Fighting Labour's Anti Union Laws

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The second half of the 1960s saw the end of the post-war boom. and the reassertion of the reality of the general crisis of capitalism.

From 1966 onwards the Labour government of Harold Wilson responded to this by attacking the old age pensioners, devaluing the pound and introducing a wage control policy under the Prices and Incomes Board on the instructions of the IMF At the end of 1968, the Minister for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, began formulating a nasty little piece of anti-union legislation.

She presented it to Parliament as a White Paper in January 1969 under the misleading title "In Place of Strife".

Her White Paper was clear in its objective. The working class had responded with militant action against the attempts of Wilson to resolve the crisis of capitalism at their expense.

I was necessary, she said, to control strikes if "Britain is to survive and prosper"

Strikes were increasingly inflicting "disproportionate harm on the rest of society"

She singled out car assembly and components, docks and shipbuilding as examples.

Donovan

The White Paper was based heavily on the report of the Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations.

This Commission had sat for three years under the chairmanship of Lord Donovan and produced its 350 page report early in 1968.

It called for incomes policy -the reform' of payments systems-particularly through use of job evaluation methods.

It demanded more control over shop stewards, new discipline procedures and the reform of the trade union structurc.

The report also called for the necessary bodies to be set up to effect these changes.

Castle's main provision was the setting up of the Industrial Board-a kind of industrial This body would have powers to order strikers back to work for a "cooling off period" of a maximum of 28 days. In addition it could order a ballot of strikers to be conducted by the union.

If its orders were defied, it could impose financial sanctions on a union or on individual members-in which case the fines would be collected by attachment of wages.

Castle argued that her provisions would not lead to workers going to prison. But there is little doubt that a persistent refusal to pay fines would in some cases have led to contempt of • court and imprisonment.

In the White Paper explained her tactics.

Immunity

She explained, for example, why she did not propose simply removing immunity from trade unions and allowing the employers to sue strikers for damages in the courts.

This had happened in the case of the Taff Vale railway strike in 1901, where the unions were fined £55,000 for damages. This initiated a struggle which led to immunity under the 1906 Trade Disputes

PLACE OF STRIFE

FOR INDUSTRIAL RELAT buses The lobby outside Fairfield Ha ment" Bill today.

So the sum total of Castle's White Paper and the Industrial Relations Bill which came out of it was a full blooded attack on trade union rights through the direct strengthening of the capitalist state.

Agents

If the capitalist class, through its agents in the Labour government was responding to its needs as a class to make the working class pay for the crisis, the reformist leadership of the trade union movement certainly was not responding to the needs of the working class to defend its hard won rights.

Quite the contrary.

Although almost every union formally opposed the Bill, none mobilised official action against it.

Worse, the TUC and the leaders of the main unions all actively opposed the unofficial action which did take place.

«The actions called were unofficial and the forces involved were the Communist Party and the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League, at that time by far the biggest of Trotskyist organisations.

Today's Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) with its wholesale adaptation to petty bourgeois nationalism, its slander campaigns against opponents it cannot answer politically and its abstention from serious work in the unions is a mere shadow of its forerunner-the SLL of that period.