The most fundamental divide of all – class – is the most ignored concept within the TUC...
TUC: Back to basics
WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2008 ISSUE
The annual congress of the TUC rolls round this month and it is time to take stock again of the health of the labour movement. The TUC agenda will deal with all the supposed pressing and politically correct agendas of the activists (not the members) who will be present.
Be it the green agenda, migrant workers, vulnerable workers, race, equalities, agency workers, individual rights, new rights etc., it will be given plenty of attention. Division over race, gender, and discrimination will continue to be highlighted and promoted – another import from the USA. Worthiness and do-gooding will spring from every photo call, press release and stunt, let alone the nightmare appearance of Brown or some other Labour Party leadership aspirant. Trade union mergers will dominate not as a strategy of growth but as one of managed decline – ever fewer huddling together, ever fewer approaching an average age of 50 years.
Though the trend is slowing, trade union membership continues to decline. Density – the percentage of union members in an industry – hovers around the 36 per cent mark with all sorts of panaceas, recruiting philosophies and organising challenges giving rise to doctorates that purport to remedy this decline. Ironically all these solutions emanate from the USA where density of the fractured and split trade unions is less than 15 per cent.
Sadly none of these panaceas has worked since 1979. The TUC Organising Academy continually pushes the statistic that the 75 per cent of Britain's 28 million workers who are not trade union members (bear in mind though that around 6 million workers are in non-TUC organisations, staff associations, professional bodies etc. – a similar number to those in TUC affiliated unions), have never been asked to join. A further 54 per cent would join if asked.
Show the relevance
Such statistics are all rosy and refreshing. But they ignore the fact that Britain has some of the most draconian anti-worker and anti-union laws in the world. It also ignores the most fundamental ideological conundrum: workers are not joining unions because they do not see the relevance, role or strength of unions that have yet to recover from the Thatcher counter-revolution.
Likewise all the partnership working, corporatism, state funding for union work, cosy individual human rights and legalistic hogwash pushed by the Labour government (most emanating from the anti-worker, anti-collectivist European Union) has been about undermining the very basis of the trade unions as class organisations.
The prettiest leaflets in the world, technological remedies, whizzes of email, YouTube, text, blog and website, photo calls and media stunts, all of which promote individualism, will not remedy the fact that the concept of collectivism, of class, of the commonweal, have been damaged to the point of being near terminal. Organisers of trade union education for stewards, learning reps, health and safety representatives, all the battery of foot soldiers who deal with the employer on a day to day basis in the workplace – all report the lowest level of political consciousness and class awareness for decades.
Along with wholesale destruction of industry, the class consciousness generated by the workplace from the early days of the Industrial Revolution through to 1997 has also largely been destroyed. Ironically, having more workers employed in Britain than ever has not seen class consciousness re-emerge in an organised form. The most fundamental divide of all – class – is the most ignored concept within the TUC.
The pay differential between employers and employees in 1996 was 39:1, in 2006 that had risen to 98:1. Income, wealth distribution and inequality bellow from every workplace but the trade unions seem unable to grasp or grapple with it.
To re-emerge we have to return to fundamental basics, the ones that built union strength in first place: every worker in their union;, every workplace organised; every union to relate to and reflect the real workplace; every union to be organic; and a required growth from the workplace.
The unions are not a business justification in themselves, though too many employed by them see them as a lifestyle better than working. They are not all suited to a merger strategy such as Unite's, nor to a mantra that one size fits all. It is a monumental task to rebuild what are effectively defensive organisations of class power and influence, and the reluctance of workers to join trade unions indicates that we are in need of a new unionism of a new type to meet this grave situation.