Probably the biggest reason for the ongoing debilitation and theoretical disorientation of the British far left is the secular decline of wider working class organisation in the wake of the defeat of the miners’ strike.
There are three main reasons for this. The first is that the labour movement frankly still has not recovered from the Thatcherite onslaught 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.
The upshot is that unions remain marginalised, amounting to little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors.
Marxists used to regard class struggle at the point of production as the key mechanism through which socialist ideas could find a mass audience. Without it, any number of communalist appeals to religious minorities on a non-class basis, or any amount of effort to recruit teenagers from the anti-globalisation milieu, will not succeeded in rebuilding our depleted strength.
To get some idea of just how tough times are, consider this story from today’s Financial Times:
The proportion of workers who are trade union members has continued to slide and is almost a quarter lower than it was 16 years ago, according to official figures published yesterday.
The biggest decline has been in the private sector, where union density has fallen to a low of 16.1 per cent in the UK. This compares with 59 of public sector employees who remain union members.
Union membership has almost halved to just under 7m since 1979 but has stabilised in recent years. The number of union members as a proportion of a rising workforce, however, has continued to decline, dipping by a further 0.3 percentage points to 25.3 per cent last year …
46.6 per cent of employees were in a workplace where there was a union but only a fifth of private sector employees were covered by collective agreements, compared with 72 per cent in the public sector.
A higher proportion of women were union members at 29.6 per cent, compared with 26.4 per cent for men. More worrying for unions was the fact that less than 10 per cent of young people aged between 16 and 24 were in unions compared with more than 35 per cent of employees aged over 50.
It’s the last paragraph that is the most worrying. The over 50s are not going to be in the workforce that much longer. If unions fail to recruit young workers in the years ahead, the damage could be irreparable.
Posted at 16:48, 31 July 2008
Comments (7)
While I disagree with your extension of the "ongoing debilitation and theoretical disorientation" of some organisations to the whole of the far left, I do agree that the serious work the left needs to be doing right now, alongside campaigning to defend public service, oppose war and normal trade union and solidarity work, is getting young people not just into trade unions, but organised, clued up and ready to fight.
I think the public-private difference is important, but other key differences are in the nature of the job. For instance, I work in the private sector, in a manufacturing plant with ~500 workers. Unionisation levels are at a public sector level. Most people now work in smaller workplaces, without history of collective bargaining rights or even the presence of a union.
The Thatcher re-configuration of the economy from manufacturing and extraction to services has probably contributed just as much to the lower unionisation as the other three reasons you give. More insecure employment and the use of more temporary and agency staff plays a role too, making people understandably wary of even joining a union.
What is needed? I think a serious effort needs to be made by trade unions (particularly Unite and USDAW) to restore collective bargaining rights and establish the practice of recruiting new workers, and involving them in the union. Unions also need to show that they are offering something. The unions that are growing are the ones that fight for their members, in localised and industrial struggles, but also politically. They are also democratic and build on a local level.
There needs to be a new new unionism in Britain that takes account of the nature of the economy post-Thatcher, based on unionising and organising workers in small service workplaces, many of whom have very insecure employment.
This is what we do in North Devon, by trying to inform workers (mainly young workers) of their rights and entitlements at work, and explaining the benefits of joining a union and getting involved in it.
But there needs to be work done by the unions themselves to back to the hilt any workers that stick their necks out in an anti-union workplace by joining a union and daring to get active.
Politically, there needs to be a significant, mass voice, backed by the more progressive trade unions, to fight for trade union rights and rights at work.
I wrote an article at the beginning of the year, which is a little outdated now after everything that's been going on, that explores some of what I've mentioned here in the context of low pay, it is at http://devonsocialistarticles.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/low-pay-the-devon-way/ if anyone would like a gander.
We need to hold regular leafletting of indutrial esates.
Pick one in each town and just start the long job of educating, agitating, and organising.
We need to stop talking and start acting.
I think you missed a further cause - long term structural unemployment at around a million people - the real thatcher weapon - Union laws could be circumvented if needed, but a big pool of unemployment, that's hard for unions to get round...
The strong trade unions we remember from our youth (I am right in thinking we are all about the same age here?) were a product of the Second World War and Stalinism. Following teh Second World War, the shop stewards movement was very strong in Britain, remember such films as 'I'm Alright Jack' and I expect the Carry On lot did something. The fact is those conditions don't exist anymore. The capitalist class knew that it had to bread the power of the unions, if it wanted to deliver a knockout blow to the organised working class. Persoanlly, I think our only hope is that the newly industrialised countries of the world such as China and India become militant trade unionists. Raising wages and conditions for their own workers which will raise the level of society generally and flush out all the quaint ideas that some so-called leftists think are democratic. It would also be good for the products they produce. This year in America (I read) there have been several scares about the safety of products from China, and I know that everytime I go to Boots, they have posters up warning about dangers in various products ie loose connections, insecure knobs etc.
The problem facing trade union renewal, and by extension any attempt to base a new left political formation on the trade unions, is that industrial class struggle has largely been demobilised and individualised by the legal and economic context in which unions now operate.
Beginning in the mid-1970s employers and the state began to develop new forms of legal, economic and procedural regulation intended to weaken workplace militancy and channel grievances and complaints into modes of mediation and resolution removed from the immediate day to day politics and conflicts of the workplace.
Resistance to this process was undermined by the state which mobilised significant legal and ideological resources to divide, demoralise and defeat much of the industrial left. Such efforts were greatly assisted by global economic recession which radically weakened the resolve and ability of activists to resist the introduction of new working practices and systems of control.
The cumulative result is that levels of collective industrial struggle are now at their lowest level since the 1930s. It is akin to fantasy to imagine that in such a context workers will develop the consciousness necessary to support a new radical class-based political party.
The FT article highlights a number of worrying trends (continuing density decline, our weakness in the private sector, the struggle to effectively reach out to younger workers etc), but we should also draw some comfort from the stats.
Over the last 10 years density has declined by 2.5% points - compared to a 30 point decline between 1978-1998. Women are now just as likely to be union members as men.
27 of the 46 TUC unions that we can track membership for (including those who have gone through mergers etc) have grown over the last 10 years, most by over 10% (19 have declined). USDAW for example has grown by over 20% since 1997, all 3 national teachers unions have grown by between 6-40+%, PCS has grown by 15% and so on. UNISON has grown every year for a decade, the GMB which has spent most of the last 2 decades in membership decline has posted increases over the last 3 years and UNITE is beginning to make some real in-roads into parts of the private service sector that unions used to think were almost 'no-go zones'.
Almost every major TUC union is reporting that they are now better focussing on (and spending more resource on) organising than they were 10 years ago.
All this doesn't mean we don't have big problems and big challenges - but I think all the above shows that unions are not passive actors and that what we do can make the difference between growing or withering on the vine.
Anyone interested in the broader membership and organising debate might be interested in these events of taking place over the new few months.
You will find that the big employers in the manufacturing secture: Bae Systems, Fords, Vauxhalls and Airbus are still highly unionised.
The problem in these industries is that the unions sign Temporary Labour Agreements, which secures the core worforce from redundancy, but if you are a Temp you wouldn't see much merit in joining the Union if you are only getting half the protection.