6. The unions and the new technology

YOU MIGHT EXPECT the union leaders to be much more worried about the new technology than the government. After all, it is the membership of their unions whose lives are going to be turned upside down.

Unfortunately, however, it cannot be said that things are working out like that.

We have already referred to the enthusiasm for the new technology displayed by Eric Hammond of the EETPU executive and by the APEX Research Department. These people are not alone in embracing measures which will destroy their members’ jobs. The overall attitude of union officials is one of extreme complacency.

Even where there is some awareness of the problem, it is usually smothered by a general attitude which makes it impossible to deal with the causes of the problem.

This was clearly shown in the debate on the new technology at the 1978 TUC. A motion was carried unanimously which was supposed to register concern at the threat to jobs.

But there was not a mention of action, at the national or local level, to protect jobs. Instead, there was a vague and placid call for the government, ‘to declare publicly their concern at the prospect of the resulting unemployment and support moves towards a shorter working week, month, year or lifetime, with no deterioration in living standards’ and to ‘carry out as a high priority a comprehensive study of the employment and social consequences of advances in the new technology’.

At the same time, the TUC supported all the measures the government has carried out so far which are going to have the effect of destroying jobs: ‘Congress supports the NEB action in creating a new microelectronic company ...’

There were some ‘more radical’ elements at the TUC Congress. These went so far as to demand ‘... that the government appoint a Royal Commission into the new technology!’

They seem to have forgotten that only a couple of years ago there was a Royal Commission into the new technology for one specific industry – the press. Its conclusion was to advise the great newspaper companies to cut their workforces by half! If the policy of such union leaders is followed we will have a repeat performance, with another gang of highly paid parasites telling the rest of us to surrender half our jobs.

Millions of working people need advice from their unions now on how to cope as word processing machines, and robots, computer terminals and optical fibres, VDUs and System X, threaten their jobs. The TUC, it seems, is quite incapable of giving that advice. Like the government, its message is ‘grin and bear it’.

The reason lies in the basic philosophy accepted by all the union leaders, whether they see themselves as being on the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ of the movement.

They all accept that the way forward for their members is through collaboration with the employers. Of course, many of them see the need for occasional industrial action to ‘bring the employers to their senses’ – but once the industrial action is over, they again preach agreement and collaboration. If the employer follows a policy detrimental to the interests of the workers, this is said to be a ‘mistake’ on his part – not something which is inevitable in a system based on competition between rival profit makers.

It is this approach which enables those who regard themselves as ‘left of centre’ to expect the problem of the new technology to be dealt with by Royal Commission made up of employers’ as well as union representatives.

The philosophy of class collaboration has sunk very deep into the British trade union movement. Even quite a way to the left you hear calls for ‘an alternative economic strategy’ which will ‘revive British industry’.

What this ignores is that British industry is capitalist industry. 80 per cent of the private sector is in the hands of just one per cent of the population. Even the nationalised industries are run by boards of directors drawn from this one per cent, and pay out interest payments to them.

The demand for British industry to be ‘more efficient’, and ‘more competitive’, is a demand for it to be more efficient and more competitive in producing profits for this one per cent. The demand for ‘industrial expansion’ through ‘increased productivity’ is a demand for the wealth in the hands of this one per cent to grow, without any corresponding increase in the number of workers employed.

Those who accept the basic idea of class collaboration, the idea that we should all work together to make ‘British industry more efficient’, forget that British industry is not our industry. It is the industry of a very small and very privileged class of people whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the majority of the population, a minority who have already put 1½ million people on the dole because it is profitable to have shut down factories standing next to unemployed workers.

Does anyone really believe that this minority will baulk at putting another 3 million on the dole, if this is the way to introduce the new technology ‘profitably’?

What will happen if workers follow TUC policy of collaboration in the introduction of the new technology?

Firstly, there will be a massive loss of jobs as microprocessors replaced workers in industry after industry. Then there might be an increase in the sales of British companies abroad because their goods were ‘more competitive’ than those of foreign countries.

This might mean that the job loss through the new technology is slightly less than it would otherwise have been. It would not stop there being an overall job loss.

Finally, it would mean that companies abroad (including British companies operating overseas, and multinationals also operating in this country) would say to their workers ‘we cannot sell our goods because our factories are overmanned compared to those in Britain’. Workers in these countries would be subject to the same pressure to ‘save’ their jobs by allowing the workforce to be cut. If they accepted the advice of their own TUC type leaders, before long their employers’ factories would be more competitive than factories in Britain, and the whole process would start again.

The workers of each country would be involved in a Dutch auction against each other for jobs, from which the employers of all countries would benefit.

Another version of the collaborationist argument is found within individual enterprises in this country. Workers are told that they must accept a job loss if their firm is going to defend itself against its rivals.

A good example of this is in Post Office Telecommunications. The main union, the POEU, has for many years followed a policy of urging upon management massive new investments in technological advance, so as to ensure that the Post Office prospers rather than the various British and foreign telecommunications firms. This, it tells its workers, is the only way to ‘defend the Post Office monopoly’ and to ensure that ‘Post Office jobs’ are protected.

It is a policy that cannot save jobs in the long run. Investment in new technology means investment in System X, in optical fibre systems, in ‘modular’ telephone receivers – all of which will mean far fewer jobs for POEU members.

Adoption of new technology on this scale may ensure the ‘defence of the Post Office’ against its private enterprise rivals – but the mass of the workforce will not be around to enjoy the fruits of such a victory.

Maybe, if the Post Office develops the new technology before Plessey, GEC or ITT, a handful of jobs will be saved for POEU members which might otherwise have gone to workers in one of these three companies. But that will be no more a consolation for a much greater number of Post Office workers whose jobs will have been destroyed, than it will be for the Plessey, GEC and ITT workers who will be standing alongside them in the dole queues.

In fact, the policy is a great disadvantage to POEU members. It leads to a situation every time someone suggests industrial action in defence of jobs, where they are told: ‘You will weaken the Post Office and play into hands of the private enterprise vultures’. Once you accept that policy, you have to sit back and watch jobs disappear.

The only real meaning for a worker of the slogan ‘Defend the Post Office’ should be: defence of the jobs and working conditions of those people employed by the Post Office. That cannot be done by collaboration. It requires militant action. If it is said that such action will push costs in the Post Office above those of its competitors, then the answer is to take steps to ensure that such action is also developing against the competitors, by building links between all telecommunications workers, in both the public and the private sector.

In the same way, if it is said that protecting jobs in this country against the impact of the hew technology will destroy the ‘competitiveness’ of British industry, the answer is not to stop protecting jobs: It is to encourage workers in other countries to take similar action in defence of their jobs’.

This does not mean, as some union leaders are pretending, that nothing can be done until there is some international agreement on the shorter working week. You will never get such an agreement if you wait for employers or government to make it. You will only get it when the action of workers in one country in protecting their jobs inspires workers in other countries to do the same.

The inspiration is there. Already workers in Belgium have been striking for the 35 hour week. In Ruhr steel towns there has been the first great strike since 1928, over the same issue. In this country, there has been the struggle for the same goal by the Post Off ice Engineers. Together they begin to show a clearer way forward than all the resolutions of the TUC put together.

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Last updated on 7 March 2010