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From International Socialism, No.55, February 1973, pp.7-8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
(Part I of this article, The Domination of the Right Wing, appeared in our January issue, IS 54)
Part 1 of this article described the re-establishment of right-wing power in the National Union of Seamen (NUS) after both the great upsurge of militancy in the 1966 strike and the years of campaigning by the National Seamen’s Reform Movement (NSRM).
There were many reasons for this. Throughout the union’s history the mass of the rank and file have always found it extremely difficult to participate in its affairs. The main reason is, of course, that they are often abroad on long sea voyages. The extent of the problem is revealed in the executive council election results, published in the union journal – The Seaman.
In 1967 4.8 per cent of the membership voted; in 1969 it was 5.7 per cent, and in 1971 6.7 per cent. During this period the industry has contracted, and the union membership has fallen by over 15,000. In 1971, for instance, the 6.7 per cent represented only 3,150 completed ballot papers. [1]
Side by side with this low level of membership participation, there is a large number of full-time officials. Indeed the NUS has probably the highest ratio of officials to members of any other British trade union. Unrestrained by an active membership these officials are appointed by the executive and subject to constant pressure from the union rulers. Normally the system of appointments tends to perpetuate the political control of those in charge, and known oppositionists are barred. On top of this, however, the NUS has a tradition of threatening its officials unless they strictly obey every whim of the Right wing.
In the 1920s, for example, Havelock Wilson wrote an anti-Communist book, and then complained that not all the union officials were selling it. Just to re-emphasise the point he wrote to them all as follows:
‘It is my intention to keep a careful record of the number of copies disposed of by such officials. Then I shall be able to judge what each official is worth from a propaganda point of view ... Please understand the sale of this book is propaganda), work and each and every official is responsible.’ [2]
Such tactics are not confined to the distant past. When Jim Scott was fighting against the NSRM’s demands for shipboard representatives, he applied precisely the same methods by saying:
‘I will dismiss every official, or the vast majority of them, the day that ship’s delegates come into the British Mercantile Marine.’ [3]
Such remarks were designed to ensure that nearly every full-time official fought against the NSRM and its programme. The union leadership has also relied upon the support of; seamen employed on cross-Channel voyages and similar trips It has carefully cultivated this group because of its ability to participate more frequently in the union’s internal affairs than the mass of ocean-going sailors. As the ‘short-haul’ seamen have had less cause to fight the union leadership than others, and much greater opportunity to participate in NUS affairs, they have been relatively conservative, and have had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers.
Currently, short-voyage men occupy 15 of the 16 executive council seats. During the last few years the Right wing have also skilfully manoeuvred to reduce still further the possibility of rank-and-file control in the union. The executive has been reduced in size and the annual conference replaced by one every two years.
Finally the large turnover of labour within the industry has worked against the Left. According to a recent report by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, one third of new entrants leave during the first year, and nine-tenths within 10 years. [4] Inevitably this weakens potential opposition, and means militants must continually fight to retain whatever influence they already have. A number of militants left the industry after the 1966 defeat; many others are now demoralised.
It is sometimes suggested that a new union altogether is needed, but the history of the British labour movement for the last 50 years is littered with the remains of previous attempts at breakaways. They have usually ended by contributing to non-unionism and disillusionment. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that if militants are unable to lead a mass movement for reform from within a union they are unlikely to be able to lead a mass movement from without. No breakaway union has ever succeeded in attracting a majority of the old union’s membership to its ranks. This being the case a new union has usually found itself in difficulty from the start. Its small size, inadequate funds and lack of experience, tradition and organisation have all combined to weaken it in the face of joint employer and old union hostility.
Recognition has been refused, strikes provoked and the rest of the official trade union bureaucracy mobilised against it. In consequence, new unions have usually only lasted for a brief period, attacked and destroyed before they could ever begin to consolidate themselves. This has occurred, to a greater or lesser degree, in nearly every single instance of new unions – even where, on the surface, it seemed that mass support was inevitable, circumstances extremely favourable, and prospects for continued left-wing work in the old union entirely impossible.
In 1927, for instance, when Havelock Wilson was at his most notorious, militant seamen in the National Minority Movement [5] described the state of the NUS as follows: ‘A very large majority of seamen are not in any union: in fact it is doubtful if 20 per cent continue to pay fees. The Federated Seamen’s Union and the Amalgamated Marine Workers’ Union, if not already defunct, are on the verge of closing shop, and the National Seamen’s Union for all practical purposes is a company union.
‘By arrangement with the shipowners "Have-a-lot" is still able to collect some fees ... If left to their own choice, seamen would refuse to pay into the National Seamen’s Union on account of their disgust with Wilson’s dictatorship and atrocious conduct.’ [6]
‘Nevertheless, when the Minority Movement tried to form a new seamen’s union in 1928 and 1929 their efforts failed.
‘The 1929 Minority Movement conference called for such a union while cautioning that it would first be necessary to convince the seamen of the need for a new organisation. A year later they were still preparing but nothing came of it.’ [7]
New unions have been tried among clothing workers, Scottish miners, London busmen and, more recently, glass workers and women engineers. All have failed. If the Scottish miners’ and London busmen – both of whom are closely knit and well-organised – failed to maintain new unions, for the seamen, who enjoy neither of these advantages, prospects would be even worse.
Before the Minority Movement urged the building of a new seamen’s union in 1929, its policy was ‘a seamen’s section of the Transport Union allied with the dockers.’ [8] It was only after this failed that the MM decided to support a new union.
‘In 1928 the T&GWU established a seamen’s section. The National Union of Seamen, however, held the trump card, for the Shipping Federation refused to ship men who did not possess certificates issued by the Seamen’s Union. When the courts refused to invalidate this practice, Bevin (the T&GWU general secretary) decided to reach an agreement with the Seamen’s Union. This decision, together with Bevin’s failure to take action in support of seamen members of the T&GWU who were locked out on the north-east coast at the instigation of the NUS, led militants in the Minority Movement to urge the building of ship committees and other groups in preparation for a new seamen’s union.’ [9]
The joint appeal of the NUS and shipowners for a specially ‘approved’ closed shop under the Industrial Relations Act is designed to arm Hogarth with a trump card similar to that possessed by Wilson in 1928.
Efforts have been made during the last few years to bring about an amalgamation of the T&GWU and the Seamen’s Union. This proposal has been bitterly resisted by Hogarth and the employers, and at the last NUS conference a proposal to this effect attracted fewer votes than ever before.
Jack Jones’s refusal to accept into membership the thousands of Pilkington workers who resigned from the National Union of General and Municipal Workers in 1970 for fear of upsetting the TUC membership agreement, can give no comfort to any seamen hoping for the intervention of the T&GWU. Finally, where the T&GWU is organised on a minority basis – as it undoubtedly would be to start with if it established a seamen’s section – it refuses to give any kind of independent lead and instead subordinates itself to the policies and decisions of the majority unions.
In the power industry it originally rejected the 1971-72 pay offer and then surrendered to the right wing of the Electrician’s Union (ETU/PTU) majority. In the 1972 building dispute it did exactly the same, this time to the Union of Constructional and Allied Trade Technicians (UCATT).
The Seamen’s gains in the early and mid-sixties were achieved without recourse to either breakway unionism or transfer of trade union membership.
Instead they were won by an active rank-and-file movement; the defeats of that period were the result of failure to build and rely upon that base.
Instead of expanding the rank-and-file movement, the Communist Party-dominated left wing devoted all its efforts to manoeuvring within the bureaucracy and trying to get better full-time officials. Of course, manoeuvres within the union machine and a systematic struggle to remove right-wing officials were and are essential. Only victims of ultra-left childishness can imagine that any right-wing leadership can be beaten without exploiting all the ‘official’ channels available. The criticism of the Communist Party-influenced Left in the NUS – and in the trade union movement generally – is not that it does these things. It is that it subordinates the rank-and-file movement to the manoeuvres instead of subordinating the manoeuvres to the needs of the rank-and-file movement. By abandoning a real fight to build a rank-and-file movement as the fundamental means by which the union can be changed, the Left played into the hands of Hogarth and his allies.
Armed with a privileged and conservative section of members, a mass of full-time officials, a low level of membership participation and the introduction of new rules, the Right wing had only to wait for the Left to be forgotten before organising their almost wholesale removal from the executive.
In this they were assisted by the behaviour of many of the so-called Left wingers.
Instead of leading a fight against the policies of the Right wing and attempting to mobilise the rank and file behind them, they remained silent, hardly ever producing any propaganda and accepting productivity deals.
Instead of fighting for more union democracy and exposing the methods of the Right wing they accepted full-time appointments and one of them – Gordon Norris – was actually the man who successfully proposed having the union elections supervised by the Electoral Reform Society.
In January 1972 the bankruptcy of these tactics was proved. In new elections for the smaller executive council only one Left-winger was elected. The Communist Party’s emphasis on reform from above rather than below was shown to be a costly failure.
As seamen’s jobs, conditions, rights and wages come under increasing attack, the need for new efforts to reconstruct a militant rank-and-file movement is as urgent as ever.
For it is only through this kind of activity that the NUS or any other trade union can be reformed and forced to fight for its members. That is why socialists support and are active within these movements, and why no amount of left-talking members of the TUC general council can ever be regarded as a substitute.
1. The Seaman, Feb. 1972, p.27.
2. Seamen’s Section, Transport Workers’ Minority Movement, The Struggle of British Seamen, 1927, p.42.
3. National Union of Seamen, Report of the Proceedings of the Sixty-Ninth Annual General Meeting, 1961, p.265.
4. The Seaman, May 1972, p.76.
5. This was a militant trade union organisation led by the Communist Party; cf. a useful article on it: Hyman, Richard, Communist Industrial Policy in the 1920s, International Socialism 53, Oct.-Dec. 1972, p.14.
6. Seamen’s Section, op. cit., p.29.
7. MacFarlane, L.J., The British Communist Party, p.255.
8. Seamen’s Section, op. cit., p.32.
9. MacFarlane, op. cit., p.255.
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