FIGHTING LABOUR'S ANTI UNION LAWS
Socialist Press1980sAlan Thornett looks at the struggle against 'In Place of Strife'
Transcribed by hand from the printed page.
The second half of the 1960s saw the end of the post-war boom and the reassertion of the reality of the general crisis of capitalism.
From 1966 onwards the Labour government of Harold Wilson responded to this by attacking the old age pensioners, devaluing the pound and introducing a wage control policy under the Prices and Incomes Board on the instructions of the IMF.
At the end of 1968, the Minister for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, began formulating a nasty little piece of anti-union legislation.
She presented it to Parliament as a White Paper in January 1969 under the misleading title "In Place of Strife".
Her White Paper was clear in its objective. The working class had responded with militant action against the attempts of Wilson to resolve the crisis of capitalism at their expense.
It was necessary, she said, to control strikes if "Britain is to survive and prosper".
Strikes were increasingly inflicting "disproportionate harm on the rest of society".
She singled out car assembly and components, docks and shipbuilding as examples.
Donovan
The White Paper was based heavily on the report of the Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations.
This Commission had sat for three years under the chairmanship of Lord Donovan and produced its 350 page report early in 1968.
It called for incomes policy—the 'reform' of payments systems—particularly through use of job evaluation methods.
It demanded more control over shop stewards, new discipline procedures and the reform of the trade union structure.
The report also called for the necessary bodies to be set up to effect these changes.
Castle's main provision was the setting up of the Industrial Board—a kind of industrial court.
This body would have powers to order strikers back to work for a "cooling off period" of a maximum of 28 days. In addition it could order a ballot of strikers to be conducted by the union.
If its orders were defied, it could impose financial sanctions on a union or on individual members—in which case the fines would be collected by attachment of wages.
Castle argued that her provisions would not lead to workers going to prison. But there is little doubt that a persistent refusal to pay fines would in some cases have led to contempt of court and imprisonment.
In the White Paper she explained her tactics.
Immunity
She explained, for example, why she did not propose simply removing immunity from trade unions and allowing the employers to sue strikers for damages in the courts.
This had happened in the case of the Taff Vale railway strike in 1901, where the unions were fined £55,000 for damages. This initiated a struggle which led to immunity under the 1906 Trade Disputes Act.
Castle's reluctance to revert to pre-1906 legislation was not because she was opposed in principle to letting the capitalist courts loose on the unions.
In her view the measure would simply not work because:
"The great majority of employers would probably not be prepared to sue unofficial strike leaders"!!
Similarly she held back from simply making secret ballots compulsory before all official strikes because she feared that this may not be effective.
Secret Ballots
The use of the secret ballot, she argued, had to be very selective and tactical if it was to genuinely benefit the employers.
If you were not careful, she explained, it could end up strengthening the resolve of the workers!
"In major disputes, union members are very often more militant than their leaders, and are likely to be less closely in touch with the progress and prospects of negotiations.
"If the union leaders were always obliged to hold a ballot when using the strike threat in negotiations, they might well find their hands tied by a vote to strike . . .
"The power will be used where the Secretary of State believes that the proposed strike would be a threat to public interest, and there is doubt whether it commands the support of those concerned".
In other words a ballot would be ordered only when the Secretary of State is sure it would be certain to go the right way!
Another part of the White Paper proposed the establishment of a Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR). The function of this body would be to promote "reforms" of bargaining and procedural agreements, introduce forms of 'participation', worker directors and new wage structures—particularly on a corporate basis.
Extension
The White Paper explains that it would be similar to the National Board for Prices and Incomes but would do a "different" job. It explains that its work would be a "novel extension of public (i.e. state) involvement in industrial relations in this country".
In addition to this, Castle proposed a new Registrar of Trade Unions and Employers Associations.
Unions would be required by law to register—and to do so they would be required to have a rule book which met government requirements in regard to discipline, elections, strike ballots and (very important) the appointment and function of shop stewards.
Castle claimed that the White Paper did not amount to an attack on the closed shop, but this was not the case. It had provisions to exempt those who objected on conscientious grounds not far removed from those in James Prior's "Employment" Bill today.
So the sum total of Castle's White Paper and the Industrial Relations Bill which came out of it was a full blooded attack on trade union rights through the direct strengthening of the capitalist state.
Agents
If the capitalist class, through its agents in the Labour government was responding to its needs as a class to make the working class pay for the crisis, the reformist leadership of the trade union movement certainly was not responding to the needs of the working class to defend its hard won rights.
Quite the contrary.
Although almost every union formally opposed the Bill, none mobilised official action against it.
Worse, the TUC and the leaders of the main unions all actively opposed the unofficial action which did take place.
The actions called were unofficial and the forces involved were the Communist Party and the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League, at that time by far the biggest of Trotskyist organisations.
Today's Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) with its wholesale adaptation to petty bourgeois nationalism, its slander campaigns against opponents it cannot answer politically and its abstention from serious work in the unions is a mere shadow of its forerunner—the SLL of that period.
Although the roots of today's positions were present and the internal regime of the SLL was heavily bureaucratised, it had achieved considerable weight among sections of the working class: sufficient weight to put it in a position to place effective demands on the Communist Party.
The first move towards action against the White Paper came in January 1969. The SLL called for a demonstration on February 23—four days before the TUC were to meet to discuss the White Paper.
The CP then called for a one-day national strike on February 27 itself. They were determined to split the action in two.
The problem was it left only five weeks to build for a national unofficial strike—a very difficult task indeed.
Despite this the SLL supported the strike call. With both [illegible] CP and the SLL building for [illegible] action around 100,000 [illegible] struck and 3,000 [illegible] the meeting.
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Principled unity
[illegible] after the February [illegible], in a principled [illegible] in action, the [illegible] March 8) made the [illegible]:
"The [illegible] Committee of [illegible] believes that the next [illegible] the fight against the anti-union laws should be a one-day strike on May 1. We will work to make this a success, and we are open now as always to any suggestions which may come from the CP or others in relation to the possibility of a more suitable date being selected for the demonstration".
The SLL then began a very strong campaign for the strike. The CP, however, equivocated throughout, although belatedly they were forced to back the action and bring forces out.
CP equivocation
They equivocated at the conference of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions on April 12, where they refused to put May 1 on the declaration—simply calling for support for May Day marches (called on a Sunday) and for a lobby of the Labour Party conference in September!
The declaration then went on in even more dangerous language:
"The TUC General Council must be called upon to give leadership in action to the whole trade union movement. The General Council should a) recall the 1968 TUC and b) recommend the calling of a 24 hour national strike".
But the real issue was May 1 and action against the Bill. It was correct to call on the TUC to recognise May 1, but not to pick an alternative date in the indefinite future.
The question was maximum action on May 1 followed by a General Strike.
The position of the union leaders could not have been more clear.
Even AUEW President Hugh Scanlon who was actually to back action two years later against Tory anti-union legislation, was consistently refusing to back any action against the Labour government of Wilson and Castle. Union after union was condemning May 1.
Two weeks later the TUC conceded one of the Stalinist demands and attempted to head off the May 1 mobilisation by calling for an emergency TUC conference on June 5.
Their motive was not to call their own day of action. They had something quite different in mind as was soon to emerge.
When the June 5 conference was announced the SLL added it to their main General Strike slogan for May 1.
They called a mass lobby of the Croydon conference.
250,000
Despite the LCDTU, the May 1 strike was very big for an unofficial action—mobilising almost a quarter of a million workers.
100,000 workers stopped work in London. Building sites, docks and national newspapers were hit. 15,000 marched to the TUC where acting General Secretary Vic Feather agreed to see a delegation. 10,000 car workers struck in Oxford.
40,000 workers struck in Liverpool and 10,000 marched to the Pier Head. Docks, major construction sites, Dunlops, Fishers and the Shell oil refinery were out. Ford factories, port workers and rail workers struck and joined the march.
The mood of the demonstrations was militant, and the call was for a general strike to stop the bill—a slogan very effectively advanced by the SLL.
The Merseyside mass rally passed the following resolution:
"This mass meeting congratulates all those who came out on strike today . . . It further calls for support for the demonstration to the TUC on June 5 in Croydon to demand that the TUC call a general strike to defeat the anti-union laws".
Shifting ground
The SLL was responsible for this motion. They had campaigned hard on May 1 to turn the whole mobilisation towards June 5.
But already on May 1 the CP were shifting their ground. The limited unity won between the SLL and the CP during the May 1 campaign was to quickly turn to bitter confrontation.
Even on May 1 itself CP speakers who dominated many of the marches and platforms began to call merely for a campaign to get the penal clauses out of the Bill.
They came out in opposition to strike action on June 5 and called instead simply for a lobby of the Croydon Conference.
1,000 workers lobbied the Special Conference at the Fairfield Hall. The SLL mobilisation was almost as big as the CP's and since the SLL was better organised it dominated the lobbying.
As the day went on clashes between the SLL and CP reached the point of physical attack by the CP on the SLL speaker van from which they were being denounced.
Inside the hall, Feather was outlining his proposals. There was "good and bad" in the Bill he said and we had to get rid of the "bad" parts—the penal clauses.
In order to induce Wilson and Co. to accept this he proposed that the unions do the job themselves! The union leaders would police the membership to make it unnecessary for the state to do so!
Feather explained to the conference that the General Council had worked out proposals which he thought would be more effective than the government proposals in controlling strikes and class action.
He said the General Council had proposals for:
"avoiding and settling disputes and, where necessary for disciplining members who refused to accept the democratic procedures of the movement."
In other words, proposals for discipling union members who refused to accept the dictatorship of their officials and insisted on defending their wages and conditions!
He said the F&GP of the General Council would 'deal with' national disputes, and that local committees would be set up to deal with smaller disputes.
Where workers defied these committees, individual unions, he said, would have to commit themselves to taking action against them under their own rules.
It was clear, he said, that people who acted in defiance of union authority had:
"set their own interests above those of their fellow members, and therefore must accept the judgement of their colleagues".
Scanlon spoke fully supporting the proposals of the TUC. Then came the left cover:
"If in spite of what we are attempting to do the government persists in introducing the penal clauses, I believe this now united trade union movement cannot content itself with passing resolutions".
The positions of Scanlon and Feather spell out the division of labour in reformism. While Feather—like Castle and Wilson—seeks ways and means of assisting the employer to control the working class, Scanlon, representing the 'left' wing of reformism, seeks ways and means of diverting the mass rank and file opposition that had emerged on May 1.
Yet both the right and 'left' of the TUC agreed with Castle on one thing—that the working class must be obliged to shoulder the cost of the capitalist crisis.
And they agreed that it was better for this attack to be carried through by trade union and labour bureaucrats rather than by the open intervention of the capitalist state.
Outside the hall a battle was being fought. Whilst Feather inside was saying that there was good and bad in Castle's proposals, the CP Stalinists were saying outside that there was good and bad in Feather's proposals—at least, they said, it would keep things off the statute book.
Opposed
In the afternoon the SLL called on all those opposed to the sell-out to join them in a march through the town and a rally to discuss the developments of the day.
The Stalinists opposed such a move and Kevin Halpin, on behalf of the Liaison Committee called upon the lobby to "stand firm" against the SLL move.
In fact half the lobby responded, and a demonstration and rally of 500 was held.
SLL speakers said that whereas the Communist Party had come to Croydon simply to protest about the sell-out, the SLL had come to fight it.
As an SLL speaker myself at that rally I made a comment which is ironic when looked at now against the background of my own struggles against victimisation in 1974 when Wilson came back to power, and more recently in the attempts to expel me from the TGWU.
"The TUC proposals", I said at the rally, "are the slippery slope leading to the removal of militants from office in the unions and their eventual expulsion".
With the advantage of hindsight that point is even clearer today. The Croydon conference confirmed beyond doubt the commitment of the British trade union bureaucracy to propping up capitalism in crisis.
In this task it cemented the working relationship between the trade union leaders and the Parliamentary leaders of social democracy—a relationship that has since cost the working class dearly in lost jobs, social services and living standards.
The other effect of the Bill was to prepare the ground thoroughly for the Tories when they came to power in June 1970.
The precedent of anti-union legislation was set and they could quickly begin to model their notorious Industrial Relations Act on the foundations begun by Labour 'left' Barbara Castle.
Next week: Why Castle's plan was dropped — and how it lives on today.