DUALISM AND DIVISION IN LABOUR STRATEGIES

INTRODUCTION: BRITISH LABOUR RELATIONS IN THE 1980s

The significance of the economic environment for the emergence and persistence of “corporatist” political relations has long been a matter of some uncertainty. In the early post-war decades, many proponents of such arrangement viewed them as an element in a virtuous circle of union “moderation” high productivity, profitability and investment; and rapid economic growth. Within such a perspective, “social partnership” could provide workers and their union with the benefits of long term improvement in real incomes and perhaps employment security as a reward for restraint in the exploitation of short-term bargaining advantages.

To this model of the “corporatism of expansion” may be counter-posed that of the “corporatism of crisis”. British experience in the past quarter-century clearly falls within the latter rubric. The initial creation of tripartite machinery of economic planning- with wage restraint a key component- may have been conceived, optimistic-ally, in terms of a strategy for rapid growth. Within both main parties in the early 1960s there were strong views that full employment, price stability and steady exchange rates were incompatible with “free collective bargaining”; trade union self-discipline would allow government to abandon deflation as an instrument of economic policy, replacing the cycle of “stop-go” by a sustained dash for growth.

Reality imposed a different scenario. The travails of the British economy, anticipating by some years the more general crises of the 1970s, transformed the agenda of tripartisme from the benefits of incomes policy in the late 1960s, and the “social contract” of the 1970s it’s not surprising that the predominant interpretation of corporatism among writers on British industrial relations is of a mechanism to achieve workers acquiescence in an erosion of their economic conditions.

For critics of trade union participation in such relation, these involved an unequal exchange of substantial material scarifies by worker for symbolic political status for their representatives. Thus Panitach (1981, p. 38), for example, has argued that corporatist political structures became the vehicle for engineering, legitimating (“in the national interest”) and administering the increase in exploitation which was necessary to sustain capital in the crisis. Others (e.g Crounch, 1989) replied that a more oppositional stance would have failed to protect worker position, and by aggravating the crisis might have left them even worse off. On either view the presumption was the workers ability to disrupt government economic policy inspired a strategy of enmeshing unions in its formulation and administration. Such a strategy, it might plausibly be argued, meets the requirement of state policy most directly when workers collectively are relatively strong but the overall economy is relatively weak; when there is a disjunction, in other words, between labour and product markets.

Such circumstances may well be both untypical and unstable. Beyond given limits, precarious product markets erode workers collective strength. (how this has occurred in the British context is a major theme of the discussion that follows.) Yet if the will or the ability of workers to obstruct government priorities is undermined, the economy logic if corporatism strategies for the state evaporates. In seeking to banish the TUC (and, to a certain extent, the employer’s counterpart) to the political periphery, the Thatcher government thus exhibits not simply dogmatism or vindictiveness but also a credible economic rationale. If workers compliance is no longer problematic, why concede to union a political status which- even if largely decorative – nevertheless implicitly legitimates the representation of distinctive working-class interests within the body politico- economic?

Parallel considerations apply at the micro level. In the key sectors of manufacturing industry in the 1960s, the central problem of industrial relation for employers was the collective cohesion wielded by workers on the shop floor, independently of formal trade union organisation. Even if largely sectional and fragmented, shop-floor power represented a substantial obstacle to managerial efforts to plan and rationalise production. the strategy of industrial relations “reform” embraced by government as a complement to incomes policy proposed the formal absorption of trade union within Burawoy (1979), in a different context, terms the employer internal state. The proposition that “managements. . . . can only regain control by sharing it (Flanders, 1967, p. 32) underlay initiatives in wide areas of employment during the 1970s which formalized and legitimized the role of workplace collective bargaining and the status and facilities of shop stewards. Management’s explicit recognition – and in some cases, active sponsorship – of union representation in workplace policy – making may be viewed as a form of “micro corporatism” and the implications of this trend for worker’ material interests engendered debates which replicated those provoked by development at national level.

Even before the collapse of industrial employment under the Conservatives, there was evidence that the enhanced formal status of workplace trade unionism might accompany a more delimited role in the structure of interest representation. One of the most surprising findings of survey of workplace industrial relation was the revival of machinery of joint consultation formally detached from trade union organisations. (Brown. 1981). The shift from the long- established management habit, in most strongly unionized workplace, of communicating with employees only through the shop steward structure, has proceeded further during the circle; others have introduced elaborate methods for informing and influencing employees as individuals.

Yet a both national and workplace level, it would be misleading to suggest that unions have been confronted with a simple strategy of exclusion. Certainly the Thatcher government, more brutally than any other this country, has denied the TUC the status of unquestioned representative of distinct ‘labour interests’ and has challenged the whole philosophy of tripartism. Substantively, its approach to social and economic policy and to trade union legislation contradicts totally the aspirations of trade union movement. Yet practice has not altogether matched the abrasive rhetoric: the promised massacre of the ‘quangos’ has been relatively modest; not all ministers and mandarins dismiss the ritual formalities of traditional consultative relations; and if real union influence within these channels is negligible; the same complaint could be heard even at the height of the 1970s social contracts.

At workplace level, the evidence of continuity is far clearer. There have intended been dramatic instances of an employers offensive. But significantly, the most prominent cases have been in the public sector, involving managements confident that a strategy of confrontation would win political benefits (the goodwill of government paymasters) outweighing the economic costs of even large-scale and prolonged conflict. Private employers have by contrast had to apply a very different calculus. Stability in labour relations is normally a valued asset, Particularly within an unstable market environments; if key company objectives can be achieved without directly challenging established institution of worker representations, there is no obvious rationale in provoking gratuitous conflict. On the contrary, to the extent that shop stewards and their unions assent to managerial adaptations to the crisis – plant closures, work reorganization, new technology and a variety of other forms of rationalization – they provide an important channel of legitimization.

Burowaoy, M. (1979) Manufacturing Consent, Chicago, Chicago University Press.

Crouch, C. (1982) Trade Union, Landon, Fontana.

Brown, W . A. (ed) (1981) The Changing Contours of British Industrial Relations, Oxford, Blackwell

Panitch, L, (1981) ‘Trade Union and the Capitalist State’, New Left Review, No. 125.