Bi Plan to Woo Mor Trade Union Officials

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This Socialist Press pamphlet contains articles by Terry Eagleton on marxist theoreticians from the time of the Comintern to the present day-Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Marcuse, Sartre and Althusser.

Price 65p including P&P from WSL, BM Box 5277, A new CBI handbook, Trade Unions in a Changing World: The Challenge to Management, has just been published, spelling out how crucial to employers is the cultivation of a pliable layer of trade union bureaucrats and tame shop stewards.

The CBI complains that while unions can be too powerful in their confrontations with management, the paradox is that:

"in relation to their own members they often weak and ineffectual"

In an effort to remedy this. the CBI looks first and foremost to strengthening the hand of union officials, detaching them from any kind of accounta bility to the shop floor.

"If officials are to be restored to a substantia position of influence, they musi STILL AVAILABLE London WCIV 6XX be more readily available to involve themselves in industrial relations matters at plant level. This in turn requires substantial increases in the number of officials, since industrial relations problems require immediate attention if control is not to be abdicated to the steward or to the workforce"

money But this will cost money: and the CBI is honest enough to admit that they think it should be our money that is used to provide them with an army of plain-clothed policemen:

"Undoubtedly the real level of members' subscriptions needs to rise to finance such an increase in numbers."

Nevertheless the bosses want to see a better calibre of collaborator making the grade in the union bureaucracy. And they discuss the best way of achieving this: incentives for instance;

"Apart from increasing their number, the quality of officials needs to be improved. This is partly a matter of paying higher salaries and better fringe benefits to attract more able people to the job."

If you are wondering how your union could reasonably offer higher salaries or even more fringe benefits to its officials, just wait till you hear the rest of the CBI package.

"But job security too is would be pre able for son, it to appoint all executive officials to salaried posts, rather than provide for their election for a fixed period only . . . The appointed official may feel freer to act in the interests of his members as he sees them than at their behest"

Never mind the niceties of democracy as occasionally argued so hypocritically in the Tory press. This would be simply an obstacle to the cultivation of a leadership suitable to the employers:

"It is argued, of course, that election is the best way of ensuring a close link between officials and members and that appointment would distance them even more than at present ... The reduction in democracy, more apparent than real, would be more than outweighed by the increased authority of the officials no longer required to satisfy a fickle electorate and by the benefits of continuity and of experience."

The CBI also sings the praises of certain well-loved convenors who:

"can coordinate and may be more company-orientated than an official. although without the official's wider perspective"

Out of hand

But they warn that some shop stewards courses run by the unions can get out of hand:

"Courses run by the TUC at local technical colleges or by unions at their own educational establishments necessarily are of less value to a steward than courses which include training in what he. needs to know within his own particular workplace-and employers are increasingly concerned that such, courses can become conflictbased by teaching stewards how to defeat management rather than solve problems"

The dilemma of whether or not to allow mass meetings to take decisions is also debatedthere are of course pros and cons for management. Too much of a link between leading stewards and their mass membership may discourage the stewards from simply acquiescing • to every management "There needs, of course, to be a balance struck between the benefits of such mass meetings and the problems involved. Above all, management must retain control of the frequency of such stoppages of work; cost needs to be considered, and on practical grounds communication in the first instance may have to be confined to stewards.

"There must be a balance between obtaining the views of For the grovelling delegation of TUC leaders who crawled in to Downing St. for their much-hailed meeting with Thatcher last week week, there was nothing but Tory contempt.

Thatcher and Howe flatly rejected the miserable five-point lame-brained package of concessions sought by the TUC.

They had asked for a cut in interest rates: import controls to protect industries "threatened with extermination": long-term planning for growth in "core industries": the use of North Sea oil Ievenues to help industry; and restoration of public spending cuts.

With the exception of the final request-a ludicrous one to put to this Tory governmenteveryone of these policies has been tabled by sections of the CBI for their annual conference next month!

Starting point

Far from fighting for the independent interests of the working class, the TUC has, like the CBI, made its starting the membership on every issue and encouraging representatives to lead and influence. The problems of 'mandating' can inhibit stewards from taking the job in the first place"

Indeed the CBI point out the advantages of the "check-off" system of collecting union subscriptions from pay at source. Management stand to gain most by the way this weakens the links between shop stewards and members, they argue.

At the same time stewards should be wooed by the company-being offered guaranteed pay and the prospects of promotion so that they can be persuaded to stay on.

Yet the gathering recession has outpaced much of this homespun advice from the bosses" confederation: as point the fight to restore the viability of British capitalism.

And far from mobilising the strength of the workers' movement to bring down the Tories, they tried in vain to use the fear of "uncontrollable social unrest" to scare the Tories into making concessions.

Anger

Alan Fisher, TUC president, warned that despite the craven collaboration of the lUC leaders with every Tory cut and closure, the frustration and despair of the unemployed "May soon turn to anger in a direct and forthright way unless the government changes its policies."

That, of course, is the last thing the TUC leaders want. They fear that the members would throw off the control not only of the Tories but of the parasitic bureaucracy itself.

The Tories recognise that the TUC leaders are frightened men: and this reinforces their contempt.

The construction of a principled socialist leadership in the labour movement and the lay-offs have become the rule of thumb in manufacturing industry, many employers are seeking simply to behead the union organisation in their firms -by seeking out key militants and stewards as the first targets for voluntary redundancy.

For trade unionists the issue is not simply to combat the more subtle techniques for corrupting their leadership spelled out in the CBI handbook, but, more important, to adopt a fighting strategy to defend jobs, incorporating the occupation of threatened plants, the fight to open the books of the employers, and the struggle to mobilise full scale supporting action on a local and national level in the fight to bring down the job-slashing Tory government. mobilisation of against the Tory vital to change this mass action onslaught is șituation.

Len Murray

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