[Engineering was first heartland ional Industrial Relations Court…]

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Engineering was first heartland ional Industrial Relations Court ordered the imprisonment of five dockers for defying an injunction under Edward Heath's Industrial Relations Act.

It was the age of Gary Glitter and T. Rex. Donny Osmond was number one with 'Puppy Love'.

Leeds had beaten Arsenal in the FA Cup Final. Roberto had won the Derby and Muhammad Ali's comeback continued as he stopped Al 'Blue' Lewis in eleven rounds in Dublin.

It was also the finest hour of the modern shop stewards' movement. As the dockers were hauled off to Pentonville Jail by the tipstaff the cadre of working class rank and file leaders who had developed through thę long boom went into action. Stewards committees, union branches and trades councils laid plans for emergency meetings.

Group after group of workers came out not 'spontaneously' but because they were given a lead by their stewards. The links were there, the wheels clicked into place:

With 250,000 workers out on strike and the numbers increasing every day, the TUC called a one-day General Strike.

The government and judiciary caved in.

In the hot summer of 1972 the British labour movement had what is most lacking in the unions today: a strong stewards' organisation in the workplace, able to mobilise the membership independently of the top official leaders of the trade unions, A contribution for the discussion at the September 17 'How to fight the Tories conference, on rebuilding shop stewards' organisation.

able to push the union leaders into action by the very strength of that mobilisation and -this is the crucial point - able to mobilise their members, not only on the bread and butter sectional issues of wages and conditions, but on classwide issues, in this case the use of state laws to fetter the The stewards organisations which had developed since the war were the crown jewel of British trade unionism and the hope of socialists.

Shop steward organisation had serious weaknesses and limited political horizons. 1972 was the high point, never attained again. It is only in the limited sense of a shared set of understandings, an awareness of the necessity for links with other workers, a striving to build those links, that we can talk of a movement, Today we are faced with the need to re construct rank and file organisation within the workplaces and across industry. We need to start with the memory of Pentonville but go far beyond it. We need to build on a new political basis. To do that we need to assess our experience of shop floor organisation in the past. heartland of strong workplace organisation.

The formal system in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was for the union outside the workplace to lay down rules and custom.

If employers did not accept the conditions the union laid down society men shouldn't work there. But this system was always supplemented by informal bargaining within the shop. Given the control craftsmen had over thier job a whole range of custom and practice flourished and district committees began to appoint delegates within the workplace.

From the 1880s the development of new technology - the introduction of capstan and turret lathes, machine grinders, ¿he radial arm drill, all capable of being operated by the semi-skilled - undermined the position of the time served craft worker.

With increasing international competition from Germany and the USA in the period to 1914 the employers pressed for drastic changes in the organisation of work. They attempted to weaken the unions, the barrier to putting less skilled workers on the machines at lower rates and to introducing piecework.

Bargaining

" Disputes over these issues gave stewards a greater bargaining role. Stewards received a further fillip from the 1897 agreement which broke the closed shop, lifted restrictions on overtime and the number of apprentices and brought in payment by results with job prices to be fixed in the shop.

That was where the locus of activity shifted. The District Committee could no longer uphold the craft rules. In strong workplaces the stewards could.

The introduction of new tools and the growth of management techniques led to numerous disputes over discipline. The piecework system provided a negotiating role over money for stewards.

So in the years to 1914 the shop stewards system developed as a means of workplace negotiation and as the guardian of job controls.

These developments were not limited to the ASE. Tom Bell of the Scottish Ironmoulders recalled that in the West of Scotland in the early years of the century, 'Every foundry had a shop steward. Within three hours of starting a job your card was collected.

Nor were stewards limited to the skilled unions. As early as 1872 the functions of stewards in the Tyneside and National Labourers Union were extended from recruitment and collection to negotiation. In the upsurge of the new unionism after 1889 the National Amalgamated Union of Labour specifically provided for stewards.

Tom 'Bell's judgement was true of many unions: 'the shop steward was an integral part of the trade union machinery especially to the engineers prior to the war. Most unions had their delegates on the job or in the shop for the collection of contributions checking up on defaulting members for reporting changes in the condition of work and as a link between the union branch and the work' In engineering, stewards had a greater negotiating role. Committees were established. GDH Cole describes stewards - all those years ago - being given an office, access to all departments and full facilities for negotiation with the rate fixers. •Not only was workers organisation at the point of production a tremendous gain. It was soon asserting its independence from the bureaucratized full-time offi cials.

The years before 1914 saw a tremendous struggle in the ASE between a leadership attempting to impose central negotiating and the Districts attempting to maintain local autonomy. This led in 1912 to a Delegate Conference which insisted the resignation of the Executive. When they refused to go the delegates tunnelled their way into the union headquarters and physically turned them out.

The militancy of the 'Great Unrest' saw the establishment of rank and file vigilance committees in many unions. Many of the emerging shop stewards were attracted to the socialist organisations, the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party.

The outbreak of war: in 1914 intensified many of these tendencies. A conference of trade union executives agreed with the governmen 'there shall in no case be a stoppage of work upon munition and equipment of war or other work required for a satisfactory completion of the war' . This Treasury agreement was given legal force by the passing of the Munitions Act which also provided for prosecution of workers.

With the union leaders Dow a part of the machinery of state, the rank and file filled the gap. With more time full employment they possessed the capability to defend themselves independently of their leaders. New issues in the workshops - crucially the dilution of skilled trades by employment of less skilled workers - gave a further boost to the development of stewards Continued

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soared. The story of the Minority As the Sheffield stewards Movement is a big subject leaders, J.T.Murphy said, and deserves to be told in in 1922, 'In England we have detail, elsewhere. At its foundhad a powerful shop stewards ation it grouped together removement. But it can and presentative of 200,000 workers only does exist in given ob- and the depression the Minority jective conditions. These Movement did not concentrate necessary conditions at the purely on the 'little things' moment in England do not on factory issues but not concenexist. How can you build fac- on the democratization of the tory organisations in empty union and the TUC and the and depleted workshops while forgoing of links with workers 70p (plus 16p p&p) from WSL, PO Box on a basis which spread the workshop.

The Clyde Workers Committee gave the first formal declaration of independence of the rank and file which was to be the first plank of the movement. 'We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers. But we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of delegates from every shop and untramelled by obsolete rule or law we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file' The constitution of the committee outlined its aims as:

a) To obtain increasing control over workshop conditions;

b) To regulate the terms upon which the workers shall be employed;

c) To organise the workers upon a class basis and to maintain the class struggle until the overthrow of the wages system and the establishment of industrial democracy has been obtained.' 250-300 delegates met each weekend. There were delegates from engineering, shipbuilding, the miners, railways and shops. But many represented militant minorities rather than fully fledged workplace organisation. The crunch came over the key issue of dilution. Despite the socialism of the leadership they failed to put forward a class policy which could unite skilled and unskilled workers and point a way forward by arguing that the upgrading of the unskilled should be under the control of workplace committees and that all workers should receive the skilled rate. Instead, they argued that they would only accept dilution if all industries and national resources were taken over by the government under a system of joint management with the unions. This was a pie in the sky 'socialism now' approach.

Special issue on struggle in the unions: also contains articles on workers' politics and national liberation, and the Stalinist state 'unions' 135, London N1 ODD The government realised the need to remove the committee and adopted a stickand carrot approach. Half a dozen plants were selected and dilution implemented in each. When the government could point out that it was in and working smoothly they moved to crack the tougher nuts.

Kirkwood, convenor of the Parkhead Forge was forbidden to move to other sections in the workplace. The members struck. But they had been isolated. Kirkwood and eight other CWC leaders were arrested and deported from Clydeside and opposition to dilution collapsed.

'The Clydeside Committee had failed to build bridges to the rest of the industry -and to the unskilled.

The centre of struggle shifted to Sheffield. Here the principle of dilution had been accepted but negotiation over its implementation had stimulated workplace -10 ganisation. In Sheffield the majority - of District Committee members were stewards, there was greater co-ordination between craft organisations than on the Clyde and closer links with the unskilled. In October 1916 Hargreaves a local fitter - supposedly exempt, was conscripted.

A mass meeting launched the Sheffield workers committee which gave 7 days notice of strike action if Hargreaves was not released. 12,000 workers struck. A few hours later, Hargreaves was released. But the workers refused to return until he was presented to a mass meeting 2 days later. This success spurred further action.

The number of stewards in the Sheffield District rose from 60 to 300. The committee was expanded to include the unskilled. The idea was that the District Stewards Committee should stimulate workshop committees covering all grades and a national committee.

A national stewards meeting Advertisement OR WE was to be held at Easter 1917, but in March a strike broke out when a Rochdale firm sacked 500 engineers for refusing to train women transferred, from shell production to commercial work. 200,000 workers struck in Lancashire, Sheffield and Coventry.

The government tried to crush the movement as it had on the Clyde by arresting eight of its leaders. In response one hundred delegates from 34 different districts met for three days and set up a national shop stewards leadership. After negotiations the arrested men were freed pending trial and the strikes petered out.

Shop war Now the impact of the Russian Revolution, war-weariness, peace propaganda and severe tood shortages al lea to a growing working class opposition questioning the continuance of the war itself.

This mood found a focus when at the start of 1918 the government introduced the Military Service Bill to take men from the munitions factories to the trenches. The National Conference of the shop stewards movement, meeting on January 5 and 6, 1918, decided to sound out the feeling in the districts. The conference recommended strike action against the Bill and called on the government to consider peace terms. Clyde, Barrow, Coventry and London supported the call but crucial districts such as Sheffield and Manchester who had tested workshop opinion said, They were opposed to strike action against the war' The movement drew back from a confrontation with the state into a sectional demand for exemption for the skilled.

Despite its involvement in the 40 hours strike on Clyde in 1919 the stewards movement never recovered the initiative and disintegrated with the collapse of war production and full employment.

The shop stewards movement contained two elements: a militancy by privileged workers to defend their threatened position and, within that, strains of opposition to the trade union tops, the war and the state.

In the end the former tendency won out.

None the less, the movement was important in popularising and illustrating key ideas which were to remain vital as a bequest to future generations; the idea of a movement;, of. • powerful organisation at the point of production, where the workers are strongest; and, going beyond this, an organisation to link workplaces at local and national level and establish an independent bulwark directly answerable to the workers against the official union leaders who tended to be incorporated by and the state.

Where they were weakest was in sometimes believing that a small but key section of workers could take successful action by themselves; in their neglect of work within the wider union; and in their lack of examination of wider political problems. They never solved the key problem of how socialists could establish a bridge, both organisationally and ideologically, between day to day militant trade unionism and the problem of removing the exploiting class from power.

In a limited way the British shop stewards had developed one essential of a socialist approach, the idea of workers councils. What they lacked was an understanding of the need for a political party which could mesh with and develop further the rank and file movement and prepare the way for the conquest of power.

Many of the leading shop stewards were now to take that struggle further by joining the new Communist Party.

At the workplace level itself, the war-time experience represented a development. As Cole points out, 'while the number of stewards was thus rapidly increasing throughout practically the whole range of the munitions industries, their positions and duties were also rapidly transformed. The wartime steward became, to a large extent, a negotiator on workshop greviance, a representative of the workers by whom he was appointed in dealing with the foreman and with management over all manner of workshop problems...

More and more the stewaras undertook these daily problems of workshop administration calling in the union official only when they were unable aptas ment by formal or informa negotiation... It became more and more necessary for all the stewards to act in regular cooperation and to devise a common organisation within each department and for each stablishment as a whole.

Develop

Consequently, shop stewards committees, workshop commitrees and works committees all alike based on the shop stewards system began to develop on a considerable scale...

Usually the stewards in a particular shop appointed from their number a secretary or convenor who had power to 'call meetings of all the stewards... In the large establishment consisting of a number of considerable shops or departments... an inclusive body was often constituted to represent the trade unionists in the works as a whole. Sometimes the convenors from each of the shops were appointed usually by a meeting of all the stewards in the establishment to form a works committee' • (GDH Cole, Workshop Organisation).

In 1920 an agreement with the Engineering Employers Federation gave shop stewards formal recognition and a place in procedure. But this system with its close parallels in present stewara organisatIvu WOo ITALLIULAUJ aurannicatina tuad short lived as unemployment ence). you have a great res of unemployed workers' Unemployment was 27% in engineering in 1921. After the employers victorious lockout in 1922 the AEU, as now was, had lost a quarter of its 1920 membership.

In industry generally. the erosion of shop floor strength led to dependence on national collective bargaining and the official union leaders were back in the saddle.

The shop stewards leaders were ruthlessly victimised. As early as 1920 Arthur Gleason wrote, "The unofficial shop stewards movement is at ebb tide because of the percentage of the unemployed in the metal trades. the man at the gate determines the statue nf the man at the hench ' VAAN MURITAL.

It was precisely during this down-turn that Communist Party militants were able to take up and transform the earlier traditions of rank and fileism. They provided in the Minority Movement, which they sponsored, the clearest programme yet developed for an organisation within the unions which can act as a bridge from the trade union organisation of today to the working class organisation of tomorrow.

Founded in August 1924 the programme of the movement began with demands for improvements in hours and wages, the spread of trade unionism, the democratisation of the union and the building of factory committees. It then went on to place demands which would stem from struggle over these issues on the future Labour Government. It stated clearly the necessity for the removal of the capitalist system, constantly warning that the question of Government was vital (a warning that might be observe by today's neosyndicalists such as the SWP).

This is not a question outside trade unionism by the central question for trade unionism on every side it is realised that trade unionism is not enough and that only a workers government can solve these problems (report of First Minnritv Movement. Confi economic ervoir in other countries.

But the Minority Movement was soon derailed by the defeat in the General Strike and the degeneration of the Communist Party. For reasons of Russian foreign policy tha CP in the mid-20s got too close to those who sold out the General Strike then, from 1928 to 34 it tried to build its own sectarian trade unions, ducking out of the mass movement.

From the beginning of the Minority Movement we can learn that it is possible to organise the hardest militants together even when the economic tide is firmly antagonistic.

That it is essential to do this on a firm political basis and that it is essential to give such a grouping trade union wide, class wide and international perspectives.

The re-emergence of shop steward organisation from the middle thirties as the economy picked up has grim lessons for Thatcher today. Far from producing a lasting change in attitudes the beating that they had taken produced in trade unionists a vociferous determination to take advantage of the new economic conditions.

The story will put the present triais and tribulations of the shop stewards movement into its proper historical perspective.

From the mid thirties there was a renewal of shop steward activity. AEU Districts showed a large increase in the number

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NUPE SAYS UP, SUPPORT YOU nt (cont'd)

NUPE recognised shop stewards for the first time in 1970 accredited shop stewards stewards movement. icas mass meeting accredited rom 1934.

But - and here is another ital lesson for us today -be real force for the renewal ame from the ability to imLant trade union organisaon in' the 'new' industries ach as vehicles and aircraft roduction and from the unhilled. These were often oranised by the left, as in the irike which organised the ress Steel Fisher Oxford ir the TGWU in 1934 (the AEU eclared the strike unconstitional). By 1938 there were D TGWU stewards in the tory and two and a half ousand members.

Forefront The roots of renewed confience could also be seen in ie other industries, in the andon Busmens rank and file lovement, and in the Rank id File activity on the railays. In the forefront of the turn were the engineering prentices who were involved two waves of strikes during stewards movement. This in turn established the Aircraft Shop Stewards National Council with its own paper, New Propellor. The flames were rekindled. What was done in the 30s provided a platform for a new take-off when war commenced.

Unce more trade union leaders were restored to the corridors of power they had vacated in the '20s.

With the trade unions' archbureaucrat, Ernest Bevin, at the Ministry of Labour for the Churchill/Attlee Coalition government, the trade union leaders were even more thoroughly inte grated into the state in World War 2 than they had been between 1914 and 1918.

Anti-strike legislation (Order 1305) was introduced. Employers immediately took advantage of the situation to victimise shop stewards, and there were numerous strikes over this issue. In 1941 the Essential Works Order gave some protection to jobs. Offensive strikes began.

The great majority of workers supported the war, but there WORKERS Shop meetings and reportbacks were regular and central to maintaining roots in the membership. Most stewards, given the personal and social as well as industrial nature of their members' problems during wartime, developed a close rapport with them.

Factory bulletins and newspapers had a tremendous flowering in this period. Combine committees provided organisation outside the plant in firms such as A V Roe, Daimler, Dunlop and Vickers Armstrong.

As the war ended, employers attempted to take back many of these gains. In many factories there were redundancies. Another parallel with today: some stewards committees attempted to respond to redundancies with plans for alternative production.

The movement of 1918 bad not been recaptured, still less the aspirations of the Minority Movement.

The war had ensured that shop stewards representing In what was called 'wage drift', increases at the local level outstripped the national agreements which continued in the post-war period.

Shop stewards gained some autonomy both from the union and from higher management. As national agreements were increasingly irrelevant, so was the outside structure the union.

• Publicity Joint committees of stewards with strong support from the membership were able to establish their own funds, produce: their own publicity, and link up across plants.

'Our evidence is that more than two-thirds of shop stewards have at their place of work a committee in which they meet with management to discuss and settle problems, and that two-thirds of these committees are multi-union. Where that is so, the committees are not easily made responsible to a trade union authority outside the unent factory" (Donovan report).

"In effect the shop steward organisation at Ford was thus involved in an attempt to establish standards for the rest of labour informally on a 'custom and practice' basis and in the face of disapproval of top management - even if it met with frequent concesion from lower level supervision" (Turner, Clack and Roberts, 'Labour Relations in the Motor Industry').

"In short, it appears to me in the light of the undisputed facts disclosed in this inquiry that there is a private union within a union enjoying immediate and continuous touch with the men in the shop, answerable to no superiors and in no way officially or constitutionally linked with the union hierarchy" (Report of court of inquiry into dispute at Briggs Motor Bodies Ltd, 1957).

Union officialdom, employers, and the state were alike hostile to strong independent workplace organisation. Lord Carron, president of the AEU, said of shop stewards in 1960:

•'These men are werewolves who are rushing madly towaids industrial ruin and howling delightedly at the foam on their muzzles which they accept as their only guiding light"

A 1960 TUC report on shop stewards showed the same attitude less graphically. "Unions should be more vigilant, and if after a warning a steward repeats actions contrary to rules and agreements, his credentials (which are his opportunities to do good or in a few cases to do harm) should be withdrawn".

In the same year, a TUC general council member denounced combine committees as 'a challenge to established - union arrangements' attempting to 'usurp the policy-making functions of unions' Sometimes _ as at Ford in 1962 - management were able to push through a hard line and weaken shop floor organisation, demonstrating the inadequacies of sectionalism. More often they successfully accommodated the. stewards' challenge.

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