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From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, pp. 4–5.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE FAILURE of Jones and Scanlon to organise for a real battle is not some quirk of their individual makeup. Nor is it something that can be overcome by replacing them with new leaders of a similar kind. It follows from the way in which the trade union bureaucracy – including the ‘left’ trade union leaders – see trade unionism as functioning.
The best of them assume that unions can force concessions gradually out of capitalism by collective bargaining. In this way, over time, their members’ living conditions and wages will become more tolerable within capitalist society. To achieve this goal, all that is necessary is to ensure a steady build-up of the union’s power and its funds. The problem for them arises when it becomes clear that a further improvement in workers’ living standards and working conditions is very difficult to achieve within the existing framework. They fear that if they push things too far with industrial action there will be no end to the matter. The funds which they have so carefully built up will drain away as section after section of workers enter the battle. The government might be tempted to make a grab at some of their money through the law courts. And their own conception of trade unionism as gradually changing society will get lost in the hurly burly of bitter class struggle. In order to avoid this state of affairs they turn, as a man, to compromise solutions, even where such compromises are no longer possible.
The very way in which Jack Jones, for instance, poses the problem of rising prices and the wages freeze indicates that he does not regard organising against the government as the important task, but rather reaching some agreement with it. In a recently published article in Tribune he wrote that ‘major industrial difficulties (our emphasis) could arise later this year unless there is a restoration of free collective bargaining.’
For him, then, any confrontation, the result of which cannot be known in advance, is a ‘difficulty’ to be avoided. Presumably that is how he regarded the great strikes of last year which forced up living standards and weakened the Industrial Relations Act.
None of this means that the trade union leaders will always remain passive. If the pressure from their own rank and file gets too strong, they will take action – if only in order to protect their own positions. As Jones told the rest of the General Council during the imprisonment of the five dockers last year, some action at least had to be taken if a strike movement that had begun without them was not to get out of hand.
But that is not all the same as preparing the movement for the battles that Jones and Scanlon themselves have predicted.
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Last updated on 1 March 2015