tuc - what we need are independent unions for an independent britain
WORKERS, SEPT 2004 ISSUE
When the TUC meets it deserves great attention as the closest we have to a parliament of workers. We should meet thus every day. A once-a-year event becomes a rigmarole like the band playing in the park one Sunday in summer. But we are too exhausted just surviving to pool our resources daily. Once a year for the time being will have to do. Or will it? Isn't the situation quite urgent?
Dormant power
For years the TUC Congress's docility and 'respectability' have left it sidelined and irrelevant as an event both to trade union members and the two-thirds of workers who are not in unions. There is minimal competition to go to Congress these days, most who go are unelected, a real sign of weakness. This is so because actually at work there is greater prospect for change that attracts the genuinely committed. Local results are better than national posturing. In this respect the TUC can appear very remote to trade union members keen to make a difference where they live and work.
Legions of informed industrial correspondents in the 1970s and early 1980s have been replaced by temporary headline hacks who do little more than focus on superficial splits and personalities. There's more interest in Big Brother than the brothers and sisters.
So the TUC press corps finds little to report on that workers find real at work every day, and TUC delegates have little of substance to report back except of course a few wild nights. But even the social events these days are more like post-colonial cocktail parties than socialist gatherings with stimulating culture and cooperative camaraderie. Hotels (largely un-unionised) do a roaring trade. There's the bitchiness of the fashion parade, rather than the passion of rich socialist tirade.
Fairy tale
Intended to act on genuine workers' aspirations passed through the Congress, the General Council is like something that sleeps for ages in a fairy tale. In the meantime step-children can find a new life in a hundred and one other organisations. The ability of workers to use their democratic machinery to wake the sleeping giant is just as much a problem, though not yet in folklore.
You get what you pay for. In the name of unanimity, Congress has been staged to encourage a crass uniformity of view that has little to do with active discipline and everything to do with distancing itself from workers who, in reality, love nothing more than an honest debate followed by decisive action taken by a majority in the interests of a majority. Lose this concept of democracy and you lose the unions' political purpose.
TUC struggle
The extent to which the TUC has always, since its inception, struggled to find a role reflects the artificiality of many national structures in the trade union movement. National officials easily get carried away with themselves when the real work of the trade union movement is in fact at the workplace.
National unions are no more or less than the strength of their branches. There is no getting round this. A trade union is only as good as its members. And members are only as good as they behave when disciplining management and reducing the employer to tears at the workplace. Members by and large train themselves in the struggle too and don't need to be told how to do it.
What's up at work?
An organised workplace cannot be created from the top, let alone by the TUC. An organised workplace is one where workers exercise control and power more than the employer. There are very few workplaces left like this and few unions with such clout. But it would be a great boost to every workplace if the TUC were really seen to stand up and risk a bit in the name of the majority of people in the country. Saying that unions should be able to support each other with strike action would be a start.
Small specialist trade unions organised around skills or industries have tended to be best at workplace organisation and skill enhancement. They have also recruited and held onto members better. But some in industries being run down by the EU have been genuinely pathetic in their complicity with the decline.
Trade union merger mania and conglomerate unions, some now looking to merge with European counterparts, have not necessarily benefited the politics of workplace control. Outsiders never get a look in at a genuinely well organised workplace even if they are the employer. Employ as many organisers as you want — you can only lead a horse to water. And big is not necessarily beautiful. Yet still there are essential mergers long overdue, notably the teachers.
Our class solidarity arose from the common identity of issues in each workplace. Some, often rightly, thought all other workers inferior for their lack of organisation. They paved the way for the movement as a whole by the strength and detail of their organisation.
Dignity and skill
We all strive for dignity and the independent exercise of skill. Where dignity or skill is threatened in any workplace, other workplaces should be able to respond in solidarity. We cannot, under the existing legislation, which is among the worst in the world, exercise real solidarity. And years of not having done so has made us neglectful and parochial.
Some now see other workers as inferior because they are beyond care. The worst of this mentality is paraded at the TUC and preyed upon by the MI5 operatives who circuit the hall looking for new friends.
This year there will even be opposition again from the hallowed ranks to a suggestion that we demonstrate against the anti union laws, let alone opposing them in practice. A demo would at least be a start.
Our primary responsibility as workers to each other is forbidden under legislation against secondary action and until we defy and replace this our workplace and national union strength will be minimal. As the Tolpuddle Festival becomes increasingly professionalised so our need to return to the enforced amateur illegality of our founders becomes more pressing. Hardly a suit in the hallowed Hall of Congress would risk a day's wages let alone a movement these days. Or would we?
It is much more difficult to betray workers in the workplace, because at work you can smell out the traitor or self seeking.
Workplace politics
But workplace politics is universally derided, and has been so since 1906, when the Labour Party as we know it was created. Yet politics only really exists at the workplace, in the essentially political relation between worker and employer, and in the skill concentrated in various occupations. It also exists in the wider community and family struggles to survive and adopt a collective approach. Since 1906 the view has been put forward that politics is for the politicians and the Labour Party in particular.
This defines politics as a thing that only exists in Parliament and once or twice a year in elections over this or that or for him or her to save us. This is a puzzling, reduced view of politics. It is in fact very alien to trade unions although trade unions give succour to it. Those who promoted it in order to promote themselves within the establishment had to confine trade union and workplace politics to "industrial" or "economic" matters, as if being able to eat were not political. A strike is more political than anything that has occurred in the Palace of Westminster. Ultimately Parliament only manages a fraction of the nation's wealth expressed as taxation. It has a predominantly economic function, with law-making powers based on capital and the armed forces.
The consequence of relegating responsibility for the political to those who have minimal experience of work and skill is that government is idle and unskilled. Few now in Parliament have ever had a real job. Their politics is purely a matter of finding ways to approve of the latest capitalist development. The Labour Party in power has always supported imperialism. Another tax against the rich never alleviates exploitation of the most skilled workers. It is easier, you don't have to think. It would, we are told, simply be worse if the nasty Tories were doing it. And when the Tories are down and out, the BNP is boosted as the real danger.
In praise of the Third Way
Yet it is the notion of accepting the lesser of two evils that always strikes such a lethal chord with trade unionists. And it is this intellectual conundrum that lies at the heart of social democracy and the tolerance of capitalism. Trade unionists every day settle for second best — we are always negotiating between a rock and a hard place. If you get the hard place it is better than the rock.
This encourages a habit of thought which can be called in philosophical language "empiricism" - this means finding immediate solutions to immediate problems without looking at causes and the future. Or it can be put in more everyday language as a "pragmatic" approach.
What pragmatism forgets is that there is always a third way. Neither rock, nor hard place, but our way instead.
Ironically, without generations of people taking a third way there would be no trade unions. We were formed against the lesser of two evils and prospered always when we defeated the lesser of two evils. Waiting for wind and tide to rise in our favour, as Bunyan said when he helped inspire the birth of our movement, was never an option. You'll wait for ever for them to do it.
Delegating power to represent trade union interests in Parliament is very different from delegating power to others to do all of the thinking and all of the law making and war making. History does not repeat itself. So trying to re-create the Labour Party's origins nearly a hundred years after it was born is just daft.
Labour doesn't need representation. This concept was the origin of our folly. We need power. We could run the country easily. To think that we can achieve this using the machinery the capitalists have created for themselves is as misleading now as it was a hundred years ago. History repeated becomes both farce and tragedy.
New Labour. old millionaires
Don't we want to try something new? If we do this begins with recognition of our strengths, not our weaknesses. Those who wish to represent us thrive on and wish to perpetuate our weaknesses and subjected position. Our strengths are not just in our numbers, though these are still quite significant. There are nearly 60 million people in Britain, almost all depending on workers' wages. There are only around 208,000 members of the Labour Party and 7 million trade unionists. Who should really call the shots? Many Labour Party members are millionaires. In fact the number of millionaires and billionaires has doubled since 1997.
US and EU
This small group sides with Washington and Brussels. They have managed to forget Britain. They pursue war behind Bush and support the multinationals' EU Constitution behind Berlusconi (who provides a very nice holiday retreat, thank you very much). There will be unchallenged quips about this at the General Council dinner at Congress, very droll. And then there is Mandelson, making a Millennium Dome of the World Trade Organisation next after he does his thing in his beloved EU.
Magnificent stuff to behold isn't it? Surprisingly some of us still let our unions pay a political levy to the Labour Party. The only supporters of this appear to be the self-appointed Left. Hardly anyone else does, least of all genuine Communists, and most of our best trade unions do not. Workplace organisation needs all the resources it can get. Why waste it on millionaires in government? No wonder they want state funding.
The Labour Party has tried to take the trade unions with it since 1906. Now the unions, big, stronger than they think, confused, and in danger of wilting on the vine at the crucial moment, have to decide if they want to continue in this way. Play with big business for another year, and support globalisation through the EU Constitution, or get serious about doing things for all workers in Britain? This question will underpin all Congress debates.
Taking ourselves seriously
Ironically, getting serious might mean taking our own policies seriously for a change. But this would be the biggest challenge not just to the TUC but to each union. Why not implement our policies? What gets in the way? If our policy is to see vibrant manufacturing production across a balanced range of commodities, supplying first a domestic market that is sustained by productive agriculture and fishing in order to pay for high quality public services and free health care, then we will have to break the EU's blockade against us.
Us or them?
If our policy is for deepened skills training in each sector and full employment, then all of our revenue created by our work must be spent here and reinvested in science and research, and we must reverse the imbalance of huge imports at the expense of exports. We will need to control the flow of capital and pension funds too.
If our policy is for utilities that are affordable and in our democratic control with transport networks that service our integrated needs, then why not remove from office all those who oppose us?
If we want a future and a decent pension why not withdraw from the EU which demanded the end to final salary schemes and disguised this move very cleverly?
If we don't want our children to fight other children in the future why not withdraw from the special relationship with the United States, NATO and the new EU military forces that the constitution will create? In short why not run Britain as independently, in cooperation with other nations, as you want to run your workplace?
Secondary action to help other nations will involve determined defence of our nation. In the same way you cannot call for secondary action to support your workplace unless your workplace is very well organised in the first place. The TUC will not be able to stop strong workplace organisation and opposition to the further takeover of Britain by foreign powers, despite the best efforts of dozens of government agents in its highest ranks.
Our country and our unions need to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Free, independent trade unions for a free, independent Britain. Mix it with the EU, the US, the Labour Party, new variants of the Labour Party or worse still the self- appointed Left and you will miss the point of trade unionism and class power.