is outside the Labour Party, playing footsie (but never committing) with “Respect” and that other “Workers’ Party” campaign.
The job of the serious left is to ignore these posturing ninnies, and get on with the job of fighting Blair and New Labour.