Trade Unions and States

Abstract

Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000 by Howell, Chris . Princeton University Press , Princeton, NJ , 2005 , xi + 243 pp., ISBN 0 691 12106 0 , £26.95 That the history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century was a story of hubris would be widely accepted; but in this detailed, highly scholarly historical account of the case, Chris Howell proposes an original and far from widely accepted key component of that hubris. While the unions, their opponents and most academic observers have considered that the classic British system was a voluntarist one, Howell argues that union strength was always dependent on support from the state. When, by the end of the 1970s, the state withdrew that support from both unions and the institutions of collective bargaining, the apparently autonomous and resilient edifice of union power collapsed easily. Howell's account is thoroughly convincing and signals a need to reconsider much more in the history of British industrial relations, and indeed of British society. Is this a country in which civil society is so strong that it can procure its collective goods through the autonomous actions of its citizens without much action by government? Or is it one that just tries to get by with a minimum of collective goods? The author offers the following periodization of his terrain: 1890–1940, the construction of the collective laissez faire system; 1940–1979, dissension and the decentralization of industrial relations; and 1979–1997, decollectivization. The trap of the hubris is set during the second, essentially unstable period, being finally sprung early in the third. During the first period, the basic framework was established of a system that brought a degree of order and industrial relations stability to an economy that was highly fragmented, with disorganized, medium-sized firms and a highly divided workforce. It was during this period that governments more or less consistently perceived the need for some institution construction to avoid chaos and disorder. British capital, dominated as it was by the financial sector on one side and a fragmented set of manufacturing industries on another, was unable to solve its own collective action problem of establishing an order from which it would itself benefit, so government acted. Central to Howell's highly convincing account is the idea of the state simultaneously supporting and constraining the power of employers by nudging and prodding them towards collective industrial relations arrangements. Employers were being reluctantly constitutionalized in their relations with the collectivities of their employees, just as the state itself had been constitutionalized in its relations with its collective public. Because the liberal British state proceeded by nudging and prodding rather than by the elaboration of formal structures of rights and duties, unions came to believe that they had brought employers to the construction of these institutions by their own strength. They failed to notice that they gradually became dependent on government encouragement of employers' associations, on whom the unions relied in turn more or less to recruit their members for them and enforce agreements. And they came to prefer the acquisition of immunities from the free trade logic of common law to the gaining of positive collective legal rights of labour. The theoretical position that underlies Howell's account of institution creation, stability and change is that of the French régulationistes, with change being driven primarily by shifts in the forms of capitalist accumulation, although — like most contemporary régulationistes— his account is considerably more nuanced than that school's original division of pre-Fordism, Fordism and post-Fordism. Complex changes are perceived as sectors and firm types rise and fall, but towards the end of the 1890–1940 period, the new one of mass-production, primarily domestically oriented, large firms of Fordism had become evident. These corporations were better able to achieve an industrial order within themselves than the earlier generation of craft-based or smaller-scale firms, and had less need of one that was imposed externally by the machinery of state encouragement, employers' associations, unions, industry-wide collective bargaining, and collective labour law. The second period, after 1940, was therefore one in which the earlier edifice was gradually being undermined. At another, more political, level, however, that edifice was reaching the acme of its strength. The decade of the 1940s, characterized by mass mobilization for war and then by Labour government, saw a major ramification of collectivism in industrial relations. Howell's excellent account thus enables us to make sense of the labour struggles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in ways that go considerably beyond the existing literature, extensive as that is. Government and union leaderships remained wedded to the path dependence of the earlier period: collective bargaining and the other industrial relations institutions were still definitely ‘good things’, even if unruly elements kept stimulating a need for reforms; the purpose of the reforms, including the Industrial Relations Act 1971, was still to make the model work better. On the other side, an unconscious alliance of managers seeking a firm-level model and shop stewards seeking to exploit the power of organized labour made possible by government commitment to full employment was undermining the premises of collective laissez-faire. Eventually, government was left in the hopeless position of seeking simultaneously to centralize wage-setting and decentralize other aspects of industrial relations. But both sets of actors on the labour side, central leaderships and shop stewards, continued to believe that it was organized labour's own strength that guaranteed its position in British society, that it owed little to government for its survival, and that government would have to accept its enduring presence. Given Howell's thesis that state support was always central to union strength, all that was really required to undermine that strength was a departure from the assumptions of the previous 90 years by the political class. This, of course, came with the election in 1979 of a Conservative government fully converted to neoliberal economic ideas and a leading member of the array of political and economic forces that was set to undermine most of the assumptions of the postwar political economy throughout the industrial world. Once presumptions in favour of collective action and the maintenance of full employment were dropped, the firm-level model could become one in which managers confronted, not shop stewards, but individual employees with no capacity for joint action. End of contradiction. The dramatic act that laid bare the hubris was the miners' strike of 1984–1985, conducted by a union believing completely in the myth of the autonomy of union strength. Howell possibly underestimates the role of pure political conjuncture in producing this particular dénouement. The chance occurrence of the Falklands War and the fact that the Labour Party chose to split itself in two, both occurring in the early 1980s, together gave the Conservatives an insulation from what might have otherwise been the political consequences of the abandonment of full employment policies. In that case, neoliberalism might have had to advance through the compromises with organized labour that have characterized its path in most of the rest of western Europe, leading to a restructuring of the collective system rather than its collapse. Howell would claim that the illusory nature of the British collective laissez faire model meant that the collapse was inevitable, and that sooner or later, another contingency would have occurred. This is perhaps the case, but when one considers how European systems as diverse and as potentially unfavourable to organized labour as the Irish, the French and the Spanish have all mutated into new compromises between neoliberalism and various forms of collectivism, one wonders. Howell ends his third period at 1997 and then considers in a separate chapter the changes consequent on the election of a Labour government in that year. At the time he was writing, he had only a few years of that government to write about, and he can be forgiven for not feeling able to get any kind of perspective on it. However, his historian's instincts should have warned him that a periodization that has made no concessions to events as momentous as the election of the Liberal government of 1906, the First World War, the General Strike, or the interwar depression, is unlikely to need to take much notice of a change of government between what are today two essentially neoliberal parties. In fact, his account of the post-1997 years makes it clear that, once the passing of time has afforded him better perspective, he is likely to see a continuation of the trajectory of 1979–1997: Labour has continued primarily with a model of individualized work relations, changing the emphasis a little by conceding more individual rights to employees. The more recent study of the period by Davies and Freedland (Towards a Flexible Labour Market, Oxford University Press, 2007), which has the advantage of surveying a longer post-1997 period and of concentrating on an analysis of labour law, corroborates Howell's account, and draws a further conclusion: with the exception of measures required by European Union directives, most of Labour's extensions of labour rights are designed to encourage labour force participation by groups like single mothers and immigrants who, without certain rights, might not work. British labour rights have therefore moved from being collective immunities from common law offences to being individual encouragements to work. This kind of right belongs to a discourse concerning the balance between rights and responsibilities: one acquires a right because one offers something of value. This is often opposed to a concept of rights as part and parcel of citizenship: under a universal citizenship regime, one does not have to work in order to have the right to a fair trial or to vote. This is, however, a legalistic view of citizenship. In reality, various social groups have won rights when they had something to offer that the state needed. This dates back to the original obligation on Athenian citizens to offer military service. While this can appear to undermine rights, as they become conditional, it can also be seen as strengthening them. If a right is given through benevolence or adherence to abstract principle on the part of the state, there remains doubt as to what would happen if that benevolence of adherence to principle were to slip. Such rights can be lost. Indeed, it can be said that Howell's book is a demonstration of what happens when groups become dependent on governments for their rights. In his story there is added piquancy in that the unions believed that they had won their rights, that they had offered something in exchange for them, and that they would therefore be able to reclaim what they had offered as a deterrent against withdrawal of the rights. What unions essentially have to ‘offer’ in this sense is (negatively) restraint in their capacity to disrupt society and (positively) collaboration in the pursuit of shared national economic goals. This is rather similar to the deals that medieval nobilities offered to monarchs as the latter tried to fashion systems of social peace. But it would seem, from Howell's account, that the unions' offer had over the decades become too dependent on the state's definition of its terms. They had become more like the Russian aristocracy of the nineteenth century, whose originally autonomous rights and powers increasingly became translated into a table of ranks maintained and controlled by the tsars. There is therefore a major difference between an exchange of rights for obligations when both parties maintain some autonomy over the terms of the deal, and one in which one party administers the whole. Mistaking the latter for the former is the British union weakness that Howell identifies. Different again is the contrast that Davies and Freedland identify between those collective rights and those currently given to individuals in exchange for their commitment to participate in the labour force. The exchange here is unpolitical, or rather is political on one side only. Government continues to act highly politically and strategically in framing its labour policies, but individuals in an increasingly decollectivized labour market cannot respond in the same way. They cannot offer counterplans, or try to amend the terms of the rights/obligations exchange. They are more like customers than citizens; and customers do not have rights, only products. How durable is this new model of industrial relations likely to be? Howell concludes his book by saying: . . . the third system of industrial relations has achieved the kind of political consensus enjoyed by the first system but which eluded the second, and there is a strong case for seeing this as a long-lasting, stable set of industrial relations institutions (p. 193). However, in line with Howell's régulationiste approach, one must now ask how durable is the accumulation regime on which that political consensus and industrial relations regime have been based. Also, while there have been important historical specificities in the British case, for the discovery of which Howell's historical method is ideally suited, the British case is also one of a large number of societies which have gone through certain similar experiences. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, the years from the 1940s to the 1970s constituted a period defined by growing mass prosperity and a growing size and strength of the manual working class, within which trade unions were rooted. This differed from the years of depression and repression which had preceded it, and from the neoliberal period which started, with different timings and nuances, some time from the late 1970s onwards. The so-called Fordist period was rooted in manufacturing (particularly mass production and within that particularly motor vehicles), and therefore usually associated with a mass working class, which produced organizations and had to be propitiated if it were not to present challenges to the social order. Keynesian demand management operated similarly to Fordism in making possible a mass supply of goods and services, which supply itself stimulated demand. This in turn created employment, which further stimulated demand. Keynesianism also made possible the provision of social citizenship rights, as the provision of public services and rights-based transfer payments were the basis of the large sums of government spending that demand management required. Together, therefore, the production model and demand management model served the purpose of class propitiation, from which process labour also acquired rights. For the first time in history the economic and political advance of the mass of the population was both possible and the foundation of the prosperity and stability of the whole of society. In a real sense, Marx's idea of the working class as the class that embodied the future of the whole society was realized, albeit in the form of a class compromise and not as Marx had envisaged it. It was also a far more temporary model than Marx anticipated, although it did follow his Hegelian assumptions (which he had thought would cease with the working class) about how history changes by successive periods carrying within themselves the of their own as Howell's history of his period those of with its of the Keynesian state, had an and it a different set of leading class This to be at the when the of manufacturing employment had and the class of industrial society was The neoliberal period has been rooted in services, particularly financial the important exception of public the of the services sectors not to the citizens of they demand goods and services from government and market but the they have do not need to to it, and not to to make collective In some this is because their terms and are established on an individual in labour market they the consequences for their employment of any collective action. for the social order to only from from the challenges of and the of While the neoliberal economy is one in which the purpose of government is to rather than support in the Keynesian it is even more dependent on mass than the Keynesian This is by two neoliberalism is associated with and with a major of There is therefore a growing supply of goods from with labour and of the of British other no longer on the work of other demand is by if is often the case in the are not and is can to maintain their to increasingly in it has been possible for to their and other as In like the and British into acquisition far than could be to by in and Because are in their are not considered to be and can while neoliberal is on and While the goods with their increasingly from they can also to services, which are less likely to be further stimulating the from manufacturing to services employment within the advanced world. The system can be defined as governments have been as about mass prosperity as during the previous but of to themselves through public demand they have only to and encourage the of The of Fordism and Keynesianism was this was by growing for in the growing power of organized and individual labour in the to public and the universal provision of of those The neoliberal economy has the The of in and the of the of in from have all to favour financial and all other forms of The of the concept of the of as the of a firm has further a of all economic While the model primarily through its of has more widely in the population than financial are more than any the of and therefore the to more to a in of and that had operated throughout most of the twentieth century have been during the two or decades — on when a country to the neoliberal The leading sector of the economy has therefore become financial services, and the class whose for those of the society as a whole the of and in financial if the period of the of the manual working class was associated with a in and a rise in collective goods and the rise of the financial class is associated with and a or of collective There is little in a model for something like a system of industrial relations, or social or for participation in the system by the of labour There is a need for an of the more labour that is the more for its into financial the from labour rights as collective political to individual of rights for the of The Keynesian or the period of Howell's for to on the one considers or the one The neoliberal model is now just its it of The of the in financial which is as to the model as was to might not be to but and have an is what its that believe that believe . . . that he can it is to make the model work. has been late by the fact that did not the full of that they were and and some were into of more they could all believe that this did not because they could it on to would not because he could it on . . . then all was But some did the of the It clear how far financial had Keynesianism when one how governments are to of the collapse of financial are to them in a that could not possibly be for other and are by governments and central to other even if they have little for the system is on about what there need be no as for the terms of this there is a public in And if government is this kind of it is not really a neoliberal model at the neoliberal model therefore itself in the same of time that Keynesianism to do the Or the government that are to the whole back on the While the former more given the nature of the the of any model in the neoliberalism in the during makes the latter more What has been particularly in this is the of any social or class that might appear as the of a new model — as financial institutions were to be the of It would be to write the history of the changing of the previous century and more without as Howell has to the role of in various sectors of the economy in the between them and their organizations on the one and government and on the At in the and the one can write the story of the of neoliberalism and the model without much to and their organizations at working do appear in the as and as major political if a there are also major of in relations between and But for the of work and its Howell's about a long-lasting, stable set of industrial institutions been established by the does not appear at all