Power In The Union

 

(Graphic courtesy of: Power In  A Union

It is almost impossible if you are a socialist not to get frustrated as  other people blithely go about their day to day existence seemingly oblivious to what is happening around them. It can sometimes feel as if those of us who are socialists have been given a key to a secret world that others simply cannot see. At times it is tempting to scream ‘what is the matter with you why can’t you see what is so bloody obvious to me?’ Part of the problem is that the system we are in - capitalism - is presented as if it is the most natural thing in the World and therefore it is in all our interests to make it work and, more importantly, work for it. But, of course, things are never as simple as they seem, are they?

At the heart of the capitalist economic system is a conflict that no amount of deception can wish away. This conflict is inherent in a labour process whose sole concern is making money. The only truly effective means of making money is to produce goods for sale on the open market. Leave aside for the moment issues of crime as a means of making money or what are seemingly industries that produce nothing but money (or financial services as we call them, or high class gambling which is what it amounts to) and it is obvious that this conflict creates an opposition between capitalists and workers.

In order to make money industries have to produce more of what they are selling (not always possible in a crowded market) or produce what they are selling more cheaply. If a market is expanding then the inherent conflict can remain hidden. If you have a monopoly even better. But, in what we tend to call downturns, then it becomes necessary for capital to reduce costs in order to maintain its profit margin. Most usually reducing costs is done by reducing the wages of the workforce or by reducing the numbers employed and making those left work harder for the same, or sometimes less, money. Capitalism is cyclical, a recurring system of booms and busts. At the heart of these cycles is manufacturing, which provides a particular challenge for the U.K.

Decline in manufacturing

According to academic economists Robert Hine and Peter Wright, in 1966 there were 8.58 million jobs in the manufacturing sector in the U.K. By 1979 there were 7.62 million, and by 1992 there were just 4.51 million. In essence, the manufacturing base of the U.K. halved its employment in 25 years. Although some of this was undoubtedly caused by Government policies, the trend was one dictated by the demands of capitalism. The largest decline was, rather predictably, in mining which went from 290,000 employees in 1970 to 49,000 in 1990 (5 years after the miners strike and long before the term carbon neutral was in common usage). During this period the wages of those left behind in manufacturing also declined. At the same time, productivity grew by an average of 3.6% per year in manufacturing compared to 1.9% in the economy as a whole. 

What we see is as jobs in an industry decline, capital is able to squeeze more value from the remaining workforce, by what they call efficiency gains. In short, what that means is working harder, on worsening conditions, for pay that is failing to keep pace with inflation. Meanwhile, those discarded workers are unable to easily transfer what are often very specific skills to any emerging sectors. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realise that being good at digging coal does not necessarily equip you for working in a technology based industry or in a call centre. The reality is that as each individual capitalist enterprise tries to squeeze more of what Marx called ‘surplus value’ from the workforce they have no legal responsibility to those workers they throw on to the scrap heap. Unfortunately, capitalism is a system of extracting profit and so it’s moral responsibility ends at the balance sheet.

Supporters of this system will constantly repeat the myth that state sponsorship is a bad thing, as are taxes. However, all of the infrastructure which supports capitalist endeavour is sponsored by the state. From roads and rail, to schools and hospitals capitalism has evolved so that these essential parts of their economy are funded by the same people they are busy exploiting. Of course, businesses pay tax but the U.K. has some of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the World. Remember, when John McDonnell proposed raising corporation tax to 26% how the media went into apoplexy about how businesses would leave the country. But where would they go? Maybe France? Oh, wait, corporation tax there is 28%. How about Germany? Well, no, 30%. Perhaps Japan? Not really. 30.62%. What about the business friendly USA? Afraid not. 27%. So, perhaps those threats to leave were just that. A threat. Fact is taxes help pay for infrastructure that businesses need but businesses don’t want to pay tax which they see as reducing their profits and more importantly the dividends of their shareholders. 

Tax and benefit fraud

There is a whole industry whose main aim is helping businesses (and individuals) avoid tax. It’s called accountancy and whilst not every accountant is a capitalist lacky, they would be failing to do their job if they did not point out the array of loopholes which help to ‘minimise’ the ‘tax burden’ of businesses. Although accountants have a duty to report tax avoidance, they are likely to be involved in preparing accounts that facilitate this avoidance. It has been estimated that tax evasion costs around £5.3 billion a year. The amount of tax evasion cases is believed to have risen by 28% between 2016 and 2018. The number of prosecutions over that period: 4.

There’s a magicians trick called misdirection where in order to hide the important act you are misdirected to a minor one. Tax evasion is a major problem, yet it is benefit fraud that we are misdirected toward. If you look up fraud in benefit payments you get directed to a government document entitled ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefit System’. According to this there were £4.6 billion of ‘overpayments’ in 2019-20. But, this figure is not necessarily fraud for it includes payments that “happen as a consequence of fraud, claimant error and official error”. Where the money is paid due to error it is usually reclaimed, in the latest figures £1 billion was recovered. This leaves £3.6 billion in overpayments. But in the same year underpayments amounted to £2 billion. This means the overpayment, some of which will be due to errors was £1.6 billion. Compare this to the £5.3 billion lost through tax evasion. As Rachael Swindon pointed out in June 2018: “A report has revealed HMRC employ just 522 staff to tackle tens of billions of tax evasion by the super-rich but the DWP employ 4,045 to tackle benefit fraud.” These numbers were confirmed by a Full Fact investigation.

Let’s be honest the U.K. is a capitalist economy. It is managed in a way which favours big business and the super-rich. It has a media which acts as its cheerleader hounding so-called “benefit cheats” whilst ignoring the far greater problem of tax evasion. It leaves ordinary people at the whim of a judicial system that has little interest in the rich thieves who bleed the nation dry, but will punish ordinary people essentially for the crime of being poor. All of this calls for radical reform, but the Labour Party, when last in power, did little to redress the balance.

Stand together

What then should be the response of ordinary people to a system that is rigged against them? The first and most important thing that workers can do is realise that they are at a substantial disadvantage if they try to take on their employers on their own. Workers only win when they act together. Fundamentally, it is in the interests of workers to seek better working conditions and better pay. The inherent conflict at the heart of the capitalist system. To do so they need to be organised together into unions that can represent their interests. 

In 2019 there were 6.44 million workers in trade unions in the U.K. Although union membership is increasing currently only 23% of employees are members. In 1979 the unions could boast 13.2 million members, amounting to 53% of employees. The decline was part of a deliberate policy implemented by Margaret Thatcher to drive unions out of the workforce. Between 1980 and 1993 there were six Acts of Parliament which increasingly restricted unions' ability to undertake lawful industrial action. Secondary action was outlawed and picketing was restricted. Ballots were needed for official industrial action from 1984 and these had to be postal from 1993. The Blair Government, which had a massive parliamentary majority left all of them on the statute books. With the union bureaucracy more concerned with saving their own jobs than those of their members many people reached a not irrational view that there was little point giving money to the unions.

Unfortunately, the result of the timidity with which the unions met wave after wave of anti-union legislation meant that the ability of workers to defend themselves against unscrupulous bosses was considerably weakened. In much the same way as the Labour Party right wing was prepared to let the Conservatives win the General Election rather than support Jeremy Corbyn, an earlier generation of right wingers were prepared to accept shackles on their members rather than support Arthur Scargill and the miners he so valiantly led.

The Mass Strike

In her 1918 pamphlet ‘The Mass Strike’ Rosa Luxemburg explains the difference between economic strikes (generally to get higher wages) and political strikes which have a more radical and generalised edge. The problem was that some anarchists had proposed that the entire working class should spontaneously come out simultaneously and through their mass action bring down capitalism. The point, for Luxemburg, was that this difference between economic strikes and a political mass movement was setting up a false dichotomy. As if it is possible to easily distinguish the economic from the political. For Luxemburg there is no distinction. Economic strikes are, by their very nature, political; political strikes are at their core, economic. As she puts it: “the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle.”

What, you might be thinking, has a 1918 pamphlet written by a German socialist long since dead to today’s attempts to create a mass movement for change? If that fundamental conflict between the capitalist class and the working class is correct, then only united action can tip the scales in favour of workers. Despite the existence of anti-union laws in the U.K. workers really have no choice but to take action as the attacks on their pay and conditions, and their very survival as workers, intensifies as capital seeks to maintain and extend the value they extract. The role of socialists in the workplace is to try to explain to their fellow workers that the longer hours, the loss of holidays or the refusal to improve pay, whilst evidence of the unreasonableness of their employers also represents a more general attack upon the conditions of all workers.

Nobody goes on strike on a whim. It is one of the most difficult decisions any worker makes. Loss of pay with no guarantee of success is always difficult. But, failure to defend conditions just leads to a general decline in pay and conditions. A lost strike ballot encourages the capitalist class to treat workers as expendable. Once the cuts start they don’t end until the workforce says ‘enough is enough’. It is better to make that stand sooner rather than later, and socialists in workplaces need to make that case. Of course, whether you can win that argument depends on how confident workers feel to make a stand.

Solidarity works

But equally important is to support other workers in their struggles. In outlawing secondary action the capitalist class undermined the solidarity at the heart of socialism. That the fifteen year Labour government left that legislation in place tells us everything about the priorities of the Labour right who clearly now control the party. That the union bureaucrats allowed this legislation to pass without putting up hardly any fight makes clear their priorities too. So whilst taking part in ‘official’ trade union struggle is important, it is just important to take on the laws that say you can’t strike and to do that means working around the bureaucracies and being part of wider unofficial union action. 

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here though. We are not going from a situation where strikes are at an all-time low to a general strike any time soon. In 2018, the last time figures are available, there were 273,000 strike days involving 39,000 workers. This is the sixth lowest number of strikes since 1891, and the second lowest number of workers since 1893. Two-thirds of the strike days were in the university sector, I’m proud to say I was part of those strikes. But, here’s the point, all of this points not to a contented workforce but one lacking in confidence and one accepting, in the main, the shackles placed on them by a legislative system that protects bad employers. 

Historically, the high point of union militancy was clearly the 9-day General Strike of 1926. Since then there have been three peaks, two of them involving miners. in 1972, there were 23.9 million strike days due mainly to a strike by coal miners; in 1984 the miners were responsible for the best part of 27.1 million strike days. Sandwiched in between was the so-called “winter of discontent” which helped bring down a Labour Government who ‘in place of strife’ helped give us Thatcherism, but presided over 29.5 million strike days. These high points are each preceded by Governments who tried (and mostly succeeded) to tilt the balance of class relations in favour of employers. For those who think any Labour government is better than a Tory one heed the lesson. Labour governments have been just as hostile to workers rights as Tory ones.

I am aware that many of those reading this are not in workplaces currently, either through retirement or unemployment. For those outside of the workforce it may seem that placing the emphasis on organised labour as the best route to socialist consciousness removes their own agency. But, it is important that unemployed workers are also organised (in a future blog post I will talk about the National Union of Unemployed Workers) so that it is not easy to use the under employed to undermine the wages and conditions of the employed. For those of us outside the workforce it is important to support the struggles inside the workplace by supporting those who take action. And, whilst the primary conflict in a capitalist economy is in the workplace this does not mean that other struggles, particularly against racism and the destruction of the planet, are unimportant. On their own these struggles do not challenge capital at its core but they provide fertile ground for discussing socialist ideas.

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