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.