There’s a good song by British socialist songwriter Billy Bragg which says, “there is power in the factory, there is power in the land , there is power in the hand of the worker. "But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand, there is power in the union”.
In an uneven world, working people (and students) need to unite, to pool their strength to defend our interests: “Money speaks for money, the devil for his own, who’ll come to speak for the skin and the bone? With our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in the union”. The logic of the powerless gaining power through collective action becomes a logic of generosity.
GenerosityBecause working people own very little, their private interests are not a stumbling block to taking a general, impartial view of the world. This is illustrated by the debate over climate change which is channeled through the mass media. I don’t know that newspapers are the most eco-friendly operations and I know that many of their top advertisers, such as car companies, are not. It’s a lot easier to persuade ordinary people that public transport as the primary means of transport instead of cars could improve their lives and much harder to convince those who run these industries - the old camel-needle problem. But if unions are so great, and we’ve had them for a hundred years, why have they failed? Why are they weaker now than 30 years ago? Why haven’t all union members in the country already signed the petition?
History of trade unionsTo understand this we need to look at the history of trade unions and how they interact with the economy and the state. Since the beginning of class society, weaker groups have always seen the need to combine forces. The saying ‘unity is strength’ is far older than the trade union movement but only with the emergence of the industrial working class did a section of society so combine immediate powerlessness with potential strength. The working class in Industrial Revolution England was perhaps the most miserable group in the world at the time but also directly produced the goods that made Britain the greatest power the world had ever seen. Trade unions were formed spontaneously – but with a great deal of effort and self-sacrifice – by workers who realised this basic fact and drew on ideals of solidarity and hopes for a better future.
Two sides to unionsThe early trade unions won many huge gains – the right to vote, to free speech and free assembly, the right to organise and better living standards for all. In Britain and Germany, the second most industrialized country, trade unions formed millions-strong workers parties and cooperatives for everything from food and education to soccer, singing and cycling. But the organizing successes of the working class movement exposed the political weakness of unions. Unions are the basic combat organisations of the working class but they are primarily defensive. Unions react to attacks from business but rarely put forward another vision. There’s another side to unions too, in that the primary job of the officials who staff them is to sell labour to business at the highest possible price. In times of prosperity seems that the socialist utopia will arrive simply by bargaining piece by piece for slightly higher wages each year. In situations of crisis, where whole sections of industry are collapsing, union officials often end up seeing their job as protecting the bosses, not the workers, so that they can continue to sell labour to them in the future.
World WarThe early trade unions and working class parties formed a powerful international – the second International – in a time of prosperity. In Britain and Germany, and other European countries, their hopes of an evolutionary arrival at socialism were dashed by the First World War, where only the Russian section of the international stood by the principle of international solidarity as the major parties of the working class sent their own members out to kill each other. After the War, the working class movement took heart from the Russian revolution and the first workers’ state and grew in leaps and bounds, but failed to make up the ground it had lost before the crises of the great depression and the Second World War. What should have been an opportunity to put forward an alternative vision for the economy and the world was lost, as Labour reformists and the communist parties, now no longer autonomous but foreign policy tools of the Stalinist regime, urged struggle when the enemy was strong and retreat when the time for battle came.
Post-war boom and New Zealand unionsAfter WW2, the world economy entered its longest and strongest period of growth, until the 1970s. Again in this period, there seemed little reason to think outside the box, as industrial arbitration – that’s wage bargaining organised between unions and bosses by the state – delivered wage rises year after year and unemployment was negligible. At one stage in the sixties it’s said there were 12 people unemployed and the minister of labour knew each of them by name. Strikes were regular occurrences and they were necessary to keep the advance going, but they followed a set pattern, with a season occurring annually around national wage rounds. Leading a union became a bureaucratic task. There was little need to organise in unorganized sections of the workforce and little need for strategy or creative, imaginative tactics.
Oil shocksThis ‘golden weather’ came to an end, in NZ and around the world, in the 1970s. The oil shocks were the sharp reminder that capitalism has periods of boom and bust and that class divisions can be papered over but not done away with. The trade unions fought hard in NZ and around the world in the 1970s but they had no political or economic perspective past national reforms. Meanwhile, their political wing, the Labour Party, which was supposed to come up with these perspectives, had also realised the old model, which worked during the Long Boom, was out of date. But instead of looking to working class democracy and international struggle, the supposed principles of the labour movement, key figures like Roger Douglas and David Lange abandoned them for the latest so-called free market thinking coming from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Failure of strategyThe end of the long boom saw the end of a cosy relationship between unions, the bosses and the state, where Beehive gin was merrily drunk by National Party PM Robert Muldoon and trade union leaders. When the ‘national interest’ was threatened, the state took sides with the interests of business and opted to restructure NZ along capitalist lines. The failure of unions to respond to this was not a failure of strength; it was a failure of strategy. This is crucial. In 1980, 69 per cent of workers were union members, compared to only 22 per cent now. 1977 and 1979 saw the biggest strike waves in the history of NZ. Many of our parents were young workers then, when one in ten was out on strike. Among the rank and file, socialist ideas were common and the top leadership were almost all members of supposedly socialist parties but there was no interest in breaking with the Labour Party, reformism, and the national interest.
Ruling class attacksThe 1980s saw huge layoffs in nationalised and protected industries. Unemployment sapped the strength of the union movement and emboldened the National Party, when it came to power in 1990, to attack union rights and beneficiaries. Finance Minister Ruth Richardson asked dietitians to cost out a minimal food budget – then cut it 20 per cent and set it as the basic dole. When the ECA was introduced by National in 1990, the union leaders were given a mandate from members to call a general strike – polls were running heavily against National and the ECA – but despite the wishes of the rank and file, the leadership did not move. Why? Because destroying the ECA would have meant destroying the National Government and the unions had nothing other than the discredited Labour Party to offer.
Andrew Tait |
