Inıdasıtrval Spereual The birth of the shop stewards' movement (continued)

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Join the ORGANISER Party ORGANISER tumt Scargill gets it right Inside By Harry WAGE-CUT PLAN |Hefter By the mid '60s; however, with the UK's economic situation getting worse, 'disorder' in industrial relations was increasingly seen as a key obstacle to the preferred solution - wage-cutting through incomes policy.

Attention focused on the steward, notably in the Donovan report.

Donovan pointed out that 'for the most part the steward is viewed by others and views himself as an accepted, reasonable, and even moderating influence, more of a lubricant than an irritant"

Their strategy was to strengthen this side of the steward's role. Employers and unions should work together, the report argued, 'To recognise, define and control the part played by shop stewards in our collective bargaining system"

Shop floor organisation was inevitable - and it could be helpful. The point was to control and influence it.

The steward could be civilised and drawn away from his or her members by the creation of written agreements, to codify and pin down 'custom and practice' which the stewards would then have to enforce. The replacement of piecework by measured time systems, work study, and job evaluation, could undermine the power of the section steward and formalise and rationalise the link between work and payment.

Written procedures would legitimise management's decisions because they had been taken after discussion and negotiation. They would draw the steward into more 'rational' argument, and also pull bargaining up from the machine row to the committee roum.

Formalised bargaining at plant or company level would lead to a centralisation of power at committee level and a loss of power at section level. The development of full-time stewards; the management-run closed shop with deduction of dues at source; the extension of facilities for stewards; time off for training in industrial relations -these would encourage more 'rational' behaviour, and distance the stewards from their membership.

Incorporate By the end of the '60s trade union leaders, too, had replaced their earlier hostility to workplace organisation by an attempt to incorporate it.

Jack Jones, on becoming TGWU general secretary, declared support for "a system where not a few trade union officials control the situation but a dedicated, well-trained and intelligent body of trade union members is represented by hundreds of thousands of lay representatives"

The election of Hugh Scanlon as president of the AUEW further symbolised a takeover by a generation who believed in the Join the Socialist Labour Fight the shop steward system, from those nurtured in pre-war defeats.

Even the GMWU leadership came to terms with decentralisation - shocked by its loss of members to the TGWU in Ford, and by the revolt of its members against the union in the 1970 Pilkington strike, when strikers tried to set up a breakaway union. National and regional industrial conferences to involve workplace representatives were introduced in 1969, and a majority of lay representation on the Executive provided for by 1975.

The union leaders were, of course, not trying to strengthen the stewards. They were trying to neuter and integrate them. A more controlled steward system means a less controlled, more powerful union leadership.

The shake-up in industrial relations, the 15 years of incomes policy under both Labour and Tory governments from 1964 to 1979, and the large-scale increases in union membership -all led to a further increase in the number of stewards, to their progress into new areas, and to changes in their organisation.

In 1973 the Commission on Industrial Relations claimed that 'there were well in excess of 250,000, and perhaps approach300,000, shop stewards. in 1971' One study in Sheffield found that the introductión of productivity bargaining in 1968-9 doubled the number of stewards on the Engineering District list.

But the main developments were in the public sector. In the late '60s authorities began introturing 62% of all workplaces employing more than 500 workers had full-time convenors. In engineering the figure was 69%, and in the public sector 21%.

Clegg estimates that there were 10,000 full-time stewards in 1973.

Increasingly, decisions were taken not by the individual stewards and their members on a section, or by a group of stewards in a department, b It by senior, often full-time, ste wards and the stewards' commit ¡ee at the level of the workplace — or even of the company.

• Full-time Full-time stewards often hold no sectional responsibilities, and no longer share to the same degree the insecurities and work experience of their members.

Involvement in higher union bodies and participation schemes meant that life became one long round of meetings and courses, with perks attached. This was likely to estrange them from, and weaken, workplace organisation.

Some observers saw the success of Labour's Social Contract (1974-5) in its ability to secure growing control of the official unions over workplace organisation. While union leaders were involved in the Social Contract at round the union leaders (or force them reluctantly to trail behind) reinforced the limitations of the workplace leaders' political tradition, to ensure that no adequate alternative political leadership was thrown up. They never felt the need for it, and unlike the '20s there was no strong revolutionary party able to win the key layer of stewards to consistent revolutionary politics.

As issues arose the activists turned not to trying to control the Labour Party, or to supporting a new party, but to industrial means, to direct action, alone. Despite the efforts of revolutionary groups, no viable, even embryonic, rank and file organisation, not even a small-scale pallid reflection of the Minority Movement, was established.

It was the ability of the state and the employers to use these crucial political weaknesses against the rank and file leaders which was in the end to undermine their basic strength.

By the late '70s, it had become clear that militancy within normal bounds, plus Labour voting according to tradition, could produce no more than Wilson attacking the unions instead of Heath. As it became clear that the economic situation in the late "70s really was worse than MÁCHIN 1972: printworkers rally support dockers wise, their arguments were not strong enough to carry their members with them and stop the official leadership going with Wilson.

The election of the Thatcher government opened up the use of mass unemployment to undermine shop floor strength.

Building on the work of Wilson and Callaghan, the bosses have victimised steward after steward, pushed back or intimidated one workplace organisation after another.

We have to provide the answers. We have to provide them urgently.

We must base ourselves on, and learn the lessons from, the hopeful signs amid the general retreat: on the recent victories of the Michelin and Greenings workers; on the ability of the NGA workers at the Financial Times to resist the TUC and come away with f17 more than the General Council wanted them to accept; on the resistance of the Ford workers over the Paul Kelly sacking, and the Leyland workers over washingup; in short, on the minority of workers across industry who are prepared to fight.

We have shop stewards in more workplaces than ever before. We have got to get them

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