The Birth of Bureaucracy

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WHEN trade union members struggle for better conditions or decent wages, they often face vicious and reactionary employers, and nearly always hostility from the press and mass media. They also frequently confront Government ministers.

But one other influence nearly always stands between the workers and victory. This is the trade union leaders, the fulltime officials who so often hold back the struggle itself, or in one way or another prevent full success.

Why? And how can we defeat these bureaucrats?

The first full-time officials in Britain more than a century ago did not come from the ranks of the poor, but from the 'aristocracy of labour' • They were often said to embody in their own persons the same prosperity that they were supposed to demand for their members.

Many of these early leaders fitted very easily into the political establishment of the time.

'Moderation'

George Howell, one of the first Secretaries of the TUC, was essentially a paid agent of the Liberal Party. His successor Henry Broadhurst was a minor member of one of Gladstone's Governments in the 1880s - the peak of his ambition was a meeting with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. He also received some shares from friendly employers.

As early as the 1870s, meetings of the TUC were feted by 'enlightened' employers and town councils, and praised for their dignified bearing and their 'moderation' As the union movement grew more powerful, the capitalist class took measures to ensure the leaders stayed 'moderate' . John Burnett, a distant predecessor of John Boyd in the leadership of the Engineers, was given the job of setting up what was to beWill Thorne come the present-day Department of Employment.

The process of integrating trade union leaders into the government machine took a big step forward with the First World War. Union leaders were drawn into official administration and given enlarged possibilities for recruitment in return for ensuring labour's cooperation in the war effort.

By the 1920s, no Government inquiry, no local administrative body, was quite complete without a 'workers' representative' who received his expenses and was helped to see the other side that there always is to every question.

In World War 2, again, there was another big push for closer links between the union machinery and the state machinery Craft The early unions were mostly craft unions of better off workers. In the great general and industrial unions, most of which got going in their modern form round the time of the First World War, the full-time officials sometimes had built the organisations up from nothing, and often began with radical or even revolutionary ideas.

Many of the main leaders of this period served an apprenticeship as fighters.

Thus Will Thorne, who built the modern General and Municipal Workers, worked closely with Frederick Engels and with Eleanor Marx. Ernest Bevin, who started in circumstances of the direst poverty, was for a time in the Marxist movement, and then became a leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union.

What was it that transformed Thorne into a weak and ineffective MP and member of the TUC General Council? What made Bevin into a brutal and authoritarian bureaucrat, whose many services to the ruling class were widely acknowledged during the celebration of the centenary of his birth last year?

It was not just that people like these were bought off in some simple way. They started off with the clear aim of building and maintaining powerful organisations. They sometimes had to arbitrate between sections of their members who fought one another instead of the bosses.

They came to see themselves as reflecting the general interests of their organisations in ways that the members themselves might fail to appreciate. They came to support collective bargaining machinery which tied their members to procedures which they were not necessarily prepared to accept.

So it was that massive unions like the Transport and General and the NUR, whose strength helped to improve the conditions of generations of workers, at the same time became remote from those very members. This happened even when their rules and constitutions were on paper quite democratic (and sometimes still remain so).

The big general and industrial unions in particular have created a full-time 'civil service' whose routines and activities have drifted apart from the members, linked to stable organisations and tixed bargaining procedures. The individual official who starts off with radical ideas is quickly absorbed, unless (exceptionally) a clear understanding of and organised participation in Marxist politics prevents this.

Now trade union officials have a standard of living, a life style, and a set of attitudes, that brings them closer to the employers.

Like the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they come to resemble the human beings whose interests they once opposed more closely than the fellow members of the animal kingdom.

One other way in which union officials grow remote from their members is in the possession of knowledge and information not available to the rank and file.

There was a time when the piecework system in some cotton factories was so complicated that General Secretaries of the weavers' unions were appointed by competitive examinations. Nowadays, the great complexities of legal and other regulation of almost all aspects of trade union activity make it very difficult for ordinary union members to keep up with everything, especially when they are not active in the union all the time.

Higher

The trade union official, on the other hand, rises up the rungs of promotion within the trade union machinery, sometimes showing sparks of militancy to retain respect, sometimes having to stand in elections to obtain a higher position.

The official becomes more knowledgeable in confronting employers, and slicker in dealing with the gripes of his/her own members. S/he becomes more and more concerned with industrial peace and with keeping agreements in ways that members may not like.

There revolts every generation against the dead hand of bureaucracy. The syndicalist movement at the beginning of the century argued for greater militancy and for unions covering individual industries, or even all of the working class.

They had great influence among miners, and also among engineers who were prominent in the shop stewards' movement during the First World War.

The defeat of the General Strike in 1926 was followed by a period of the consolidation of the bureaucracy, and national talks with employers under such figures as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine of the TUC. Such discussions culminated in such modern arrangements as the National Economic Development Council, and various 'social contracts' and other agreements to hold back wages.

During the post-war boom, also, there were revolts from the rank and file against the deals organised between management and unions. A new network of 'unofficial' industrial action developed, often quite apart from the established trade union machinery.

The new shop stewards' movements of the post-war years were less influenced by revolutionary ideas than their predecessors, but they were nevertheless powerful and effective, preparing the way for great victories of the trade union movement in the period Since then there has been a series of vicious attacks on rank and file militancy, spearheaded by such employers and Leyland, and continuously supported by such • bureaucrats as Terry Duffy.

This attack has included the victimisation of militants and the erosion of the rights and conditions painfully built over decades.

The stewards' movement has been attacked not only by direct repression but also by the spread downwards of the crumbs from the employers' table.

The 'independence of the stewards has been sapped by free lunches, travel in expensive cars and other minor perks often accepted at first without any dishonourable motive.

The maintenance of the independence of trade union representatives needs a relentless battle.

To secure it is not simply a matter of maintaining the 'purity' of the rank and file, as some would have it, it also involves a necessary confrontation with the bureaucrats.

It is certainly essential to organise the militant rank and file within the unions.

However, the rank and file will not succeed unless it is able to mount a challenge to the bureaucracy.

The bureaucrats under pressure can be forced to fight - and they can be replaced by more principl ed, more accountable leaders.

Challenged

The struggle for democracy in the unions is not lost before it has begun -and without that struggle, the prospects for isolated rank and file battles which seek simply to ignore or by-pass the official union machine are very limited.

The bureaucracy must be challenged by militants who are conscious of the issues at stake, who refuse to be bought off, and who are aiming at serious opposition to the employers.

As Trotsky put it in 1938, we should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to creat in all possible instances independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society..

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"Socialist Organiser no. 69 January 21, 1981 Page 10