Trade unions are back. Just about. After nine prime ministers and a world turned upside down, unions are edging into the government’s economic thinking again. It wouldn’t surprise me if the idea of “industrial relations” was hovering somewhere at the back of Keir Starmer’s mind. He’s a lawyer after all, and Harold Wilson is his favourite Labour leader.
Between 1964 and 1979, the Wilson, Callaghan and Heath governments put an enormous amount of effort into industrial relations. While George Brown’s National Plan laid the groundwork (“We must pay our way… produce more wealth”), industrial tribunals, a Prices and Incomes board, an influential Royal Commission, a powerful white paper and Edward Heath’s industrial courts tried to shape policy. But all failed to persuade the unions that what was right for government was right for them.
Barbara Castle’s white paper was called In Place of Strife. These were the days when the acronyms – ASLEF and NUPE, G&M and T&G – all knew their own way to No 10 for talks, but they never left looking happy. When Jim Callaghan’s “social contract” 5 per cent pay-rise limit was broken by Ford workers in 1978 with a pay increase of 17 per cent, the dam was breached and other unions piled in. What followed came to be called “the Winter of Discontent”. Free collective bargaining was what the unions wanted; Margaret Thatcher is what they got.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Trade unions were a vital part of Labour’s postwar settlement. Nationalisation, national health, national insurance, welfare and a commitment to full employment were the central planks of the new social democracy, and “industrial relations” were the dynamo that connected Labour to the class it was built to serve.
Along with Beveridge and Keynes, Hugh Clegg deserves to be recognised as a key influence on the new social order. Nuffield College, Oxford, gave him the time and connections to first build the idea, and then the subject of industrial relations (IR), across a range of university-connected centres of adult and postgraduate education including Ruskin College, the Extra Mural Delegacy and the Social Science Research Council down the road at Swindon. By the time of Wilson’s first government in 1964, IR was ready to take its place as the dominant way of thinking about how to boost growth and raise productivity in a free society. Clegg was a personally modest but intellectually forceful figure who almost guided Wilson and Callaghan through the choppy waters between oil inflation on one side and wage inflation on the other. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Peter Ackers’ (hugely enjoyable but inflationarily priced) intellectual biography of Clegg helps explain how.
What happened next under Thatcher went directly against 100 years of labour history. Trade unions were effectively unlawful or ineffectual for most of the 19th century until the Acts of 1871, 1875 and 1906 granted them privileges in respect of conspiracy and certain torts (civil wrongs), such as inducing breach of contract. With the requisite legal immunities in place, they were free to grow, and by 1900, they helped to found and fund the Labour Party. By 1914, they were confident enough to challenge the biggest capitalist interests in coal, rail and shipping. By 1945, they had proved themselves time and again with an astonishing surge in British war production. By the 1970s, there were 13 million trade unionists, well over half the workforce.
Trade unions existed to enable workers to regain some control over the many and varied markets in which they sold their labour – often literally, in the square, on the wharfside, or at the factory gate. This gave workers a voice, and instilled self-belief. My father never left a pub without standing up to declare “Upstanding Worthy Brothers”. This was not his language but his union’s – a craft union (shipyard drillers), within a larger union (Boilermakers, founded 1852), within a general union (General & Municipal, 1919), which eventually amalgamated with the Boilermakers to form the GMB in 1982.
Modern trade unionism grew in and out of step with the Industrial Revolution, which dismantled old customs and practices, only to build new ones that the unions stepped in to adapt and defend. Their range and remit, therefore, was as wide and varied as the range and remit of British wage-earning itself. Although the big “general” unions were adept at bundling various skills into a single organisation, there was still ample room for craft sectionalism – defending jobs that underpinned everything else in families whose emotional core was centred on the rhythms and rewards of their labour.
What Axel Honneth, in his treatise on work and democracy The Working Sovereign calls “democratic will formation” – the deep social solidarities forged at work – was obviously not always popular with those at the top. To complicate matters, those at the “top” were not just employers, but also could include trade union bosses under pressure from Labour ministers advised by industrial relations experts down from Oxford.
And so, what represents social solidarity for some can be seen as restrictive practice by others. Successive attempts to “modernise” manning levels, say, or pay differentials, or overtime, forced the unions to turn direct on-the-job bargaining into something more corporate, involving other parties. The Oxford/Warwick school believed in free collective bargaining between unions and employers – absolutely they did. But they preferred bargaining through what Clegg referred to as “stable systems hard-wired by strong normative institutions”.
Clegg was a former Communist who found his mature politics in Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism. Crosland argued it wasn’t necessary, or desirable, for socialism to bring everything into state ownership. Social democrats could regulate markets by law, cushion inequalities by welfare, and raise productivity by free collective bargaining – the position Clegg took as the lead member of the Donovan Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, which reported to Harold Wilson in 1968. On the Devlin inquiry into the docks, Clegg learned that all too often, there were too many unions, too many employers, and too many unofficial negotiators. Stronger partner institutions were required – hence Wilson and Callaghan’s beefed-up Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) and the Pay Comparability Commission.
But what if you set up the machinery and still failed to reach agreement? Did failure in practice simply mean more practice until a deal was done, or were there other options? For instance, if Callaghan had won his battle with the unions during the Winter of Discontent and then defeated Thatcher at the polls, would he have continued with the idea of a consensual social contract, or would he have opted to impose legal limits? Would he have subjected himself to yet more talks, or would he have reached for the law? As a union man, Callaghan knew the bargaining had to be his and his alone or he would lose the trust of his members. As a Labour prime minister, he knew there were other stakeholders, not least employers, or that ghostly apparition called “the national interest”.
Well, Callaghan lost, Thatcher won, the Labour Party split into those who were comfortable with the unions (John Smith) and those who weren’t (Roy Jenkins and David Owen), and the entire principle and practice of industrial relations was thrown out the window. The Liberal Acts of 1871, 1875 and 1906 were superseded or repealed, and new punitive legislation curtailed unions’ freedom to strike and negotiate. At the same time, the destruction of the National Coal Board (itself a gigantic early exercise in industrial relations) showed how to smash a great union and proud communities as well. “Big Bang” deregulation of the City followed and global Britain was on its way towards deindustrialisation and mass immigration. Manufacturing collapsed from about seven million workers in 1979 to 2.5 million – or around 8 per cent of the workforce – currently. Union membership fell from 55 to 22 per cent in the same period. It’s estimated that half of employee representatives are non-union. New Labour did nothing to change these things, but just said they were inevitable or welcome.
Honneth outlines how to measure the well-being of wage workers: that they should earn enough to enjoy a measure of independence; that they should have time to spare; that they should be recognised for the value of their work; and that they should have opportunities for self-improvement. It’s a tall order, but his astonishing conclusion is that “working conditions are significantly worse now than they were 50 or 60 years ago”.
The headline on a recent Guardian op-ed read: “Say it loud and rejoice: the days of anti-union worker exploitation in Britain are coming to an end.” Well, maybe, but the recent past doesn’t suggest it. Starmer and Reeves hope that by clearing the decks of old industrial disputes, they will be able to win back trust, reform labour law, and edge the economy back into the sort of industrial relations framework envisaged by Wilson, Callaghan and Clegg.
What are the odds? Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union says the government doesn’t need to worry, because he’s not rushing to claim there will be a return to the Winter of Discontent “or anything like that”. That’s all right, then. Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, says the unions want a return to free collective bargaining under a positive legal framework. Mick Lynch of the powerful RMT concurs and is pushing to rebuild bargaining power across the workforce as “the most normal and most important function of a trade union”. At the same time, he said his union wanted Labour in power and to stay in power.
Call it Starmer’s choice. Unions grew not through heroic acts of martyrdom (though there were heroes and martyrs) but because the law protected them, employers recognised them, and workers valued them above all other forms of social solidarity except the social solidarity of the street. Getting back to this won’t be easy. Starmer can either keep unions weak and lose a vital ally (as well as Labour’s only organic connection with the workers), or he can trust union leaders to bargain sensibly inside a positive institutional framework. He can introduce tough statutory restraints that might not be effective anyway in a dynamic market, or he can do it all through employee rights.
Finally, it’s worth remembering three things. First that at their best, strong trade unions reduce inequality and remind their members that this is their country too. Second, that employee rights at work are nothing to do with trade unions’ ability to bargain, and may even hinder it. Third, it’s never the perfect time. Events always come thick and fast. On 22 July Starmer announced the “skills England” initiative to increase the training of skilled workers, but on the same day refused to support Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard which faces the possible loss of 1,500 skilled jobs.
All the while, AI looms. The world is filling with workers like those featured in the recent book AI Morality: Anita in Uganda who earns $1.6 per hour annotating images, or Laura who sold her voice to a company and is now competing with the voice for a job. But fear not. Private Eye reports that the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change thinks AI will be able to do 40 per cent of public sector jobs with £37bn savings to the Treasury. Guess where they got the figures.
Robert Colls taught Labour History at Leicester University. His next book, “A Very Short Introduction to Orwell”, is forthcoming from OUP
Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg
Peter Ackers
Routledge, 254pp, £135
The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship
Axel Honneth, trs Daniel Steuer
Polity, 238pp, £25
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[See also: Will Keir Starmer’s “partnership” with trade unions work?]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?