Are we heading for an autumn of discontent?
Mike Millar asks if the recent spate of strikes augurs a resurgence in trade union militancy
In the summer of 2004, Derek Simpson, then general secretary of the Amicus trade union, went to the Glastonbury music festival. He took to the skies and arrived by helicopter, lord of all he surveyed. But of course he was really nothing of the sort, hence the need for this stunt in the first place. Simpson was there to show that trade unionism was ‘down’ with the youth of today. The media took more notice than festival-goers did.
But desperate times called for desperate measures. Union attempts to entice a new generation of members in meaningful numbers were not working. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that by the end of 2006 little had changed; indeed, things were actually getting worse. That year the rate of union membership fell by 0.6 per cent to 28.4 per cent of the workforce, the biggest annual fall since 1998. One in six private sector workers are union members, compared to three out of five public sector workers. Unfortunately for the unions, public sector workers only make up one fifth of UK employees.
But there is a feeling that the times might be changing. Almost every area of the public sector has either taken industrial action or threatened to do so recently. Even the police could one day walk out, after voting to lobby the government for the right to strike.
Professor Roger Siefert, director of the Centre for Industrial Relations at the University of Keele, says there is ‘a sense of something happening’ – driven by government policy, tough economic factors and a youth disillusioned with politics but keen to ‘enforce what is right’.
Professor Michael Terry from the Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick Business School says unions are now working out how to attract these would-be politicos. ‘Unions have tried to broaden their scope to attract the next generation – they are tapping into individual interests like workplace training or conservation and green issues, rather than just wages and conditions.’
This lateral thinking is also increasingly evident in the way in which unions are fighting companies through the media rather than through strikes. When Burberry decided to shut a factory in Wales, the company did not just feel the wrath of staff, but also the booming voice of Tom Jones, the dramatic poise of double-Oscar winner Emma Thompson and even Burberry’s own poster boy, actor Ioan Gruffudd. Similarly, Damon Buffini of the private equity group Permira was greeted by a camel and a giant needle when he came out of church, as part of a campaign to highlight the alleged ruthlessness of the private-equity industry in general in its treatment of workers in companies it acquires. In an era where brand is so important and images are beamed instantly around the world, one bemused camel can be as effective as a million people marching.
Both these campaigns were orchestrated by the GMB – which now brands itself ‘Britain’s general union’, but derives its initials from ‘Municipal’ and ‘Boilermakers’. Their impact may have something to do with the GMB’s claims that it is adding 1,000 a month to its roll, despite a steady decline in overall union membership across the private sector.
While public sector unions have been making most of the recent noise (teachers, police and prison officers, for example), private sector unions are also getting in on the act. Recent strike calls have involved rail maintenance staff, Fujitsu workers and – the new benchmark for union militancy – the shutdown of the Grangemouth oil refinery and the disruptions wrought by Shell tanker drivers.
Last year more than a million working days were lost to strikes, a 250,000 rise on the year before. Unions have effectively promised more trouble to come, as food and fuel bills march ever higher. But David Yeandle, deputy director of employment policy at the manufacturing lobby group EEF, warns employers that it is the quiet unions they should be wary of.
Unite – formed last year by a merger between Amicus and T&G and numbering two million members – was relatively quiet for some time before the Grangemouth action and the Shell drivers’ dispute, prompting Professor Siefert of Keele to dismiss its leaders Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley as ‘a spent force’. But David Yeandle says both leaders are working hard in the background to secure reform before they retire – probably within the next two years – and before a general election that is now widely expected to herald a Conservative government.
‘We may be moving into an environment where the more thoughtful members might be thinking this could be the end [of Labour] for a while [so] let’s get what we can, while we can,’ Yeandle says.
The possibility of a change of government will bring pressure to bear on a number of issues, including more ‘family-friendly’ policies, greater rights for agency workers and a hike in redundancy pay, Yeandle says. There is also talk of a Warwick Agreement Mark II in the immediate future to secure further concessions to the unions on top of those the government made in the original agreement in 2004.
There are quite literally millions of reasons why this pressure might pay off: the Labour Party is acutely short of money and in the first quarter of 2008 more than 90 per cent of the £3.1 million it raised came from trade unions. The public might think this allows unions to wield a disproportionate amount of power – and if you don’t just pay the piper, but give him the flute and the lessons as well, then you tend to expect to call the tune. This remains true even if only half of British unions still fund the Labour Party.
But much of the evidence that seems to point to resurgent trade unions can also be interpreted as a desperate rearguard action. It is impossible to ignore the membership numbers. Rory Murphy, a former union general secretary turned commentator, says it speaks volumes that the UK has around 29 million people in work, but only eight million in unions.
‘Unions are sabre rattling, but what are they producing? Going out on strike against government isn’t working. If their impact was as important as unions would like everyone to believe, then millions would be on board.’ Unions are still fighting the old battles on wages and conditions: longevity risks and pressure on pensions are the paid-holiday and health-and-safety issues for the new millennium, and I’m not sure they understand that,’ Murphy says. This was highlighted when, surprisingly, Unison’s NHS members voted for the government’s three-year pay deal, leaving the union with nothing else to do but promise it would revisit the issue if inflation kept going up.
Michael Terry says it is hard to point to areas where unions have influenced policy in the last few years. ‘It’s difficult to use the notion of having more power – power means influence, but I don’t see that,’ he says. ‘Over the next few months there will be [industrial] action in the public sector but there’s no comparison with the rolling strikes of the 1970s and 1980s.’
The million working days lost last year to strikes might sound significant, but as Terry points out, it is small change compared to an average of 7.2 million days lost in the 1980s. The approach of battle-by-media has also been only a qualified success to date. The Burberry factory in Wales closed despite the celebrity quotient and Unite’s £1 million campaign to stop people buying Peugeot cars did not stop the company going ahead with the closure of its Coventry factory.
Even the issue of Labour Party funding is far from straightforward. If financing Labour is a means of acquiring real clout, why did the GMB decide to cut funding to a third of the 108 MPs it sponsors? Then there are the difficult political decisions the funding issue throws up. The government has to choose between the demands of a vocal minority that holds the purse strings, and the risk of alienating the wider electorate who are not interested in trade unionism. The unions in turn are torn between the attraction of flexing their financial muscle and the fear of pushing the Conservatives into power by demanding too much.
It is difficult to conclude that there is – or will be between now and a 2010 general election – a true resurgence in trade unionism, despite the impact on forthcoming wage negotiations of a sharp rise in domestic inflation. After years of decline, the next set of union membership figures (due out in late summer) will be a key indicator of whether the louder bark of the unions heard recently now has the bite to back it up.
Mike Millar is a freelance business journalist and author of Five Minute Failure