trade Unions

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Chapter 8

Trade Unions.

“The progress of human society consists …in…

the better and better apportioning of wages to work”.

Thomas Carlyle from Past and Present.

For many commentators in recent years trade unions have been seen as an old fashioned social institution. Large scale confrontations with

employers, and even with the government as in the General Strike of 1926, were seen as forms of political action leading to socialism. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet style of socialism, made this search for socialism through trade unionism seem utopian at best.

Another way of putting this point is to argue that because workers do not make a collective profit for themselves, so they cannot have a collective economic interest. Capitalists, however, do make a collective profit, and do have collective interests; at least within the firm. It is true that capitalists do compete with one another to sell their service or product. They also co-operate within bodies such as the Confederation of British Industries, and a variety of government bodies. This means that workers have to work continually to construct collective interests amongst all workers, including non-members of the trade union. The sense of a worker collective interest has to be maintained when they are in conflict with the employer over wages or health and safety. It also has to be maintained when the workers have to co-operate with the employer to ensure the viability of the firm in tough competitive times. Arguably, it is easier to have a lively sense of collectivism in conflict than in co-operation. Since periods of overt conflict are very short, relative to periods of co-operation, the job of keeping a sense of collective interest alive is a very hard one.

The earliest trade unions saw themselves as a ‘sword of justice’. This meant that there was a moral basis to trade union collectivism. It was the injustice of low pay, arbitrary sacking, and management lock-outs that originally created collectivism. Actual poverty of workers was seen as a less effective form of mobilisation. The high point of collective action was the 1960’s and 1970’s, when workers were relatively well paid.

Since the 1970’s, collective action, including strikes, has dramatically declined. This supports the view that trade unions are irrelevant to to-day’s society. The hard evidence for this view of trade unions is the fall in membership. In 1979, the membership had reached an historic high level of over 13 million members. This had fallen by about a half by the 1990’s. The first point to be made about this fall is that it was from the highest historical point. The current figure of around 7 million is higher than it was in the nineteenth century. In 1896 the figure was only 1.3 million (Bain, 7: 1983). Secondly, the institutions themselves are still in existence, doing what they always did, negotiating with employers, managing members pensions etc.. It is also true that there have been mergers of trade unions in the last 20 years. This can be seen as a weakening of the old traditions: or as becoming a larger player to negotiate with employers who have also merged. A third point concerns union density. This expresses the number of union members, as a percentage of the total number of employees in a firm. Therefore, if every employee were a union member the density would be 100%. In 1896 density was about 10% (Bain, 7: 1983). In the period of the 1920’s in Britain when unemployment was at it’s historic high, union density fell by about one third. In the 1980’s, density fell by only a fifth (Gallie, 3: 1996). Then in 1997 union density was down to 30%, from the historic high of 55% in 1979. The figure of 30% does, however, hide an enormous variation across different types of employment. For example, in the private sector there is only 20% density. This contrasts with a figure for the public sector of 60%. It also varies across different industries; ranging from 7% in hotels and restaurants to 63% in gas, electricity and water supplies.

Most of this paints a less pessimistic picture of the power of trade unions, even taking into account the fall in membership in the last 30 years of the 20^th century. In a study of six very different areas of Britain, it was found that only 5% of managers actively discouraged trade unionism in their organisation (Gallie, 14: 1996). Further, 28% of managers have actively encouraged unionism. Looking only at finance industries this figure rose to 32%. The industries, which showed the greatest decline in trade union influence, were engineering, transport, and chemicals. These were industries that were in decline themselves. It is this industrial decline rather that a management initiative against unions, which explains union decline.

The management encouragement of trade unions reiterates an oft-quoted analysis of unions as being more of a lubricant than an irritant. Unions are still valued by managers as a means of communication with workers. It is easier to communicate with one or two representatives, than hundreds of employees. Opinion surveys over nearly 20 years support this view of unions. The perhaps surprising belief that trade unions have too little power has been growing (Kelly, 45: 1998). If this is widely true, it may inhibit industrial action, including strikes, as unions may not see themselves as being strong enough for the conflict. However, the belief in the relative weakness of unions does show a growing belief in Britain that there is an asymmetry of power as between employers and employees. This raises broader questions of justice in society. Interestingly, there has been no decline in workers raising grievances against employers. Perhaps the old sword of justice still lives!

The last point has to be understood in the context of government sponsored employer initiatives against trade unions since 1979. Factories setting up on green-field sites, with various local and national financial incentives to go to areas of high unemployment, either have a no trade union policy, or provide little encouragement. It has been estimated that of all the Japanese firms entering Britain, about half have union representation. Where these unions do exist, it is often with no strike agreements. Further, there have been various changes in the law. The outlawing of secondary picketing, where one cannot picket an employer other than your own, is one of the more dramatic changes.

There have also been more subtle, and less draconian, changes introduced by management over the last 20 years or more. Employees are being encouraged to work partly, or entirely, from home. It is estimated that there are over 2 million tele-workers, or remote workers, in Britain to-day (Ackers, 12: 1996). Computers have facilitated this change. Working from home may facilitate childcare and domestic labour. However, the evidence for this is mixed. Easier childcare may go with very low pay. It also matters whether the work is low skilled data entering, or highly skilled professional work (Crompton, 38: 1997). In any case, this makes contact with, or membership of, a trade union more difficult. There is not the daily collective discussion of management initiatives, and mutual support for a union response.

Other management initiatives include customer care and quality circles. Customer care involves more training of staff to respond to the customer with a greeting, smile and friendly telephone manner. This is an increase in the emotional work now required. Training is often in working hours, which often means that the office is closed to customers for half an hour one day per week. Quality circles quickly followed customer care. Longer periods were taken out of normal work. Workers were encouraged to identify problems with their work, and to brainstorm solutions. These solutions were written down, and if approved by management would be implemented. One unresolved issue here was what payment should be made for successfully implemented solutions? Token gifts by managers were often seen as inadequate. One Building Society gave a bunch of flowers. Another problem was that normal work/service was disrupted during the meeting of the quality circle. One building society senior manager, on visiting a local branch, noticed that the branch had their quality meetings in their lunch hour. This was the peak period for customer attendance at the branch. There were long queues. The quality circle was stopped. More generally, when workers returned from the circle to normal work, there was some cynicism about the slowness of introducing approved changes. Consequently, quality circles had a high rate of decay. A recent survey found them in only 22% of all work places (Ackers, 159: 1996).

A more successful management initiative, found in over half of all workplaces in the same survey, was team working. Workers were organised into teams with team leaders. The team’s performance was measured over time, with scoreboards placed around the factory. This encouraged inter-team competition. This competition could, and did, result in one team giving another team poor scores for poor quality work. Then the other team would engage in retaliatory scoring on the first team. This resulted in some difficulties for the team leaders.

Team leaders were previously called foremen or supervisors. Their new role involved financial responsibility. They were trained in some accountancy, and notional budgets were devolved to them. This was a part of reducing levels of management in the firm. Layers of bureaucratic fat were being reduced. However, the new team leaders were concerned with the intensification of their labour. They supervised the team as before. But they also had to operate within their budget constraints. Further, they felt that they had not been given enough training in accountancy. It had been too short. They were a sort of mini-manager without management holidays, management pay, fringe benefits, or promotion prospects. Further, they faced the real prospect of redundancy. Being a mini-manager did not produce job security. They now wanted a return of trade unions. Ironically, they only got their new role as team leaders on condition that they supported the de-recognition of trade unions.

Yet, another management initiative was called Human Resource Management. This effectively replaced what is now seen as old-fashioned personnel management. Whereas personnel managers took some responsibility for the health and welfare of employees; human resource management saw the employee as a resource to the firm in it’s efforts to maximise profits. There are two variants of this new approach to employees, a hard variant and a soft one (Legge, 66: 1995). The hard variant was concerned with identifying the firm's needs for different types of workers in different places. The soft variant was concerned to discover what skills and abilities employees had to offer, and what new training could be offered to them. The hard variant would be concerned with managing redundancy. Both variants stressed the individual’s relationship with the employer. It was the individual that was managed. This encouraged the belief that all employees were individuals whose relation to the employer was an individualistic one. There was little place for trade unions here.

When asked what they wanted from employment most employees answered good pay and job security. If Japanese firms, or firms with a tradition of secure employment could offer this, there was again little place for trade unions. Unions have responded to this by also treating their members as individuals. They offer individual credit cards, reductions on the cost of holidays, insurance etc.. Some unions can ask for even more training than is on offer, as this is seen as the positive side of management initiatives. Unions also represent sacked employees. So unions are also trying to get a more secure employment for workers, partly through increasing skills, which should make them more attractive to existing, or future employers. A survey of six different parts of Britain found that the stock of skilled jobs had increased in the 1980’s to 70% of all jobs (Kelly, 119: 1998). Further, more than half those interviewed claimed that they had experienced an increase in their skill levels. Raised entry qualifications and extensive training by the firm are seen as measures of these higher skill levels. This suggests that the unions were right to be concerned about up-skilling. However, the survey also found evidence of de-skilling in part-time and unskilled jobs. This indicates a polarisation of workers in terms of skill levels.

Further, unions did not halt the massive redundancies in manufacturing industries in the 1980's. There was no trade union for the unemployed, as there was in the 1930's. There was some involvement in unemployed centres, but to little effect. In America, one study in Chicago showed that when unskilled manufacturing jobs moved out of the city to the suburbs and abroad, the growth of inner city service jobs was largely for women only (Wilson, 1996). This was because employers were explicit in preferring women to men. Further, they preferred black women to black men. Women were seen as being more reliable than men are, because they had a sense of responsibility to their family. Women were seen as having better skills than men in spelling, grammar, and adopting the business dress code. So unemployment was greater for men than women.

This unemployment meant that trade unions at the national level are reduced to being a provider of information and individual services as shown above. Yet, this focus on the national hides the real basis of union power, which is local. The organisation of the union at the local factory or office is normally done by shop stewards. These stewards dealt with immediate daily issues. They attempted to protect union members from managerial whims. They also met other shop stewards within the firm and managed a variety of demands from different groups of workers. Sectional interests, as between different unions, always exist; and always threaten the unity of the union. There are ‘cowboys’ attempting to advance claims opportunistically, which could disrupt unity. For those workers still in jobs in the 1990's, this style of shop steward organisation still existed. It was not, of course, available to the unemployed; nor to those small scale private companies in the service sector set up in the 1990's. These small firms are always hard to organise and recruit members in.

So for many of those still in work the shop steward still existed, managing the necessary ballots for any strike action, and still operating as before. The legal requirement to have a written ballot members before a strike was seen as an inhibitor of industrial conflict. This inhibition, however, did not materialise. The vast majority of ballots called by the national trade union were well supported by the members. This not only reflected the trust members had in the head office, but also the local shop stewards. So the ballot tended to create greater cohesion within the union generally.

Also the view that the trade unions, and their members, were always bent on conflict with employers was an exaggerated one. A 1980's study of workers attitudes to their employers showed a very different story. 50% believed that workers and managers had the same interests; 49% disagreed. Further, 64% believed that any changes in production ought to be subject to joint decision making between workers and managers. Although only 15% thought that changes actually were jointly managed (Martin, 65: 1992). These are hardly workers bent on irresponsible industrial conflict for it's own sake; quite apart from the fact that most forms of industrial conflict do affect the worker financially. Strike pay from the union is usually well below normal pay.

Having considered trade union responses to recent conditions, a more fundamental question is why there is any conflict at all between trade unions and employers? One classic answer was that there is always an effort bargain between worker and manager (Edwards, 32: 1986). This bargain is variable, and so negotiable. The effort bargain exists in the first place because the details of any labour contract can never be fully specified in advance. This is because the law governing employment changes over time, as does the introduction of new technologies, and changes in competition from other firms. However, the most fundamental reason as to why there must be a lack of specificity in the bargain has to do with changing expectations on the part of both managers and workers as to what effort is required. In the case of the workers if there is a perceived disparity between the effort made and the wages received, this can easily produce a variety of forms of conflict, up to the most dramatic, the withdrawal of labour in a strike. In the case of managers, if they also perceive a similar disparity then they may require greater effort for the same wages. The factory line may be speeded up; or the number of successful sales of mobile phones achieved per minute of a sales pitch by a tele-sales person, may be increased.

One response to an increase in effort is an increased wage demand. Another response is to find easier ways of doing the work, than the way laid down by management. In Britain this is often called "fiddles"; in America it is called "angles" (Edwards, 42: 1986). This is a very double-edged strategy. It helps the workers keep to a traditional sense of what effort should be; it also helps management get things done without any overt conflict. This complex strategy can be seen as exercising the creative powers of workers, not normally exercised. One study found that workers used more creative thought getting to work in the morning, than at work. The strategy can even be seen as subverting detailed management control of work. It can even be seen as workers controlling production themselves, making management redundant. However, the most subtle analysis of this strategy suggests that a kind of worker consent is created. This consent is to being a worker in the first place; to the existence of management; to a fatalistic view of the possibility of any radical change; and to a broad acquiescence of the status quo in society. Essentially, what is being argued here is that worker consent is created inside the office/factory by the workers themselves, rather than any political initiatives outside the workplace (Edwards, 46: 1986).

As more workers now work in offices rather than factories, are better educated than before, the need for consent is all the greater. Old fashioned authoritarian management may produce more conflict than in the past. In the last 20 years of the 20th century the growth of quality circles, team working, and flatter structures with fewer layers of managers, all aimed to increase worker consent and commitment to the organisation. These moves increased the flexibility of workers in the sense that there were no more clearly defined boundaries between one job and another. This reduced delays as previously one had to wait for the relevant expert trained worker to do a specific task. This flexibility also reduced the ability of trade unions to negotiate disagreements over job boundaries. Tapping into worker creativity in these changing initiatives is also a double-edged strategy.

On the one hand there are fewer, and less experienced younger, managers to exert managerial control. The decline of autocratic management may improve the working environment; it may even become more playful. More may actually be produced with creative workers, and less time lost through conflict. On the other hand, there are much less prospects for promotion as there are fewer layers of management. The workers may or may not get increased wages following increased production. Even if wages do increase, the returns to the owners and senior managers are likely to be much greater. Office working conditions may be cleaner and less noisy than older factories, but the risks of industrial injury are real. Repetitive strain injury from working too long on computer keyboards, restrictive and very short breaks in telephone answering call centres, are more contemporary examples of health problems at work.

The changes of the last 20 years of the 20th century need to be understood in relation to the previous 20 years, the 1960's and 1970's. This was the period of the highest level of strikes in Britain's history. There were nearly 5,000 strikes per million workers in the 1970's. This figure compares with 352 strikes per million in the period 1881 to 1905 (Edwards, 194: 1986). The explanation for this period of high industrial conflict is many sided and still in dispute. There was increasing competition from Japan in the 1960's and onwards. This required British, and American, companies to increase productivity, or output per head; to reduce the wage bill; and to take more control over the factory floor. Before this shock of competition from lower priced and more reliable products, there had been relatively low investment in many car factories, and low levels of profit per car. In the 1950’s, the organisation of trade unions through local leaders, the shop stewards, was developing slowly. Payment was by piece rate, the more you produced the more you were paid. Managers at the time believed that this system of pay was the most powerful incentive to get workers to work harder, and increase their effort for more money. The power of the shop stewards grew through negotiating the rate for any one piece of work. This worked well enough until the 60's and 70's. New investment from management went with demands for more flexibility from workers. This tended to undermine the power of the shop stewards. This established what was called a "frontier of control" (Edwards, 241: 1986). This frontier in one factory was over management's ability to move a worker from one machine to another, without the control of the shop stewards. Another example, from the same factory, was that if management wanted any overtime at all, it had to be offered to all workers, and for a 12 week period! Yet another example was where the piece work system of wages was replaced by measured day work, where management set a daily rate. Shop stewards got an earnings policy for the whole factory. This had a number of consequences. Firstly, it took away individual work effort bargaining. Secondly, it produced a union, or shop steward, discipline across the whole factory. Thirdly, it moved the frontier of control from local or individual issues to the whole factory. This example is by no means typical of union power at the time, but gives a sense of the conflict that did exist; and the consequent need for new management initiatives.

One initiative was to de-recognise the trade union, which was popular in new start companies, and management buy-outs of parts of ailing corporations. One study of this was in three high tech firms in the south of England . One firm, which had de-recognised a trade union, made speakers for hi-fi systems. They had a mainly female unskilled and untrained work force, which did largely repetitive work, which did not require

"cleverness or a lot of thinking"

(McLoughlin, 84: 1994) .

These workers had lines of T.V. monitors, which flashed green if they were ahead of their targets, and red if they were not. Two fifths of these workers had been in the old trade union, and would have rejoined if a new trade union was in place. Most of the other workers in the other two firms did not want to join a trade union. This had less to do with the success of new Human Resource Management policies, and more to do with negative attitudes about unions ability to achieve anything for them, including more pay. These were mostly highly skilled technical workers, who could easily get more pay by leaving and getting another job. However, even these workers had problems. The nature of the workflow was dependent on varying customer orders. When contract deadlines were not met, then sub-contracted workers were called in. They were often paid much more than the full time technical staffs. This produced the need for 6 month, as opposed to 12 month, salary reviews; and a costly period of intensive training for the full time staff. As these small start-up firms matured and employed more people, there was a need for managing people that had not existed before. Many staff became confused and angry. There were rumours of heavy drinking on Friday afternoons. In this situation, not having a union to express grievances could be as costly and time consuming as having one!

For some writers the 1970's were a period of co-operation between trade unions, employers, and government, sometimes called corporatism. This co-operation may be seen as a response to the continuing industrial conflict. The 1980's have now been called the period of de-incorporation; that is firms felt the need to free themselves from the need for lengthy union negotiations and bureaucracy. The old system of collective bargaining for large numbers of workers across a firm, or even an industry, was seen as part of a solution to business problems for the previous 20 years or more. Management had been to be incorporated into these relationships, as well as unions. De-incorporation meant de-recognising unions and introducing Human Resource Management. This was a risky new strategy, as shown above, and could be costly and unpopular.

In this environment unions could survive as service providers for members, and become "empty shells" (Mc Loughlin, 160: 1994), with little relationship with their members, who would fade away. The issue here is the survival of trade unions into the future. Survival requires a strategy. The two strategies of providing new consumer services, and older industrial services around wages and working conditions , seem set to continue. Having one strategy without the other appears a risky strategy. However, the two strategies create tensions within the union. The first encourages the values of individualism; the second the values of collectivism. These two values cannot easily coexist. More of one value may reduce the other value. Too much individualism may weaken the power of trade unions in the longer term. If unions are seen as merely reactive, or defensive organisations, then one could argue that they are merely reacting to a more individualised society. This is necessary to survive. Surviving makes possible the continuing and more traditional role of unions in defending worker's interests.

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Black Workers