This year’s T.U.C
It is normal at trade union conferences for numbers of resolutions to be carried that have no practical outcome and serve no purpose except to indicate the feelings of delegates on all sorts of issues about which they protest loudly because they cannot think of anything else to do. Delegates have only to look back at the resolutions they carried last year and the years before to realise that nobody takes any notice of most of them, least of all the Government to whom many are conveyed.
This year, however, there were one or two decisions of the T.U.C. that may, for better or for worse, have some consequences that may be worth considering.
The Delegates at the Blackpool Conference were almost unanimous in supporting a resolution calling on the General Council to examine the possibility of reorganising the structure of both the T.U.C. and the trade union movement “with a view to making it better fitted to meet modern industrial conditions.” Nothing will happen immediately as a result of this resolution. The intention is that the General Council should complete its examination in time for next year’s conference, but Mr. Woodcock warned that it would take at least two years. The movers took care not to indicate the kind of alterations of structure that may be found desirable, this reticence being the only way to get the delegates to agree wholeheartedly to the resolution. As Mr. Woodcock remarked, each union is inclined to regard its own way of doing things the right one and the other fellow’s wrong. Though no particular changes were foreshadowed, one union, the Locomotive drivers, voted against the enquiry; they think it will probably recommend a merger with the National Union of
Railwayman and they have no intention of merging.
Many times in its history the T.U.C. has seen delegates at its conferences pass resolutions calling for re-organisation of the unions. Not much has come of such resolutions because most trade unionists nowadays have the feeling that none of the changes likely to occur will make much difference. There was a time when trade unionists could get into excited argument about the respective merits of craft unions and industrial unions, about the benefits of amalgamation, and about giving the General Council of the T.U.C. authority to control the wage claims and strikes of affiliated unions. These causes still have their advocates, but it is all in a less heated atmosphere than once it was. Experience and disappointment have had a sobering effect. The collapse of the Triple Alliance of Miners, Railwaymen and Transport workers and the “General Strike” of 1926 have left their mark.
One of the periods of lively discussion about the trade unions was just after the first World War. In that atmosphere a resolution was carried at the 1919 T.U.C. instructing the General Council to examine the constitution of every affiliated union and on the information so obtained “to report upon what, in its opinion, is the most desirable and up-to-date method of organisation that will enable the workers by hand and brain to reap the full results of their toil.”
It was moved, seconded and carried without more than a hundred words of supporting speech by the mover, and no opposition. This could have been due to the unanimity on the part of the delegates, or to a general feeling that it was a pious resolution and nothing would come of it.
Whatever the explanation, nothing much did come of it.
The idea of giving the General Council power to control the unions has often been put forward, but has had little support in this country, most trade unionists obviously preferring to keep the power to decide on wage claims and any supporting action within their own organisation. A characteristic attitude was that of a Miners Federation delegate at the 1915 T.U.C. when opposing a resolution which had called on the T.U.C. to try to obtain an all-round 5s.. increase of wages:
“This is work for the Trade Unions themselves to tackle. So far as the Miners Federation is concerned, we should object to the Parliamentary Committee coming to us and trying to get us 5s. a week extra.”
After that speech the delegates would not even discuss the resolution any more and went on to next business.
And in 1919, when it was moved that the T.U.C. should undertake the amalgamation of all unions into one body, under control of the T.U.C., only one short opposition speech was made, but it was sufficient to kill the resolution: only seven delegates voted for it out of 851.
The opposer said: “I want to say that there is not a single Trade Union in the country that would submit to the control of the Parliamentary Committee. It is ridiculous to suppose that this Congress would ever submit to anything of the kind.”
This persistent opposition to formal proposals of a changed structure does not mean that the unions in Britain have not changed. By process of amalgamation of local unions into National bodies and of more or less associated unions into larger ones the number of unions has been nearly halved since 1913 (from 1,269 to 690), while membership has more than doubled, from 4.135,000 to 9,803,000. In 1913 about two-thirds of all trade unionists were in the small number of unions with over 50,000 members. Now membership is largely concentrated in seventeen unions above the 100,000 level. But 1913 has nothing like those mammoth unions, the Transport & General Workers with over 1,300,000 members and the A.E.U. with 982,000. Apart from the Miners who had 600,000 members in 1913 (and that was a more or less loose federation, not a concentrated body) the largest union in 1913 appears to have been the N.U.R. with 273,000 members.
While these trade union developments of half a century have been going on, and indeed inducing them, British capitalism has been organising into larger units, with employers federations acquiring more experience of handling “labour problems” and productivity techniques, and making more use of arbitration and conciliation machinery.
It is arguable whether the unions are a little more effective or a little less effective in dealing with the changed conditions. Certainly their members are dissatisfied with the results, but so they always were. Basically it is because the trade unions have never dealt with anything except the effects of capitalism, and capitalism has not changed in essentials.
The workers, including the “white collar” workers who are now increasingly entering the fold of trade union organisation, are still a class that lives by selling its labour power, its mental and physical energies, to the employers. Nothing has changed about that.
Contrasted with this country with its 650 unions, of which 183 are affiliated to the T.U.C., there are other countries in which the trade union movement has been reconstructed and streamlined or where the central trade union body has powers unknown and hitherto unacceptable here. But has it made any material difference? Are the workers of Austria, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, in any better situation?
The answer is, of course, that against the universal background of the capitalist wages system structural alterations can have only relatively small affect.
What is needed, as the Socialist has to go on repeating, is that the outlook and purpose of the working class have to be changed: not the grouping of non-Socialist trade unions into organisations of different size and shape, but the adoption of a different outlook and purpose. This aim is not the one for which trade unions exist or that they can achieve. It calls for Socialist understanding and political organisation and action, not on a craft or industrial or National basis but internationally, on the basis of the common interest of all workers in abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism.
H.