Trade Unions and the State
The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890-2000By Chris Howell
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13040-8
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION: THE PUZZLE OF BRITISH INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
So though I'm a working man I can ruin the government's plan Though I'm not too hard The sight of my card Makes me some kind of superman.
Oh you don't get me I'm part of the union You don't get me I'm part of the union You don't get me I'm part of the union Till the day I die, till the day I die.
THIS BOOK BEGINS with a puzzle. Why did the British labor movement so quickly succumb to the radical reforming efforts of Conservative governments elected after 1979? This was a labor movement at the peak of its power and influence in 1979, when more than half of all British employees belonged to unions and more than four-fifths were covered by collective pay-setting mechanisms. Trade union power was widely acknowledged to be immune to state reform efforts because it was embedded in decentralized workplace institutions, rather than being dependent upon a favorable framework of labor law, and the British labor movement had only recently successfully turned back two major government efforts to limit its power. Such reform efforts were more likely to lead to the downfall of governments than to any decline in trade union strength. And yet, twenty years later, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, trade union density has almost halved; the extent of collective bargaining coverage and the numbers of strikes have collapsed to the lowest levels since the 1920s (or even earlier); where trade unionism exists, it is of a weaker, more marginal form, consulted more often than negotiated with; and various forms of individualized industrial relations have come to dominate the landscape of the British economy. It should be said that so unexpected and rapid was British trade union decline that it went largely unnoticed and unacknowledged among academics until the early 1990s, when evidence from workplace surveys confirmed the transformation of the British industrial relations system.
To put the question that first set the research agenda for this book in a somewhat different way, why was Thatcherism, which enjoyed much more mixed results in economic and social policy, so strikingly successful in the realm of industrial relations? In searching for an answer to this question, and exploring the puzzle of how a once powerful labor movement went into what may well be terminal decline, this book offers a reinterpretation of more than a century of British industrial relations developments, and constructs an argument about the centrality of state action in the establishment, maintenance, and reconstruction of industrial relations institutions. The importance of the British state's role has been its institution-building capacity rather than regulation or repression, and both the timing and the form of state action are intelligible in terms of shifts in the underlying patterns of British economic growth. I argue that, contrary to most scholarship, the state has played a central role in the construction of industrial relations institutions in Britain in the last hundred years or so, and that one can identify three distinct industrial relations systems, the first lasting from the early part of the twentieth century until the end of the 1950s, the second lasting a scant two decades before collapsing in the mid-1980s, and the third now firmly in place. For all the variations across industries, and idiosyncratic elements of industrial relations practice, each system formed a more or less coherent approach to the regulation of relations between business and labor, and each evolved in response to economic restructuring. Industrial relations institutions came under severe pressure as the basic structure of the economy changed, and the state, far from being abstentionist, played a crucial role in the construction of new institutions to manage, or regulate, class relations. How the state intervened, in turn, had important implications for the ideology, organization, and practice of British trade unions. It is the legacy of this crucial state role over more than a century, I argue, that explains why British trade unionism was so vulnerable to Thatcherism.
The focus of this book is Britain, but the argument that it makes has much broader theoretical and empirical applicability. The next chapter intervenes in the theoretical debate concerning institution-building, arguing first that institutional theory needs to pay more attention to moments of crisis and disjuncture, second that economic patterning and class conflict are key triggers of institutional change, and third that states have particular capacities unavailable to private actors, among them a privileged role in the narration of crises, and the ability to solve collective action problems. As such, the theory of institutional change offered in the next chapter anticipates both more dramatic breaks in institutional development and greater synchronicity in institutional developments across the political economies of advanced capitalist societies, along with a more central and distinctive role for states in institutional construction, than the main alternative theoretical approaches.
Furthermore, at an empirical level, I argue that Britain constitutes a critical case for any argument about the role of the state in institutional development. It has long anchored one end of the spectrum of state intervention in industrial relations. In contrast to accounts of industrial relations development in France or the United States, for example, which have tended to emphasize important roles for their respective states, state abstentionism in industrial relations, and a concomitant emphasis on "voluntarism" on the part of private industrial actors, was the defining feature of accounts of British industrial relations until at least the end of the 1960s. If it can be argued, as this book does, that the British state has in fact been a central actor in the construction, maintenance, and reconstruction of industrial relations institutions for over a hundred years, this suggests that, at least in the realm of industrial relations, accounts of institutional construction cannot afford to sideline the importance of state action anywhere.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN BRITISH POLITICS AND SOCIETY
In no other capitalist democracy has "the labour question" been as enduringly central to politics and political economy as in Britain. The British Labour Party, famously born out "of the bowels" of the trade union movement, retained a tight institutional and organizational connection with the labor movement from the time of its creation until the middle of the 1990s, and even now the party constitution reserves an important role for unions; despite a persistent undercurrent of conflict, even Tony Blair's New Labour government has not yet attempted to sever the constitutional cord linking party and unions. The closeness of the party-union linkage has meant that party politics has been inextricably linked to industrial relations and the manner in which the labor movement is integrated into the British political economy. Every attempt to renegotiate the role of labor and the form of industrial relations has caused political tremors.
Concern over the labor question, though, goes well beyond party politics and the linkage between the Labour Party and the trade union movement. Well before the labor interest was represented in Parliament there were periodic bouts of middle-class panic in response to industrial conflict, and as British economic dominance gave way to the long drawn-out agony of economic decline, one of the most persistent themes has been trade union responsibility for economic failure. One can read explanations of British economic problems in the Economist magazine or the Times of London in the 1890s and the 1970s and find almost identical passages in both periods identifying restrictive work rules, resistance to technological innovation, and poor work habits as the source of those problems. Only the inclusion of delightful terms such as "ca'-canny" (the deliberate practice of "going slow" at work and limiting output on the part of workers) in the earlier period serves to date these accounts.
Political and public concern over economic decline and the labor movement's responsibility for that decline reached its apogee in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain. Industrial relations reform became a central part of the agenda of successive governments, and a plausible case can be made that industrial conflict and trade union resistance to those reform efforts brought down two governments: Edward Heath's 1970-74 Conservative government, following the stillbirth of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act and the mine workers' strike, which made Arthur Scargill a household name; and James Callaghan's Labour government, which collapsed in 1979 after an extended experiment with incomes policies resulted in a wave of strikes known collectively as the Winter of Discontent. These events had a profound political impact, launching Margaret Thatcher's leadership of the Conservative Party, contributing to that party's embrace of neoliberalism and radical industrial relations reform, and leading to the process of "modernizing" the Labour Party, which eventually led it to embrace "Third Way" policies and Tony Blair as its leader.
The argument here is not that the British labor movement necessarily bears responsibility for the charges that have been repeatedly brought against it; debate over the source of economic decline has been perhaps Britain's only consistent growth industry. There is a strong case to be made that trade unions were as much the victims of decline as its cause, and that industrial militancy was more symptom of economic failure than cause. From the perspective of more than a century of debate, Britain's economic decline appears overdetermined. This is not, in any case, a debate that I wish to enter into in this book.
The point, rather, is the importance that public debates concerning industrial relations have played in British politics and society for more than a century. Regardless of the reality of trade union power, it became a central cultural trope, reappearing every time the level of industrial conflict became elevated or concern about economic decline heightened. Again, the two decades from the end of the 1950s until the end of the 1970s serve as the best indicator of the wider cultural impact of perceptions of industrial relations crisis. Two examples may illustrate the point. In 1959 Peter Sellers starred in the enormously popular film I'm All Right Jack, as a dour trade union shop steward, contemplating a small portrait of Lenin on his mantelpiece at home, and seeking to limit output and encourage militancy at work. Ian Carmichael played an employee whose efforts to work hard and ignore restrictive practices were constantly thwarted by the Sellers character. The film won several British film awards. My first exposure to the cultural importance of British industrial relations came in 1973, when I was eleven and the Strawbs reached number two in the British pop charts with the song "Part of the Union." The song ended with the verse and refrain that begin this chapter, and it captured well the apparent power and influence of trade unions in Britain in the 1970s. Little wonder then that public debate over industrial relations reform has been so central to British politics. The story of the institutional development of industrial relations is an inseparable part of the wider trajectory of British politics and political economy in the twentieth century. An examination of the reform of industrial relations over this long period opens a remarkable window into the process by which political-economic institutions are first constructed, then maintained, and eventually transformed in capitalist societies.
THATCHERISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Why was the rapid transformation of the British system of industrial relations in the period after 1979 so unexpected, posing substantial problems of explanation for scholars? After all, Britain's centralized Westminster system of politics places few political obstacles in the way of government reform efforts, and there is no question but that "taming the trade unions" was a core goal of Thatcherite Conservatism. The reason this constitutes a puzzle lies in the manner in which the power of the labor movement had tended to be explained prior to the 1980s, and in particular, the role accorded the British state in the construction of industrial relations institutions.
Almost thirty years ago, John Goldthorpe launched a devastating critique of the dominant diagnoses of the crisis of British industrial relations and prescriptions for reform. In the early 1970s two main versions of reformism, "liberal-pluralist" and "Tory reformism," emerged in response to the problems widely considered to be afflicting British industrial relations: a high strike rate, inflexible and restrictive labor practices, and uncontrolled labor costs. Liberal-pluralist reformism, which was intellectually dominant at that point, argued that these problems reflected a widespread "disorder" or "anomie" in the industrial relations system, and recommended efforts to institutionalize formal collective bargaining in the workplace and reassert both managerial and union authority through education and persuasion (see chapter 4 for an account of those efforts). Tory reformism, to which Goldthorpe devoted much less attention, on the grounds that it had been tried and found wanting, shared much of the liberal-pluralist diagnosis but identified trade union power as a prime culprit and prescribed legislation and sanctions to prevent the "abuse" of union power.
Goldthorpe, from the perspective of radical sociology, argued that reformers failed to recognize that the problems of British industrial relations were symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the balance of class power in the postwar period, in favor of labor, which had created something akin to an industrial relations stalemate. As a result, reformism both misdiagnosed the problem and promoted utopian solutions. Goldthorpe ended his critique thus: "Indeed, the further, more radical, conclusion may be suggested that at the present time British industrial relations are simply not in any far-reaching way reformable." Goldthorpe was not alone. By the mid-1970s it was common, among academics, politicians, and political commentators, to argue that Britain was becoming "ungovernable," in large part because of the power of a deeply implanted labor movement that was autonomous of, and therefore immune to, state power. As we will see later in this chapter, postwar industrial relations scholars constructed a highly sophisticated theoretical edifice to explain British industrial relations, one that rested on the notion of a largely abstentionist state and a decentralized workplace trade unionism, and that identified few sharp breaks in the institutional trajectory of industrial relations, and certainly no leading role for the state during periods of institutional transformation.
Yet a quarter century on, one can plausibly argue that British industrial relations have undergone massive reform, and in the process many of the problems of most concern to employers have disappeared. Most interestingly, and unexpectedly, the nature of this reform of industrial relations has not been of the liberal-pluralist variety but rather Tory reformism, in the form of the Thatcherite class project of using state power to restrict the actions of trade unions, limit collective bargaining, and free the hands of managers to organize the workplace as they wish. The state has not been as powerless as, and the labor movement has been more fragile than, anyone would have expected three decades ago. This requires a reinterpretation of British industrial relations.
It is worth stepping back a moment to explain in terms of intellectual autobiography why I have come to argue that understanding Thatcherism's impact on industrial relations requires a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of a century of British institutional development in this sphere. Prior to turning to the study of British industrial relations, I worked on France, which boasted a notoriously weak and excluded labor movement and an archetypal strong state whose central role in the regulation of industrial relations was well known. I then became involved in a collaborative comparative project surveying the fate of trade unionism in Western Europe in the period after the second oil shock; within this project, my responsibility was Britain. I had expected a striking contrast between Britain and France given the long-standing dominant interpretations of British industrial relations; in many ways the respective labor movement strength and state role in industrial relations in the two countries ought to have been mirror images of each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trade Unions and the Stateby Chris Howell Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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