By Frank Noakes
LONDON — There are any number of interesting conferences and meetings to tempt one here. "Unions '93", organised in late May by a dozen unions and the New Statesman & Society magazine with a line-up of unionists — including a former Tory minister — wasn't one of them.
Nevertheless, perhaps I would be pleasantly surprised. After all, wasn't the sun shining? The turn-up surprised even the organisers. Granted, there weren't many workers, but then at $70 per head this surprised no-one.
Meeting at Congress House on the 125th anniversary of the Trade Union Congress, there was no sense of history or celebration. Indeed, the TUC has lost 5 million members in the last decade. Yet ironically, recent opinion polls suggest unions are more popular than at any time since the '70s. Is this because Tory legislation having cowed them, the movement is now respected for its timorousness? Has the TUC's do-nothing approach finally paid off?
Apparently not. After 14 years of relentless Tory propaganda — free market good, unions bad — and seven pieces of anti-union legislation, more than 70% of those asked in recent polls believe that unions are essential to defend wages and jobs.
Thatcher's ideological triumph has turned out to be short lived. But the leaders of the union movement and Labour Party, long in hibernation, appear not to have noticed the change in mood.
At the announcement of a second one-day rail strike in protest against privatisation, subsequently supported by 100,000 workers, TV reporters searched in vain for disgruntled passengers; people supported the strike. Ignoring pleas from employers, most city workers took a second unscheduled long weekend, confirming the findings of a recent survey showing only 4% of Britons happy in their jobs.
The social decay in Britain is profound. The health
service provides a useful barometer. In just two years 15,000 hospital beds have gone and 531 hospitals have closed, at a time when more than 1 million people are waiting for a hospital bed. One in 10 heart patients dies on the waiting list. Dr Duncan Dymond, a heart surgeon, described as a "national scandal" the fact that it takes two years from diagnosis to operation.
Hospitals now have to comply with strict budgets which have led to more than 7000 jobs being cut. In one instance, an elderly woman car accident victim died while doctors at one hospital, deciding that they couldn't afford to operate, took two hours to find another hospital that could!
Meanwhile, at Unions '93, Will Hutton, the Guardian newspaper's economics writer, easily demolished the government's "green shoots of recovery" propaganda.
It's impossible to return to the boom years of the mid-1980s, he said. The small rise in consumption is a result of lower mortgage rates, not economic growth. Net trade is negative and new investment in manufacturing is zero; increased economic activity is due to companies topping up stocks depleted over the past couple of years.
While inflation has fallen to a 30-year low of 1.3%, Hutton predicts it will rise steadily during the course of the year to 6%, ruling out along the way any further interest rate cuts. The "recovery" which the Tories detect is likely to be the shallowest and shortest in history.
Recent statistics show a small fall in the number of unemployed, but reality lies elsewhere; more than 8 million Britons have known unemployment in the past two years alone. Many companies predict further lay-offs; privatised British Telecom recently announced that up to 40,000 of its work force might be sacked over the next two years.
With many people carrying high personal debts from the late '80s, insecurity is rife. In fact, personal bankruptcies in England and Wales are on the increase with 10,000 recorded in the first three months of 1993. Farmers, to give but one example, are committing
suicide at a rate of one every other day.
Against this background, industrial action is on the increase. Miners have held more marches than at any time since 1945 to save 31 pits from closure. Firefighters have just voted for strike action, as have broadcast workers. Teachers are refusing to implement new tests on 7- and 14-year-olds, despite heavy pressure from the government. London bus drivers have had five one-day strikes so far this year. Post Office privatisation plans will be rigorously opposed by staff, their union resolved at its May conference.
At the Timex factory in Dundee, where all workers were locked out, and subsequently sacked, after taking industrial action, a picket line continues three months later. Migrant women workers are staffing picket lines outside two factories after being sacked for attempting to unionise their workplaces.
Parents and teachers have held sit-ins at schools threatened with closure. Health workers have taken action in an attempt to prevent the closure of hospitals, and public sector workers are planning strike action to prevent the privatisation of their work and government spending cuts.
Even within the Conservative Party, there is rebellion. A number of government backbenchers oppose rail privatisation. The Scottish Tories' annual conference opposed the privatisation of that country's water. Planned cutbacks to social security provisions have draw fire from Conservative politicians fearful for their seats.
The Tories lost the blue ribbon seat of Newbury in a by-election in early May, suffering a 29% drop in their vote. In the same week they lost 16 of the 17 shire county councils they had previously controlled. Following this massive rejection of the Tories, Prime Minister John Major is to reshuffle his ministers in an attempt to restore the government's flagging support.
The government is clearly on the back foot, saved in large measure because there is no effective opposition. As Labour MP Tony Benn told Green Left Weekly, the Labour Party leadership is happy to be in opposition. Unions '93 was an attempt to define a
role for the trade union movement in this new situation.
The TUC's current demeanour is epitomised by engineering union president Bill Jordan. Last September he told TUC delegates: "It will come as a smack in the eye to those Tories and other extremists who were hoping that this congress, in a fit of post-election disappointment, would backtrack on the assurances last year's congress gave to the British public. This was our commitment to conduct our business in a lawful manner whether in dispute or taking solidarity action." In other words, the union movement should accept the Tory anti-union legislation and live within it.
Unions '93 met to discover if there is a middle way between Jordan and the leader writers of most far left papers, whose job qualification appears to be an ability to write endlessly: "Kick the Tories Out" and "General Strike Now".
The conference didn't discover it, because the real alternative is considered unsophisticated and, worse still, it is personified by someone more popular than any other union leader, more popular than the prime minister — Arthur Scargill.
Scargill, the miners president, pointed out that the miners had linked up with the churches, marched in large numbers across the country, petitioned, proved their case for keeping the pits open. All this was good, but it was not enough on its own, he said.
Addressing a very different meeting, Scargill declared: "It's time this movement, and that means the leadership of the TUC and it means the leadership of the Labour Party, stopped pontificating, stopped talking in platitudes and began to make a call to workers to become involved in industrial action.
"We're fighting on a number of fronts; the tragedy is the opportunity that now faces the trade union movement is not being recognised. It is time that trade union leaders recognised that this movement was built, not by people who were compliant to the law, it was built by the Chartists, the Levellers, the Suffragettes.
"This is a fight for the health service, the education system, our social services; and I find it incredible that when all of us are under attack with four and a half million unemployed, that there are still those in the trade union movement who are kneeling at the altar of 'new realism'", he told 5000 cheering, rain-soaked demonstrators outside the Timex factory in Dundee on May 17.
Leaving Congress House, the sun still shining, I was reminded of the gag, "Can you tell me how do I get to Gundagai?" — "Well, I wouldn't start from here." Unions '93 wasn't a good starting point for the revival of the union movement. But despite the TUC's institutionalised conservatism and the pure cowardice of many of its leaders, the spirit of the movement's founders still lives on picket lines the length and breadth of a Britain increasingly hostile to Toryism.