Читать книгу Why You Should be a Trade Unionist - Len McCluskey - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe labour movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.
Martin Luther King Jr
In a time when our children learn little more history than Kings and Queens in school, the working class must tell its own story. In August 2019 we marked the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, the moment when our journey to working-class representation and respect began, when working-class people stood up for democracy and economic political freedom, and were brutally crushed for their proud defiance. Eighteen peaceful protestors were killed by the cavalry troops who swept into St Peter’s Field with their sabres drawn. Some were trampled by the stampede, others were shot by muskets fired indiscriminately into the crowd.
Mike Leigh, the film director who made the 2018 film Peterloo, tells of how he went to school within ‘spitting distance’ of St Peter’s Field in Manchester. Yet even he and his school mates didn’t learn about the atrocity. Today, as they did then, the ruling class would prefer to sweep Peterloo, and all other such brutal injustices against working people, under the table. This is precisely why we must teach our own history and fight for our own justice.
What that history tells us is that progress for working people has only ever been achieved by the collective self-empowerment of organised labour, not through the accumulation of individual rights alone, however worthy they may be.
Employers have always been effective at working together to control labour. As far back as medieval times, the masters organised themselves into guilds to regulate prices, quality standards and their workers’ wages, even imposing sanctions on workers for coming up short. There was no voice then for those they employed. Then as now, workers were legislated against in order to keep them down. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Combination Acts, passed during the Napoleonic wars, made any sort of strike action illegal. Workers could be imprisoned for up to three months or sentenced to brutal hard labour if they broke the new laws.
Despite the Combination Acts, workers continued to press for better pay and working conditions, and trade unions grew rapidly. The Acts were finally repealed in 1824–5, but the repression of trade unions and trade unionists during the industrial revolution continued. This was the fate of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in the 1830s, but they were not alone.1
It was the Chartist movement of the 1840s that laid down the foundations of our modern labour movement. The Chartists coalesced around a People’s Charter that set out six electoral reforms aimed at extending the franchise and enabling working men to be elected to Parliament. The Chartists also did much to organise non-unionised workers, holding regular mass demonstrations and instructing uneducated people in the basics of organising meetings and campaigning.
Such protests steadily improved the conditions of working men and women. The 1847 Ten Hours Act restricted the working hours of women and young workers in textile mills, though this was not extended to adult men until 1850. It was a long-fought-for victory that galvanised the unions into further organisation, leading to the formation of the Trades Union Congress in Manchester in 1868, the legalisation of unions through the 1871 Trade Union Act, and the start of campaigns for the eight-hour day, the repeal of anti-union laws, extension of the franchise, and the unionisation of the railways. It also led to the establishment of many new unions, including the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers Union (the first dock workers’ union in the UK) and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, as well as the emergence of unions within Jewish immigrant communities working in the baking and clothing trades.
There were early interventions by women trade unionists too. In 1872 a National Union of Agricultural Workers was set up in Warwickshire. The following year a group of sixteen women from Ascott-under-Wychwood demanded that their association be represented. They were imprisoned in 1873 for picketing in support of male agricultural workers, and were only pardoned following an appeal to Queen Victoria. Only recently have these brave women workers, the Ascott Martyrs, begun to be honoured in our collective trade union memories.
The history of our movement is also the history of the struggle by the left to secure for working people the unions and the leaders they need and deserve. In the 1880s, what became known as ‘new unionism’ emerged in reaction to the perceived ineffectiveness of the TUC, which was hostile to a model of industrial unionism in which all workers in an industry are organised into the same union, regardless of their skills. New unionism was undoubtedly a turning point that saw trade unions reaching out beyond the skilled and craft elite of the working class.
The London ‘match girls’ strike of 1888 was a key moment in new unionism, involving working-class women and teenage girls, uneducated and starving, slogging long hours for Bryant and May on slave wages, physically and mentally abused by their bosses, and exposed to lethal white phosphorus that rotted their jaw bones and led to horrific deaths.2 They became determined fighters and trade unionists, and by walking out on strike and closing the factory for sixteen days, they secured improvements in their working conditions, including recognition of their union.
Tom Mann was a key figure in the new unionism movement, and one of the chief organisers of the 1889 London dockers’ strike for union recognition, the abolition of contract work, and a minimum wage of sixpence an hour (the ‘dockers’ tanner’).3 For me, the dockers’ strike and the Taff Vale Railway strike of 1900 were among the key moments in our history that gave the unions greater confidence to organise and fight.4 The dock strike involved thousands, and, as Terry McCarthy says in his short history of the British Labour movement, the strike leaders won over the public with their shrewd tactics.5 There were no slogans about overthrowing the state, and no violent protests; instead, the trade unions took the people with them, and won. Furthermore, for the first time, the new unionism focused on workplace issues beyond hours and conditions, including the huge deductions imposed on women clothing workers for things like the use of cooking facilities and, extraordinarily, the use of steam power, even if they were working from home.
The Taff Vale strike also ultimately convinced the trade unions of the need for a Labour Party to give workers a voice in Parliament. In the South Wales valleys, determined members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), a forerunner to today’s RMT, resisted their employers and unjust laws. Nevertheless, the bosses took the ASRS to court for lost earnings and won a staggering £42,000 in damages – the equivalent of well over £2 million today. It was this travesty, decided in the House of Lords, that persuaded the unions they needed representation in the House of Commons in order to pass legislation that would improve workers’ lives, rather than just challenge existing laws from the outside.
The results of this change in tactics were seen in the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, which reversed the whittling away of union rights granted by the 1871 Trade Union Act. The 1906 Act legalised peaceful picketing, and prevented employers from taking legal action against workers for ‘breach of contract’ if it was done in pursuit of a trade dispute. Back then, this had a far wider definition than it does now, including enabling workers to withdraw their labour in support of others not employed by the same employer. The Act also protected trade union funds, but the biggest victory was the clause that exempted trade unions from legal action. These were rights and protections all reversed by Thatcher’s laws.
This was the start of working people’s challenge to Toryism, with its class hierarchy and its determination to always put private property before freedom and democracy. It was also a challenge to liberalism, which will do anything for the poor so long as the poor never organise to do anything for themselves. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, it was the refusal by the then Liberal Party to speak up for an increasingly organised working class that not only helped to drive the formation of trade unions, but also led to the foundation of the Labour Party.
By the early twentieth century, trade unions were becoming central to society, in spite of the hostility they faced. They began to be portrayed in popular culture, most notably with the 1914 publication of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, one of the greatest books of all time. Anyone wanting to understand the world of work should read it. It is shameful that, in today’s zero-hour wastelands, and with so many people struggling to live on the minimum wage, nothing has changed since Tressell’s story of the efforts by the painter and decorator, Frank Owen, to make ends meet and convince his colleagues that capitalism was the cause of their troubles. Tressell’s depiction of the ‘great money trick’ is so simple, and yet millions of workers have been captured by it ever since.
The First World War was an opportunity for the unions to organise and to politicise workplaces, and there was a significant increase in union membership, not least among the women who kept the factories going while the men fought abroad. Nevertheless, at the same time there was a more concerted effort by the state to undermine the Labour Party, left-wing unions and their leaders, not by brute force but through an ideological campaign of vilification and smears, aided eagerly by the Tory press.
Unfortunately, the history of trade unions is littered with examples of rank-and-file trade unionists being let down by their leaders. In 1925, the agreement by the government to avert strikes by negotiating a subsidy for the coal industry to enable the employers to maintain wages and conditions was a short-lived victory. Soon the employers were again demanding wage cuts and a longer working week, and when the miners launched industrial action in 1926 under the slogan ‘not a penny off the pay or an hour on the day’, many workers walked out in solidarity. Although the TUC called a general strike, a combination of weak leadership and government determination to support the employers led to the strike’s defeat.
The Second World War underpinned the strength of trade unionism, which was significantly invigorated as the country prepared for conflict with the building of ships and the manufacture of munitions. Employment increased across the country, including among women, who were again called up to work in the factories and became increasingly active in the labour movement. This new confidence led to the growth of the shop stewards’ movement that organised the union rank and file across the country. The period also saw a growth in white-collar trade unionism.
When Clement Attlee’s Labour government came to power in 1945, repealing Tory anti-union laws, approving closed shops, nationalising key industries and establishing the NHS and the welfare state, the confidence and strength of the unions grew further. This was a government that worked hand in hand with the unions, and its major reforms were union-driven, including the extension of workers’ rights and the establishment of the Agricultural Wages Board. Sick-pay schemes were introduced, and the Dock Labour Scheme of 1947 set a guaranteed minimum fallback wage and created job security for registered dockers. It was abolished by Thatcher in 1989.
By the time Harold Wilson’s Labour government was elected in 1964, the then general secretary of T&G, Frank Cousins, was appointed minister of technology. This was the start of a new era of militancy, with Cousins leading the opposition to any dilution of the socialist principles of the Labour Party, and eventually resigning from the government in protest at its enforcement of an incomes policy that held back wages.
Jack Jones, Cousins’ successor at the top of the T&G, went on to cement a formidable left-wing alliance with Hugh Scanlon, leader of the engineering union, and together they halted Labour’s plans to place legal restrictions on industrial action and on the shop stewards’ movement. These were formulated in In Place of Strife, a 1969 White Paper drawn up by Barbara Castle, the secretary of state for employment and productivity, which proposed an Industrial Board to enforce settlements in industrial disputes. The Jones–Scanlon partnership, with a mass movement behind them, effectively killed off the cabinet vote in favour of the plans.
The pair then played a central role in the development of a militant rank-and-file movement against the incoming Conservative government’s anti-trade union laws. This was a movement that saw the London dockers challenge and defeat the government, mass solidarity with the miners, and a wave of over 200 workplace occupations that began to challenge the conventions of capitalist ownership.
I remember well the TUC march against the draconian 1971 Industrial Relations Act brought in by Ted Heath’s Conservative government. The Act included powers to sequestrate union assets and to prevent mass picketing and secondary action. It also sought to limit strikes through the establishment of a National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC), empowered to grant injunctions against unions and to settle disputes – not unlike the In Place of Strife plan – as well as enable no-strike clauses in individual contracts.
To go to prison in the cause of trade union freedom is not something many trade unionists in Britain have had to face, but five brave dockers did just that. The Pentonville Five, as they became known, were arrested for refusing to appear before the NIRC and were imprisoned in the summer of 1972, after an unofficial strike at the Chobham Farm container depot in Newham, London. They were released after six days when the Official Solicitor applied to the Court of Appeal to have the arrest warrants overturned. The subsequent protests of working people against this direct attack on their trade union organisations eventually forced the government to step back from the Act.
Another group of workers imprisoned during this period of Tory war against the trade unions was the Shrewsbury 24, who were arrested in 1972 following the national building workers’ strike to secure better wages and safety regimes. Two of them – Des Warren and the now household name (and my good friend) Ricky Tomlinson – were found guilty of conspiracy to intimidate for visiting building sites and trying to persuade non-union workers to down tools. Tomlinson’s fight to clear his and Warren’s names continues to this day.6
Next came victory for the miners’ in 1974, when their strike in demand of better pay effectively brought down Heath’s government. The prime minister’s response to the government pay board’s decision to recommend the NUM’s pay claim was to call a snap general election in February, with the campaign slogan ‘Who governs Britain?’ The poll resulted in a hung Parliament, leading to another election in October in which Labour was returned to power with a very narrow majority.
During the following five-year term – with first Wilson, then Jim Callaghan as prime minister – there were significant gains for the unions in terms of health and safety legislation. These included the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act and the 1977 Safety Representatives Regulations, with their vital statutory rights for trade union health and safety reps. By now the long march of the labour movement had achieved democracy and the welfare state, while living standards had taken great strides forward and the labour share of income was the highest it has ever been. It was also in this period that trade union membership reached its peak, with over 13 million members by 1979.
But it was also the time that leading members of the Tory hard-right – including Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit and Nicholas Ridley – realised that if they ever got back into power they would have to curb trade union strength. Which they duly did, through the orchestration of salami-style legislation, year on year, throughout the 1980s. Act upon parliamentary Act restricted our ability to take lawful industrial action and picket workplaces, with secondary ‘sympathy’ action being outlawed. Employers were handed new and powerful legal means to stop strikes if unions put a foot wrong, including in how they balloted their members and the ballot thresholds they must reach. What counted as a trade dispute was now so narrowly defined so as to restrict what we could actually take action about.
Why did Thatcher and her successors do this? Because employers and the political establishment knew then, and understand even more acutely now, that trade unions are the first line of defence for working people. It amuses me whenever the right-wing media try to portray trade unions as being irrelevant – with membership today less than half what it was at the end of the 1970s – because I always think, if we’re so irrelevant then why do they keep attacking us? Why don’t they just leave us alone and let us wither on the vine? They don’t, because they know that we are the only ones who challenge their power, the only ones able to stand up to them.
What does this brief history of British trade unionism demonstrate? Firstly, that the story is inextricably linked to working-class history, and that working-class people have consistently been given a voice by becoming trade unionists.
When I worked on the docks in Liverpool, I remember how an arch-Conservative friend of a family member challenged me about why I’d become a trade unionist and shop steward. It’s a bit of a Monty Python cliché, but he said: ‘What have the unions ever done for you?’ I told him my union had given me a voice, and dignity at work. And I’ve never come up with a better answer since. My experience on the docks taught me so much about the essence of solidarity, being able to stand up with dignity, look an employer in the eye, and not be intimidated.
And that’s exactly what our British Airways mixed fleet have done recently, reminding us that the struggles of the past continue to be the challenges of the present. During a lobby of Parliament, MPs were visibly shaken when BA mixed fleet cabin-crew members, on strike to secure an increase in the poverty pay the airline forced them to live on, told them about their working conditions and the creative methods BA was using to avoid paying them the minimum wage, including by lumping in food allowances. Among those sharing their stories of living on pot noodles and tins of tuna, sleeping overnight in their cars, being unable to afford fuel to get to work, and losing incentive pay for being sick, there was a deep resolve not to be cowed by our national carrier. A deep resolve even though the airline was punishing them for their action by denying them their bonuses – those hard-earned extras that are vital to workers whose take home annual salary amounts to just over £12,000.
These mixed fleet members, the majority of them young, took some eighty-five days of industrial action, in what became one of the longest running disputes in recent trade union history. They weren’t being greedy. They just wanted to be able to provide the best and safest service they could to BA customers, and to be paid a wage they could live on for doing so. Trade unionism gave them a voice to demand that they be treated with dignity.
I recall some of the conversations I had with those on strike – whose jobs are considered so glamorous by the public – when I joined them on the Heathrow picket line:
‘I’ve had to have a second job the entire six years I’ve worked on mixed fleet. My BA pay covers my rent and no more.’
‘There are some routes where we have no choice but to stay in the crew hotel and eat there, at huge expense.’
‘It makes me rage when I see the profits BA is making, but none of it is passed on to its workers. All they need do is offer us a bit more money, give us our bonuses back and treat us with a bit of respect.’
The mixed fleet members were inspired to take their stand by BA cabin-crew colleagues before them, members of our British Airlines Stewards and Stewardesses Association (BASSA), who had been in dispute with the airline for nearly two years over staff cuts – a dispute I was heavily involved in settling in 2011.7 This was a very high-profile and heroic struggle, and I was privileged to represent this group of decent people who stood firm and defeated BA’s CEO Willy Walsh, the darling of the right-wing media. Similarly, it was the determination and solidarity of our mixed fleet members, and the voice trade unionism gave them, that secured a decent pay rise in the end. They stuck together through thick and thin, and demonstrated how it pays to be a trade unionist.
The vast majority of trade unionists’ time is spent dealing positively with employers over pay and conditions and resolving grievances, and I am proud of the type of engagement we have with them. I talk to company chief executives every week, often working together to resolve complex issues that as an employer they cannot solve on their own. That is what unions and their shop stewards do – they negotiate and work to put out fires. We do not seek confrontation, and we do not relish fights; but neither do we walk away from bullying bosses and companies that are not treating their employees fairly. We are afraid of no one.
So when we do take industrial action, it is a last resort. And it is how workers find their voice when their employer is refusing to hear it.
Another example: Greenwich Leisure Ltd (GLL) runs libraries and swimming pools for local authorities in London, many of which have London Living Wage (LLW) accreditation, meaning they should mandate GLL to pay the LLW. But some have allowed the firm to pay eighteen- to twenty-year-olds over £2 an hour less. So we built a campaign, talking to those young workers about what mattered to them, bringing them into union membership, and putting political and industrial pressure on the local authorities, supposedly so proud of their LLW accreditation, through protests, lobbies of council meetings and media activity.
Finding a voice through their trade unionism, these young workers were able to force councillors to explain why they were letting a private contractor off the hook when it came to ensuring fair and equal pay. The decision of the Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets councils to pay under-twenty-ones the LLW were big wins that saw a significant number of young Londoners joining Unite.
The list of similar campaigns is long. The TGI Fridays dispute, the Pizza Express fair tips campaign,8 the McDonald’s strike, and the fair pay deals we’ve struck for hospitality workers at the Edinburgh fringe,9 have all been made possible because young people working in hospitality are standing up and taking action. They know why they should be trade unionists.
Asif Mohammed chairs Unite’s West Midlands regional and young members’ committees. He recorded a video in which he explains why he became a trade unionist:
I joined Unite as a student, when I worked in retail. I saw there was a lot of exploitation, including non-payment of the adult national living wage rate. I thought the best way to challenge this was by becoming part of a collective, coming together with people who were in a similar position as me and fighting for better pay and conditions, and ultimately achieving a better, fairer future for all of us.
Asif had a piece of advice for young people starting out in work today. Joining a union will give them a voice both at work and within the union. His point is that members are central to the democratic life of any trade union, and there are many ways to be involved. Asif’s rise to chair of a Unite regional committee, in his early twenties, also demonstrates the new vibrancy that our young members are bringing to our union. We are seeing young trade unionists, with women at the fore, generating an enthusiasm that is so necessary in any organisation, carrying forward the values of older members and expressing those values in different ways. And this is fantastic for the future of our movement.
