Vol. 16 No. 18 · 22 September 1994
pages 10-11 | 2712 words
It all gets worse
Ross McKibbin
- The New Industrial Relations? by Neil Millward
Policy Studies Institute, 170 pp, £15.00, February 1994, ISBN 0 85374 590 0
For much of the last few years Britain has not had industrial relations, at least not that the public would be aware of. ‘Industrial relations’ to most of us connotes strike unreasonable trade unions – all that is understood by the ‘Seventies’. We have repeatedly told pollsters that unions had too much power and were ‘damaging’ the economy; even trade unionists agreed with this, though they usually exempted themselves and their own unions from blame. The Government has very successfully exploited this folk-memory, and the stated aim of its industrial policies – the restoration of managerial authority – has been pursued with undisguised determination and no political ill-effects. For the Government, the question is one of power. Ministers have not been interested in alternatives to trade unions because most alternatives presuppose a kind of consultative procedure and thus some limitation on management’s ‘right to manage’. Whether its trade union legislation was responsible, or the economic policies which destroyed much of the country’s manufacturing capacity (so rendering workless a good part of the population), the Government’s success is unquestionable. Since its peak in the late Seventies there has been a huge fall in the number of trade unionists and a significant decline in the number of establishments which recognise trade unions. Half of all workplaces in industry and commerce have no union members and only 40 per cent of them recognise unions for the purpose of pay bargaining. In 1990, collective bargaining – the historic British form of wage bargaining – covered only 43 per cent of employees in industry and commerce. Aside from the miners’ strike, which affected hardly anyone except the miners, but them disastrously, and the occasional public sector strike, we have lived since 1979 in an environment without industrial relations – that is, without strikes.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 19 · 6 October 1994
From Keith Flett
Ross McKibbin (LRB, 22 September), while clearly sympathetic to trade unionism, follows a generally pessimistic line about the current and likely future position of the trade unions. It is a picture which many active trade unionists will recognise, but many fewer, myself included, will agree with. We have been told many times, by Tory MPs and media pundits, but also by trade-union leaders, that changes in the law in 1979 have effectively finished trade unionism as a significant force. It is clearly true that there are fewer trade unionists than there were, that disputes are way down and that collective bargaining is not the force that it was. Yet there are still as many trade unionists now as there were in the late Sixties, not usually thought of as a time of great union weakness. In an age of the decline of mass organisation, particularly the Church and the major political parties, the trade unions remain the one mass membership public body. Any trade-union activist will recognise immediately that these days members consult their representatives not just about jobs and wages but about all manner of personal issues previously dealt with in other arenas. In many areas large workplaces with high trade-union membership remain the norm. My large Central London workplace has over a thousand employees and 87 per cent union membership. Techniques designed to bypass unions, such as performance-related pay, merely succeed in enraging employees and increasing union membership.
Millward misses the point, as does McKibbin: the discontent which organised trade unionism represents and channels has not gone away just because it is not so often displayed on the picket line. In most workplaces there is tremendous anger and bitterness. The fact that this does not explode, as it has done in France, is not because trade unions are weak but because they remain comparatively strong in their ability to control and constrain their membership and, as a quid pro quo, to wrestle some concessions from management. Trade unions are not going to take over society, as the Right thought in the Seventies, because that was never their function or role. But they are an abiding feature of the industrial landscape and they are no more likely to wither away, in the short term, than the employers who, despite it all, they are still involved in facing down.
Keith Flett
Secretary, London HQ Branch,
