MIA > Archive > Cliff > Incomes policy
In order to carry out an incomes policy – or wage restraint – it is first of all necessary to bring about great changes in the structure and function of the trade unions: “The introduction of any sort of formal incomes policy would significantly affect the power, functioning and attitudes of the trade unions”. [1] In particular, since the size of individual wage bargains could not be left to individual unions and employers, the position of the TUC would have to be greatly strengthened. Trade union power would have to be centralised much more in the hands of the TUC, which would have to be able “to speak for all and to enforce its word”.
It will certainly mean the relegation of the present collective bargaining machinery to a secondary place in the structure since the crucial decision, of the size of the general increase for any one year, will be taken elsewhere ... It also means that the central skill of many union leaders, that of negotiator, will be less important, with consequent effects on their general status. [2]
However, in return for this loss of function, they will perhaps be offered some compensations:
It would probably require a number of the most influential and respected union leaders to take a step up from their position of union secretary to some higher position, perhaps in the government. [3]
With the centralisation of power in the TUC – a process already begun by the “wage-vetting” scheme – there will be an increased need, if the incomes policy is to work, to draw the trade unions closer and closer to the machinery of the state. This closer association between trade union brass and state will be no new thing, however, but rather a continuation of a process that began a long time ago. In 1931-32 there was only one government committee on which the General Council of the TUC was represented, according to the TUC directory of committees. By 1934-35 the directory listed six such committees [4], and the number has been increasing steadily ever since. The Second World War in particular saw a change in the relationship between the unions and the state:
No established right of access to the government was conceded to unions ... until the Second World War ... The long duration of the war and the much longer duration of post-war economic problems encouraged its establishment. Indeed, communications often moved in the opposite direction. Frequently it was the prime minister or one of his ministers who wanted to meet the trade union leaders. [5]
After the Tories came to power in 1951 the union leaders showed no desire to diminish their rights of access to the government or their policy of collaboration with it. Thus the General Council of the TUC stated:
It is our longstanding practice to seek to work amicably with whatever government is in power and through consultation with ministers and with the other side of industry to find practical solutions to the social and economic problems facing this country. There need be no doubt, therefore, of the attitude of the TUC towards the new government. [6]
Often, indeed, the policies of the union leaders expressed this relationship very well. Often their views were considerably closer to those of the Tory government than they were to those of many of the union rank and file, as a far from unfriendly commentator noted:
The TUC leaders, led by Deakin of the Transport and General, Tom Williamson of the General and Municipal, and Will Lawther of the Mineworkers, saw to it that the cautious and moderate policy which they had pursued under the Labour government was maintained under the Conservatives. Among other things, they ensured that resolutions denouncing all forms of wage restraint – such as were regularly submitted to Congress by the Communist-dominated unions – were voted down by adequate majorities. [7]
Despite the fact that the Conservative government had no “emotional bonds” with the unions, the number of governmental committees on which the unions were represented rose from 60 in 1949 to 81 in 1954, and these covered a wide range of subjects. [8] The most prominent of these committees have been the two general advisory committees, the National Joint Advisory Council to the Minister of Labour and the National Production Advisory Council on Industry. [9]
Whatever the colour of the government, the trade unions have direct access to government departments. In 1946 Arthur Deakin could say, “We have an open door in relation to all state departments and are thus able to get our difficulties examined in such a way as would not have been possible with any other party in government”. [10]
But the situation did not change once the Tories came to power:
The Conservatives preserved the system almost intact after 1951, although there was not the same familiarity of contacts with Conservative ministers as under the Labour government. While the TUC might not convince the government on any major economic issues, there was less difference on the everyday technical level. But the unions’ views were heard. “If I want to talk to the minister,” said a leading trade unionist in 1957, “I just pick up that telephone”. [11]
This process of coming together between trade union leaders and the state can only be furthered by the development of incomes policy, which requires much more active collaboration from the union leaderships.
The integration of the trade union leaderships into the state is one thing, but increasing their influence and impact on the state is quite another. The TUC undoubtedly seeks to be “reasonable” in its dealings with civil servants and ministers but the power of its voice is remarkably small, for all the reasonableness and sweetness of its tones:
The growing frustration experienced by the council can be seen from a study of the reports which its specialist committees make to Congress. Here one can read of the failure of the economic committee to influence budgetary policy; the production committee records its criticisms of government plans for high unemployment areas; and the education committee reports its unsuccessful attempts to secure the implementation of the Crowther report. But the decline in influence can be seen at its most tragic in the field of social insurance and industrial welfare, topics of great concern to the unions, where the General Council’s past achievements have been considerable. [12]
Thus the TUC has failed to get the number of factory inspectors increased to a satisfactory level (in spite of a continuing high rate of industrial accidents), has failed to get concessions for the industrially injured, has failed to get compensation benefits standardised for those injured before 1948, etc. Many of these failures are nothing short of pathetic:
Labour’s National Health Act gave the minister power to provide appliances for the disabled. Consequently motor-tricycles were provided for those whose disability involved a loss of both legs. During the last few years specially adapted small cars have been designed for the use of the disabled, and they have been supplied, under the National Health Service, to the war disabled. Yet successive Tory ministers have refused to extend this provision to the industrially disabled. The TUC has pointed out that tricycles are less reliable than cars, and in cases of breakdown disabled men have been stranded for long periods ... Despite the injustice and hardship caused ... and the trifling cost involved, the representations of the TUC have had no effect. [13]
At the 1963 Congress, George Woodcock claimed proudly that the TUC had moved from Trafalgar Square to the committee rooms. The abject failure to gain any real influence in those committee rooms is only too clear. Organised force could have won cars for the industrially disabled in five minutes. There can be no doubt of the generous and sympathetic reaction that a call for industrial support for this claim would have produced from many groups of workers. But the TUC has long been cut off from the working class, and such a call to action today would be unthinkable.
That the top men in the trade unions are quite often knighted for their services to the nation is well known. Some of them are given posts on the boards of both nationalised and private industries, and of the Bank of England. Among the 35 members of the TUC General Council only one is a layman, ie not a full time official. And paid full time officials are coming more not only to control the TUC hierarchy but to man the lower echelons of the unions.
In the National Union of Seamen and the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives full time branch secretaries belong to a recognised grade of the hierarchy of officers with exactly the same privileges as other full time officers. There are many full time branch secretaries in the National Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paper Workers, and in the National Union of General and Municipal Workers. The same applies also to the National Union of Miners. [14] Altogether the number of full time union officials reached the figure of 2,600 in 1959. [15] Since then, and especially since Wilson’s coming to power, the drive to increase the number of full time officials in the unions has been hotted up. Take, for instance, the case of the ETU. At the biennial conference in May 1965 the ETU decided:
As Les Cannon, the ETU president, put it, “The basic decision ... was that we should abandon horizontal lines of organisation within the union, and replace these with the vertical structure”. [19]
One delegate opposing Les Cannon and his friends summed up the work of the executive council as follows:
The executive council are calling for a full time executive council. This will mean that we will be electing the supreme policy-making body in the union for five years instead of for two years as at present. Not only will the executive council decide policy, but they will implement it and conduct all important negotiations. The individual executive councillor by virtue of that office will become the senior official controlling area officials in a large regional office. By judiciously recruiting branches and installing a full time branch secretary, this executive council devised structure, including their proposals to eliminate area committees, will ensure complete domination from the top on all policy questions, and national and district wage negotiations. [20]
In the AEU too a kite was flown at the national committee in June 1965 for turning branch secretaries into full time officials. [21]
The extent to which many officials in the unions are completely free of control from the members is clear from the fact that only a very small number of them have been removed by standing for re-election. Over a period of some three decades only 3 percent of them suffered this unhappy fate. [22]
The official’s white collar and his briefcase, together with the fact that in most cases he does not have to face election, quite often give him a feeling that he is a member not of the working class but of the middle class. As one study based on interviews with hundreds of officials stated:
We attempted to measure the feelings of trade union officials towards the social standing of the jobs by asking them to place their own jobs and the posts of the general secretaries in a list of 30 occupations according to what they thought would be “the generally accepted view” of their social standing. The question was answered by 79 percent of the sample and, of these, 64 percent placed their general secretary’s post as equivalent or superior to that of a medical officer of health or a company director, and 36 percent put it somewhere between a county solicitor and an elementary schoolteacher; 10 percent rated their own posts as equal to or above that of a civil servant (executive grade), 69 percent put themselves between a non-conformist minister and an elementary schoolteacher, and 21 percent somewhere below the schoolteacher. [23]
Most full time officers rate themselves among the holders of middle class posts (and rate their general secretaries close to the top of a scale of social standing). [24]
Not surprisingly, very few trade union officials went back to the ranks after giving up their jobs, for whatever reason:
|
FULL TIME OFFICERS: SUBSEQUENT POST OF RESIGNED OFFICERS [25] |
|
|
Post in nationalised industry |
48 |
|---|---|
|
Government post |
25 |
|
Managerial post in private industry |
14 |
|
Post in another union |
11 |
|
Back to “shopfloor” |
13 |
|
Own shop or business |
7 |
|
Labour Party post |
4 |
|
Elected Member of Parliament |
4 |
|
Post with other organisations |
9 |
|
Other |
9 |
|
Unknown |
122 |
|
Total |
266 |
Thus the trade union bureaucracy, rising above the rank and file membership of the unions, and feeling that it belongs to a group with a higher social status, hardly ever thinks of going back to the rank and file. To this degree it is alienated from those it supposedly represents. [26]
An added factor contributing to the alienation of the officials from the rank and file membership is the fact that the trade union branch, once the cell that connected the rank and file to the union machine, has radically declined in importance over the past few decades. This decline of the union branches has been brought about by a whole number of irreversible forces. Firstly, as a great deal of collective bargaining has become more centralised, the local union branch has come to have little or nothing to do with the fixing of wages and general conditions. Secondly, the detailed working out of the way in which general national agreements are to be applied is being done more and more in particular establishments by shop stewards and works committees rather than by the branch. The only exceptions are those few places, outside the mining and steel industries, where the works and the branch do coincide. Thirdly, the function of the branch as a friendly society has largely disappeared as the state has come to play a more important role with regard to health, insurance and so on. Fourthly, the union branch used to be a social centre for talk and drink, but here too there has been a decline as more and more workers have come to work far away from home.
As the branch has declined, so organisations built on the basis of the branches like district committees and trades councils have declined too. In many big unions individual branches no longer send delegates to national union conferences or district committees, but are grouped together for the purpose of selecting a delegate. This weakens the branch, and the delegate representing several branches necessarily has less direct contact with those whom he is supposed to represent.
The union branch is the basic unit on which the higher levels of the trade union administration rise. The weakening of the branch is a further element – both as cause and as result – in the increasing centralisation of the unions, their bureaucratisation. If the decline of the branch is the result of the centralisation of capital and the centralisation of collective bargaining on a national level, this decline of the branch also accentuates the tendency towards centralisation. Lack of power and function for the branches breeds apathy among the membership at branch level, and apathy is the reverse of the coin of centralisation.
Although a majority of the union officials are right wing in their political and union attitudes, and although they have sought to evade pressure from their members continually, they cannot entirely avoid this pressure, especially on the wages question. As a result, when the government has made demands on them they have generally dithered about, seeking to evade government pressures too, so as to avoid really concentrated fire from their members. It is only in this light that we can understand their response to George Brown’s insistence on “early warning of wage claims”, which can only make national negotiations even more of a farce than at present, and the imposition of a “wage-vetting” role on the TUC.
1. M. Stewart and R. Winsbury, An Incomes Policy, p.14.
2. M. Stewart and R. Winsbury, An Incomes Policy, p.18.
3. M. Stewart and R. Winsbury, An Incomes Policy, p.27.
4. V.L. Allen, Trade Unions and the Government (London, 1961), p.32.
5. V.L. Allen, Trade Unions, p.12.
6. TUC Report 1952, p300; cited V.L. Allen, Trade Unions, p.23.
7. H. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Harmondsworth, 1963), p.235.
8. V.L. Allen, Trade Unions in Contemporary Capitalism, Socialist Register 1964, p.157.
9. V.L. Allen, Trade Unions, p.35.
10. M. Harrison, Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945 (London, 1960), p.294.
11. M. Harrison, Trade Unions, pp.294-295.
12. W. McCarthy, The Future of the Unions, Fabian Tract 339 (September 1962), pp.23-24.
13. W. McCarthy, The Future, p.25.
14. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade Union Officers (Oxford, 1961), pp.21-22.
15. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade, p.39.
16. Abridged Report of the Second Biennial Conference (London, 1965), pp.46-58.
17. Abridged Report, pp.108-117.
18. Abridged Report, pp.79-95. In addition, the leadership of the ETU insisted that representation at conference should be on the basis of one delegate per branch, regardless of the size of the branch. The result: “We find that in branches of one to 30 that 46 delegates represent 1,200 members, whilst at the other end of the scale we find that only 14 delegates represent 30,000 of the membership” (Abridged Report, p.97). Also, it is up to the executive to decide on the merging or splitting of branches. So, quite simply, if the leadership is in need of a few more delegates to support them, all they have to do is to create a few more tiny branches.
19. Abridged Report, p.8.
20. Abridged Report, pp.55-56.
21. AEU Journal, July 1965.
22. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade, p.79.
23. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade, pp.72-73.
24. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade, p.90.
25. H.A. Clegg, A.J. Killick and R. Adams, Trade, p.85.
26. What we have said should not be taken to imply an indiscriminate personal attack on every individual full time union official. As a body, however, full time officials are becoming further and further removed from their members by a number of separate but related pressures. Many of them undoubtedly act in direct opposition to the men and women they are supposed to represent, and put their association with the employers before their members’ interests. Some, we are sure, try to avoid this situation. What matters in this context, however, is that any strategy of opposition to incomes policy that looks to trade union officials, of the left or of the right, to play an important role in this opposition is fundamentally misconceived. No one would in any way wish to exclude left wing union officials from socialist movements, we imagine, but to rely upon them to play an important role, or to focus too much attention on them, is as ridiculous as seeing the fate of the working class movement in this country as dependent upon the activities of a few socialist university professors.
Last updated on 19.4.2003