Review by Stan Crooke of: “Raising Lazarus from the Dead: The Future of Organised Labour” (David Coats)
The public launch of “Raising Lazarus from the Dead: The Future of Organised Labour” took place shortly before Christmas.
Among the luminaries attending the launch were government Trade and Industry Secretary Alan Johnson (who recently advocated that the unions’ share of the vote at Labour Party conference should be reduced to 15%) and USDAW General Secretary John Hannet (whose main claim to fame is his union’s sweetheart deals with employers like Tesco).
Other trade union general secretaries have also rallied to support “Raising Lazarus from the Dead”.
Connect General Secretary Adrian Askew has described the booklet as “a refreshingly optimistic analysis of where we are now, and the high road that is available to the trade union movement.”
Community General Secretary Mick Leahy was “delighted to read (this booklet) on the future of trade unions, which signposts the way for us all in finding new modern roles for trade unions that fit the world we live in.”
An editorial in the “Guardian” was equally enthusiastic about what it misleadingly called “a powerful report.” According to the editorial, it was “difficult to argue against (the booklet’s) case that the future lies more in unions emphasising lifelong learning and career development … than in the confrontational tactics of Bob Crow’s RMT.”
Author of the booklet is David Coats, Head of Economic and Social Affairs at the TUC between 1999 and 2004. He now ranks – according to the booklet – “among the most influential and respected analysts of the world of work in union, Labour and academic circles.” He is also a member of Hackney South and Shoreditch Labour Party.
Publishers of the booklet are the Fabian Society, which modestly describes itself as “Britain’s leading left-of-centre think-tank and political society. … For over 120 years Fabians have been central to every important renewal and revision of left-of-centre thinking.”
Others, however, have held the Fabians in a lesser degree of esteem.
Writing in the mid-1920s Trotsky described the Fabians as “pompous authorities, pedants and haughty high-faluting cowards who systematically poison the labour movement, clouding the consciousness of the proletariat and paralysing its will, … self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie.”
The day that the British working class “cleanses itself of the spiritual abomination of Fabianism,” Trotsky continued, “mankind, especially in Europe, will increase its stature by a head.”
Reading “Raising Lazarus”, one can see just how right Trotsky was.
Coats’ starting point is the drastic decline in trade union membership in Britain over the past two and a half decades. Union membership is down by nearly 50% on what it was 25 years ago. In 1979 the pay and conditions of around 75% of workers were covered by collective bargaining. That has now slumped to 35%, disproportionately concentrated in the public sector.
Whereas about a third of the workforce over the age of 35 are unionised, only 10% of those in the 16-24 age bracket are union members. Workers who have never been union members now outnumber current and former union members put together.
One reason identified by Coats for the decline in the level of trade union membership is changes in the composition of the workforce.
Industries with a traditionally high level of unionisation, such as mining and the steel industry, have largely disappeared. At the same time, the labour market “now has the shape of an hour-glass, with more jobs at the top and the bottom, and a shrinking middle.” But the “middling jobs” were the traditional strongholds of trade unionism.
Rejecting the argument that the Tories’ attacks on trade unionism are to blame for the decline in membership levels – “attributing continued stagnation to Conservative anti-union laws is a neat but unconvincing argument” – Coats argues that trade unions “have nobody to blame but themselves.”
Basically, trade unions are stuck in the past: “There is something fundamentally wrong with their brand, product, and marketing strategy.” Many unions “are genuinely ‘Old Labour’, finding it difficult to accept that the world has changed, and preferring the comfort of conference rhetoric to a radical re-appraisal of their role.”
Unions suffer from a “sentimental attachment to the past (which) is a significant obstacle in the path of union renewal.” The “rhetoric of struggle, strikes and strife has little purchase on the opinions of employees.” Unions are on the way to becoming “an unrepresentative and anachronistic network of decaying organisations.”
Trade unions also suffer from a self-defeating negative and hostile attitude towards the Labour government. “The set-piece annual disagreements at party conference” writes Coats, “now often serve only to highlight the unions’ weakness and lack of influence.”
Historically, unions have played a positive role in the Labour Party. They “protected the party against extremism, the political obsessions of the ‘chattering classes’ and a focus on cultural politics.” In the past, Coats continues, “unions have saved the party from policies that were electorally disasterous.”
Indeed, “unions were once the predominant constituency in the Old Labour coalition, with 90% of the votes at party conference.” But “the combined effects of social change and membership decline have made organised labour a much less important element in British social democracy.”
Unions now “seem to be the architects of policies that the (Labour Party) leadership believes to be electorally damaging.” They give succour to “the widespread sense (promoted by conservative newspapers and some broadcast journalists) that New Labour is failing in its mission to improve public services.” The result is that “the government gets little or no credit for its achievements.”
The planned mega-merger of the GMB, TGWU and Amicus would pose a basic question mark against the union-Labour link: “Is it right that almost half the votes at party conference should be in the hands of two general secretaries? There is something inherently undemocratic about the policy of a governing party being determined by two people. It smacks of a return to the smoke-filled room, Tamany Hall, machine politics, and a lack of transparency.”
In what Coats calls “the Manichean struggle underway for the soul of British trade unionism” the real villains of the piece are the so-called “awkward squad” trade union leaders.
These people are “media-hungry leaders who strike confrontational postures.” They “sometimes have a disturbing tendency to see prejudice as fact.” They have “suggested that a crude adversarialism – the ‘fighting back’ strategy – is the route to renewal.” They have “beached (their unions) on the wilder shores of anti-government leftism.”
Mark Serwotka is “a self-confessed Trotskyist.” Derek Simpson is “an ex-Communist who had never held national office until his election.” Tony Woodley is the originator of the “Woodley paradox.” (Simultaneously holding “the view that unions have got too close to government” and “the view that the government should act to deliver justice.” Coats considers this to be a “paradox”.)
And Bob Crow is positively an anti-union force: “A trade union campaign for ‘a voice in every workplace’ is easily interpreted by some employers as ‘a Bob Crow in every workplace’ – an outcome that even the most enlightened will be keen to resist.”
(Poor Bob Crow just can’t win. The “fiery rhetoric of class solidarity” may “partially explain” the “supposed success of Bob Crow’s RMT.” But, in the bigger picture, “it may also have the effect of reinforcing negative stereotypes, which could make unions less attractive.”)
The weak-kneed may throw up their hands in horror at this sight of crude adversarialism, struggle-strikes-and-strife rhetoric, and decaying anachronistic organisations stranded on the wilder shores of anti-government leftism. But not the former Head of Economic and Social Affairs at the TUC and current member of Hackney South and Shoreditch CLP.
Trade unions need to “jettison outmoded ideological or cultural baggage.” ‘Old Labour’ is “dead and ought to be given a decent and respectful burial.” The need for “a new generation of trade union modernisers has never been greater.” A revival of trade unionism is impossible “without a symbolic ‘Clause IV moment’.” Trade unions need to face up to “the triumph of New Labour.”
Unions must accept that “they no longer have exclusive rights to represent workers.” The most effective trade unions are ones which “have developed a robust, co-operative relationship with the employer … characterised by trust, respect and mutuality.” Despite some setbacks in recent years, “partnership had and still has much to commend it.”
The government should “offer more explicit support for a partnership model of industrial relations, and encourage the adoption of such a model in the public sector.” Unions should “revive the commitment to workplace partnership that characterised the work of the TUC for more than a decade.”
Unions need to establish themselves as “institutions that can help people navigate the shoals of a more challenging world of work.” The unions which are currently growing are ones which have “established themselves as custodians of professional or craft standards, offer job search and career counselling services, and advice on employment contracts.”
USDAW is cited by Coats as a model for other unions to follow. Its recruitment strategy “emphasises lifelong learning, career development and widening opportunity. This has proved successful and the union is growing.”
USDAW’s recognition agreement with Tesco is exemplary. It has “had the effect of significantly widening the bargaining agenda” to include matters such as lifelong learning and career progression. The agreement is “a fine example of a union organising lower-paid and lower-skilled workers using the language of aspiration.” It is proof that low-paid workers are more enthusiastic about “improving the workplace” than about “fighting back.”
Other unions cited by Coats as showing the way forward are Community (“making a determined effort to reconceptualise what a trade union should be, … a strong track record of delivering access to training”), Connect (“offers advice on individual contracts, and job-search and career-counselling services”), and Prospect (“has moved in the same direction”).
Coats’s starting point – that trade union membership and density have slumped over the last quarter of a century – is a straightforward matter of fact. That the process of ‘de-industrialisation’ over the same period has decimated traditional bastions of trade unionism is likewise simply a statement of fact.
But it does not necessarily follow from this that ‘traditional’ trade unionism has no relevance for the majority of the modern workforce, or that careers counselling and lifelong learning should now be the foundation of trade union recruitment strategies.
In the early years of the automotive industry, for example, its workforce was seen as a virtual no-go area for trade unionism. Its employees were targeted for sociological studies into the ‘affluent worker’. Over time, however, carworkers became a well-organised and relatively militant section of the trade union movement – without trade unions having to undergo the kind of transformation argued for by Coats.
Although Coats is right to reject the argument that the current stagnation of the trade union movement can simply be blamed on the Tories’ anti-union legislation – the argument functions essentially as a bureaucratic excuse for inaction – he certainly fails to take into account the ongoing significance of the Tories’ anti-union laws.
The most significant factor in determining whether a worker joins a trade union is whether they joined a trade union in their first job. The combined impact of the Tories’ anti-union legislation and ‘industrial restructuring’ was that the first experience of work of a high proportion of new entrants into the labour market under the Tories was in non-unionised workplaces.
That ‘generation’ of new entrants not only remains resistant to joining a trade union as it grows older. As it moves to other workplaces, it also leaves behind non-unionised workplaces. These, in turn, provide the first experience of work for the next ‘generation’ of new entrants into the labour market, thus setting in motion a new cycle of union membership decline.
A second respect in which the legacy of the Tories’ anti anti-union laws remains an obstacle to effective trade unionism are the legal shackles which it placed on industrial action.
Legal strikes are restricted to “legitimate industrial disputes” – a category which does not include strikes in pursuit of industrial goals (such as opposition to privatisation), solidarity strikes, or strikes which have not overcome all the legal hurdles erected to delay and hinder industrial action.
Even after the Labour government’s (highly limited) reforms, striking workers can still be legally sacked if a strike lasts beyond eight weeks.
The legal shackles imposed by the Tories on the unions weaken the latter. That was the whole point of the Tories’ anti-union legislation. And weak trade unions are less likely to ‘deliver’ for their members. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for them to recruit.
The Tories’ anti-union laws remain a serious – though not the sole – factor in undermining the effectiveness, and the numerical strength, of the trade union movement. But, needless to say, Coats, who until recently was a senior ‘civil servant’ at the TUC – does not call on Labour to scrap the anti-union laws. This is precluded by his overall politics.
(Coats’ failure to call for repeal of the anti-union laws is also inconsistent with his basic argument. If workers really do want only careers counselling and lifelong learning from their trade unions, then scrapping the legislation which restricts the right to strike would have zero impact. Workers, according to Coats’ logic, simply would not want to make use of their restored right to strike!)
In his analysis of the relationship between the trade unions and the Labour government and Labour Party, Coats, to be fair to him, is not entirely uncritical of Blair and his followers. But such criticisms that he does have are not only few and far between, they are also highly tangential to his overall support for the Blairite leadership. They are the mumbled half-hearted criticisms of a Blairite loyalist.
The Blairite privatisation of public services – resulting in worse working conditions for employees, a worse service for users, and worse value for money for taxpayers – is hyped up by Coats as Labour’s “mission to improve public services.”
Trade union opposition to privatisation, on the other hand, is dismissed by Coats as a disloyal stab-in-the-back which plays into the hands of the Tory media. (What makes Coats’ criticism here particularly perverse is the fact that trade union anti-privatisation campaigns not only win new members, but are also highly popular with the broader public.)
The “set-piece annual disagreements at party conference” between the trade unions and the Party leadership are a figment of Coats’ imagination.
In the years preceding Labour’s election victory in 1997 the affiliated unions largely accepted and voted for a dismantling of the democratic structures of the Labour Party, and voted for the adoption of increasingly right-wing policies by the Labour Party. Given the weight of the union vote at Labour Party conference, such changes could not have taken place without support from the unions.
In the years following 1997 the trade unions continued down the same road. Only recently, and particularly so at last year’s conference, have the unions begun – and then only to a limited extent - to oppose further ‘modernisation’ of the Labour Party and its policies.
Coats grimly warns of a future in which two trade union general secretaries would cast nearly half the votes at Labour Party conference and thereby determine the policy of a governing party. That would be “inherently undemocratic.”
But there would be nothing undemocratic about such a process if the way in which the votes were cast reflected the wishes of the affiliated union members, as determined at the conferences of those unions.
There is a world of difference, as Coats knows full well, between members of affiliated organisations deciding their organisation’s policy and mandating delegates to vote accordingly, and a couple of unaccountable general secretaries determining policy in cahoots with their counterparts in the Labour Party leadership.
In fact, where an affiliated union is seriously split on a particular issue, there is no reason why the trade union vote must necessarily be cast as a single bloc at Labour Party conferences. But Coats’ booklet is silent on the question of democratisation of the trade unions.
Coats is also profoundly inconsistent on the role of the affiliated trade unions.
In the past, writes Coats, the unions played a positive role – saving the Labour Party from extremism, the obsessions of the chattering classes, and electorally disasterous policies.
But those were the years when half a dozen ‘union barons’ voted for whatever the Labour Party leadership wanted, irrespective of the interests of the members whom they were supposed to represent. Wasn’t there something “inherently undemocratic” about that?
Moreover, in that period the trade union bloc vote accounted for 90% of the vote at Labour Party conferences. By Coats’ logic, therefore, he should be far more critical of the role of affiliated unions in the Labour Party in the past than he is of their role now, when their share of the vote has been reduced to 50%.
And that reduced share of the vote – which is what Coats presumably means when he refers to the “less important role” played by the unions “in British social democracy” – is not the result, as Coats rather disingenuously states, of “social change and membership decline.”
The reduction in the unions’ share of the vote at Labour Party conferences is the ‘achievement’ of a Labour Party leadership which is hostile in principle to giving unions a real say in determining Labour Party policy, and which wants to ‘free’ the Labour Party from a trade union input (other than a financial input).
Even if trade union membership had not fallen over the past 25 years, the Party leadership would still have wanted to reduce the union share of the vote. And if membership decline determined voting shares at Labour Party conferences, then it would be the CLP share of the vote that would have been drastically reduced over the past eight years.
Coats’ treatment of the “awkward squad” trade union leaders is both a caricature of reality and an evasion of reality.
The reality of such trade union leaders is hardly one of unalloyed “struggle, strikes and strife”, leaving their unions stranded “on the wilder shores of an anti-government leftism.” Witness, for example, the Gate Gourmet debacle, or the acceptance by even the more left-wing unions of a two-tier pension scheme for public sector workers.
Having said that, the “awkward squad”, including even Derek Simpson, are more left-wing than their predecessors. And that creates a major problem for Coats and his plea for a new-style ‘trade unionism’.
If Serwotka really is a “self-confessed Trotskyist” (although his Trotsykist days are actually long behind him), that did not stop his members electing him. If, as is the case, Simpson has not previously held national office, his members did not see this as an obstacle to electing him Amicus General Secretary. And if, as Coats argues, Crow is really a liability for the trade union movement, RMT members did not find this a reason not to elect him as their general secretary.
Contrary to Coats’ caricature, the “awkward squad” union leaders were not elected on a platform of class struggle and incipient civil war. They were elected on basic platforms of defending the interests of their members, as opposed to subservience to New Labour. And they won votes from all sections of their membership, not just from a “dwindling band of union activists who can still remember the 1970s.”
In electing Serwotka, Simpson, Crow, Woodley and, more recently, Matt Wrack as general secretaries, union members voted against the very policies which Coats advocates in his booklet: partnership with employers, partnership with the government, and a disavowal of what Coats contemptuously calls “’fighting back’ trade unionism.”
The incumbent office bearers whom they replaced or succeeded – with the partial exception of FBU General Secretary Andy Gilchrist, who organised, however half-heartedly, a short-lived campaign of industrial action – had fallen in behind the New Labour agenda. Where they did not actively support it, they certainly did not campaign against it.
Coats begrudgingly admits at one point that “the Left are currently in the ascendant” in the unions (although, of course, they are “bereft of new ideas to promote union growth”), but cannot explain this phenomenon other than in terms of a failure by the government to “give the advocates of partnership consistent support, (which) unwittingly undermined the modernising forces in the trade union movement.”
What unions need to do to recover from the malaise with which they are currently afflicted, according to Coats, is to go through their own “Clause Four moment.” Just as the Labour Party “had to go through a painful exercise of political reinvention”, so too trade unions “must embark on a similar journey.”
This is a recipe for further union decline. The Labour Party’s “Clause Four moment” and the broader process of ‘modernisation’ have seen Party membership slump by around 50% since 1997 – a loss of some 200,000 members. Women’s sections and youth sections are now virtually non-existent. Branch life and CLP life are largely extinguished. Many branches and CLPs have simply collapsed. This is anything but the political equivalent of “raising Lazarus”.
Even Labour’s electoral victories are rather less impressive than is claimed by New Labour apologists. In the 1997 General Election Labour won less votes than the Tories had in the preceding elections. And in last year’s elections Labour secured a “historic third term” on the basis of winning less votes than any other governing party in the history of the universal franchise in the UK.
For the trade unions to embark on a “similar journey” to that undertaken by the Labour Party would, if it were to lead to the same destination, result in the loss of three million members, the laying-waste of union structures of accountability, and the adoption of a Thatcherite political agenda.
Just as Coats mythologizes the “achievements” of Labour governments and the results of the “modernisation” of the Labour Party, so too his portrayal of his alternative to “’fighting back’ trade unionism” is equally far removed from reality.
Coats’ model is USDAW, an affiliate to the TUC which currently deserves the title of “trade union by appointment to her majesty the employer.”
When USDAW launched a campaign in early 2005 to try to recruit Marks and Spencer staff, its General Secretary John Hannet explained: “M&S is going through change, and employees are telling us they would appreciate an independent third party with expertise.” The idea of a trade union as an “independent third party” – independent of employers and employees alike – is certainly a new concept of trade unionism.
Hannet also explained the weaknesses of the USDAW recruitment campaign: “This (leafleting outside shops) is not ideal, because it smacks of the old way of doing things. What we want is to be invited in by management to sit down with them and to talk to the staff in a non-adversarial way.”
In relation to USDAW’s recognition agreement with Tesco, which Coats singles out for particular praise in his booklet, it would actually be a step forward if USDAW were to play the role of an “independent third party” – as opposed to its current role of general dogsbody for management and collaborator in Tesco’s attacks on working conditions.
Despite Tesco’s multi-million pound profits, Tesco workers are particularly low-paid. With USDAW’s agreement, Tesco scrapped sick pay for its staff for the first three days of absence. Premium rates of pay for weekend working have also been cut back by Tesco. Stories of USDAW workplace representatives being removed from office because of management objections are common.
As Terry Savage, the Broad Left candidate in the current USDAW presidential elections, has put it: “USDAW is wedded to a failing partnership model, which alienates ordinary members and is loved by employers and the Blair government. Tesco retail workers no longer have a vote on their pay and conditions. Sainsbury staff are kept on low wages because the USDAW leadership refuses to work with the TGWU to force wage bargaining in the company.”
Contrary to Coats’ claim that USDAW’s recognition agreement with Tesco has “significantly widened the bargaining agenda”, the most basic of union issues – pay and working conditions – have in fact largely fallen off the agenda.
According to Coats, the USDAW approach to recruitment “has proved successful and the union is growing.” What Coats does not mention is that, even though Tesco encourages its employees to join USDAW, only around half of them have actually joined, and there appears to be a high turnover in union membership.
Moreover, although USDAW has increased its membership in recent years, the rate of increase lags behind the rate of increase in the size of the workforce in the retail sector of the UK economy.
While Coats is happy to point to the growth in USDAW membership as ‘proof’ of the effectiveness of its “partnership” philosophy, he omits to mention, by way of comparison, the record increase in membership recorded by the PCS in 2004 under the leadership of its “self-confessed Trotskyist” general secretary.
USDAW’s “partnership” with the Labour government has been no more of a success story for its members than USDAW’s “partnership” with Tesco: the government is now proposing to allow longer Sunday opening hours for supermarkets and other large shops. USDAW opposes this on the grounds that bonus payments for Sunday working have been “remorselessly eroded” since 1994, and most stores now pay only weekday rates.
It would be a mistake to dismiss “Raising Lazarus” as a dreary, shallow, and intellectually incoherent booklet (even though that is what it is).
Coats’ arguments represent the thinking of a layer of the trade union bureaucracy, in the main that layer grouped together in “Unions 21”. (By a remarkable coincidence, the 2004 conference of Unions 21 centred on a paper which argued along the lines of “Raising Lazarus.” That paper was the edited version of a paper which had been presented to its Executive Committee in 2003 by David Coats.)
And the presence of former-CWU-General-Secretary-now-Labour-politician Alan Johnson at the launch of Coats’ booklet indicates that, for obvious reasons, Coats’ prescription for the trade union movement suits the New Labour political agenda.
Coats’ booklet contains a vision of the future for the trade union movement. But it is not a vision in which trade unions assert themselves on the industrial and political fronts. It is a vision of USDAW trade unionism – one in partnership with the employers and the government, and on their terms.
The most that can be said for Coats’ booklet is that at least it is a warning of what the “modernisers” have in mind for the trade union movement – and a stimulus to ensure that their vision is never realised.
