These sustained attacks were preparing a backlash. Geoffrey Armstrong, Director-General of the Institute of Personnel Management, warned his annual conference in October 1993 to avoid excessively squeezing its workforce:
“While encouraging flexibility in matching the needs of organisations with those of their employees and prospective employees, we must stand out against abuse”, he said. “The creation of a permanently casualised industrial peasantry, with little protection and no stake in the future, cannot be in the interests of organisations or society. Maybe the ‘steady job’ has gone, but to ensure trust is maintained with their workers, employers need to make sure they give them ‘security where they can’, ‘treat them consistently in a principled manner’, and equip them ‘with the generic skills and employability’ which will enable them to find alternatives if we can no longer employ them.”[6]
This summed up the views of the “good” capitalists who wanted to treat their working class “peasantry” with a degree of compassion. Exploit them, but don’t push them over the edge. If you have to get rid of them, then do it nicely! The problem is that it is not a question of this or that employer, but the capitalist system as a whole. Through competition the capitalists are forced to introduce the latest techniques. It is not a question of personal choice, but under the whip of capitalist anarchy it is the survival of the fittest. In their search for maximum profits, they are continually seeking ways of reducing costs of production. All things being equal, this means reducing wage costs.
By 1993, while the weak-kneed trade union leaders were preaching “class harmony”, manufacturing jobs, where union membership was at its highest density, were being ruthlessly axed. As a result, AEEU membership fell below the 700,000 mark. The same was true of the TGWU. As a whole, trade union membership fell over the following decade and was to shrink to around seven million. This decline also reflected the bitter fruits of “New Realism” and to decades of right-wing mis-leadership. The only other comparable period when such a fall was recorded was between 1920 and 1933, following the defeat of the General Strike and the world slump. At that time, trade union membership contracted by almost half, from eight million to 4.5 million.
With this decline in membership, trade unions leaders were forced to seek a way out of this dilemma through new union mergers. In such cases, not all mergers were driven by the interests of the membership, but reflected the needs of the bureaucracy to preserve its apparatus and resources. However, other mergers marked a step forward, resulting in new formations such as the rail union, RMT, the civil service union, PCS, and the local government and health union, Unison, the latter being the third largest union in Europe. These had the progressive features of concentrating power into fewer trade unions, making the tasks of transforming the union movement easier, and in the long run laying the basis for industrial unions.
While the closure of manufacturing industries weakened the unions, the “new economy” produced new employment and created a potential for union organisation in other areas: for instance the infamous call centres, where workers enclosed in cubicles, continually answer phone enquiries, day and night. These were to provide work for more people than the coal, steel and shipbuilding industries combined. Their rise was a barometer of Britain’s industrial decline. High paid skilled jobs in industry have been replaced by low paid unskilled employment in the service sector. The workers in these call centres are treated so abysmally that they have been described as the modern equivalent of Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills”. According to a report by CBE, a training consultant company, the monotonous nature of the job, coupled with workers’ lack of control over their work, produced severe stress levels. Six per cent of call centre workers suffered from “serious psychiatric problems” – double the rate for the general working population. “You cannot turn human beings into machines”, said Jim Bennett of CBE, “making their function little more than a production line of repetitive operations and still expect them to perform all the human and inter-personal skills required in customer service roles.” This explained the massive 20 per cent turnover in staff in these centres, which has served to make union organisation more difficult, but far from impossible.
Today, with the slowdown in the world economy, many call centres have been closed or dramatically downsized, with jobs being transferred to third world countries such as India, where wage costs are 10 per cent of the west. “With Indian call centre workers on about £1,200 a year – less than a tenth of the near £12,000 starting salary of an equivalent worker in Britain – it is not hard to work out that firms can save themselves a lot of cash”, states The Guardian.[7] According to Mitial Research, about a third of Britain’s larger call centres will close by 2005 losing 90,000 jobs in the process. These attacks on these workers have, in turn, led to strike action in defence of jobs and greater unionisation of these workers.
The British service sector has grown enormously over the past two decades. This reflects the organic decline and decay of British capitalism. The former “workshop of the world”, British capitalism has increasingly taken on the characteristics of a rentier economy, relying more and more on services, banking and insurance. Finance capital has become the dominant force, which is a major factor in Britain’s industrial decline. With its failure to invest and modernise industry, the bourgeoisie has allowed much of manufacturing to go to the wall. Marx explained that there are periods in the history of capitalism when the capitalists forget that real wealth is material wealth in manufacturing production. He explained the source of profit lies in the production of surplus value through industrial production. Once realised through sales, the surplus value is shared out between different sections of the ruling class in the form of rent, interest and profit. The capitalists in the service sector, who play a parasitic role, take a slice of this surplus value according to the average rate of profit. While manufacturing relies upon services to market its commodities, the mainstay of any modern economy must rest upon its industrial base. Those who maintained that the British economy had no need of manufacturing to survive but could simply rely upon service industries, show how parasitic and short-sighted the British capitalists have become. This was, in particular, a great favourite of the Thatcherites and their economic witch doctors, who did so much to wreck British industry and reducing the numbers employed by manufacturing to around three million. They have become the modern Luddites.
The decline of British capitalism has gone hand in hand with attacks on the working class. The modern killer in the workplace is stress or over-work. The capitalist system is based upon it and is directly linked to the production of relative and absolute surplus value. The picture of over-work depicted in the 1936 Chaplin film, Modern Times, can be replicated across industry, white-collar and blue-collar alike. As a result of the employers’ offensive, the acute levels of stress have become a key issue. Every year, 150,000 workers take at least one month off for illness caused by job stress. Whilst days lost through strike action fell to record levels, the number of days lost in workplace sickness has doubled since 1995. The Health and Safety Commission reported that 40 million working days were lost due to work-related illness in 2002. This picture of burned-out Britain is a product of the past two decades of attacks on working people and the increased rate of exploitation. Britain has opted out of the 48 hour European directive, as the working class is literally being worked to death.
Now new rules have been introduced which reflect the cold-heartedness of British capitalism. The aim of big business is to prevent compensation claims by workers for such stress-related illnesses.
“Lady Justice Hale said it should not be the responsibility of an employer to make exhaustive investigations into the mental health of employees,” reported The Independent.[8] “Instead, the onus was on the stressed worker to decide whether to leave the job or carry on working and accept the risk of a mental breakdown.”
These are laws written by capitalists in the interests of capitalists and reek of the Victorian morality of the Poor Law Commissioners. Without doubt Lady Justice Hale and her like are not afflicted with such brutal working conditions.
In the face of this capitalist onslaught, the right-wing trade union leaders were totally impotent. The Department of Employment under John Major cynically explained what was required of the unions: “If trade unions wish to stem the tide of decreasing recognition by employers, they will need to demonstrate their worth to them… In particular unions should adopt approaches which show unequivocally that they share management’s desire to raise competitiveness and adapt to change.”[9] In other words, the unions should prostrate themselves in front of big business, and show themselves as a willing tool of the employers. Rather than rejecting this slavish complicity, the TUC replied with the statement:
Modern trade unions recognise that companies must be competitive in global markets if they are to be successful and provide secure employment for their employees… Unions are willing to bargain in good faith to introduce changes in working practices and production methods.[10]
The union leaders were eager to please the employers in return for the promise of a quiet life. The AEEU leadership, embracing business unionism even more firmly, epitomised this abject capitulation to the ruling class. They participated in “beauty contests” with other unions over union recognition deals – where the employers picked the union most suited to their needs! The ever-pliant AEEU leaders then signed a number of so-called sweetheart agreements allowing single union status. The bosses were obviously very keen to permit only one union to operate in its plants so long as it was operating on the company’s terms and kept out more troublesome unions. “Properly implemented multiskilling programmes offer employers a more flexible workforce devoid of most demarcations”, noted the AEEU working party’s pamphlet on Multiskilling and Flexibility. Even the right-wing American unions have not dared openly to go this far!
In the United States, the AFL/CIO decides which union will operate in a particular plant, not the employers. However, in Britain the employers selected the “best” and most “co-operative” union for their purposes.
“We have signed a number of single union agreements with inward investors such as Nissan, Toyota and Sony and we find their approach to Human Resource Management (HRM) gives us no reason for complaint,” stated Bill Jordan, the then president of the AEEU. “Team-working, flexibility and multiskilling have been central to the competitive edge that these companies have established but they have never sought to exploit their workforces by using these techniques.”
He continued:
Whether we like it or not, these practices amount to a modern industrial development that is here to stay. It must be our job to ensure that they are introduced in a way that is of maximum benefit to our membership. A refusal to acknowledge HRM would give the opponents of social partnership an opportunity to cast the trade union movement as negative and as being stuck in the past. Frankly, in my view, there would be some justification to this charge. Our adoption of an oppositionalist line would also deny us the opportunity to differentiate between good and bad management. At present AEEU support for HRM in its form at Toyota, Nissan and Sony allows us to be critical of those companies that try to use these techniques as a cloak for attacks on their workforces. In reality, companies will introduce these techniques regardless of our opposition. Let us not leave our shop stewards with the unenviable task of trying to respond to change with no guidance or practical support from their union or from the wider trade union movement.
In making such a statement, Jordan was asking the membership to prostrate itself before the bosses. The whole rationale for introducing HRM was to “exploit their workforce”, to maximise their profits. Why else would they be introducing new production techniques? Certainly not because they had the workers’ happiness at heart! Bill Jordan regarded HRM as “here to stay”, just like the capitalist system, and was going to be introduced “regardless of our opposition”. In order not to offend his close friends in charge of Toyota, Nissan and Sony, the leader of one of the biggest unions in Britain was willing to offer up his members, like lambs to the slaughter, as he had no alternative to offer. The bosses were in charge and the workers had to accept their lot in life. It was as simple as that.
Throughout these years, Britain was fast becoming the bridgehead for lean production in Europe. In Nissan, the AEEU had given management complete control within its plants. It was a model to be imitated elsewhere. By 1994 the TUC had adopted a favourable view of Human Resources Management. The TGWU, a nominally left union, had followed suit by 1996. This capitulation to big business by the right wing – and even some on the “left” – within the trade unions was however preparing a massive backlash. The working class were being squeezed to the limit in response to the demands for greater “flexibility” and profits. The levels of stress and resentment that built up on the shop floor were reaching explosive levels. Yet, the union bureaucracy used their dominant position to hold the workers in check and muzzle this discontent. Not only were they acting as policemen within their own ranks, but they undermined any attempts of workers to offer resistance. “Class collaboration was the only way forward!” they exclaimed. The threat of the Tory anti-union laws was used in no small part to spread despondency and impotence throughout the movement. However, this growing bitterness could not be dammed up indefinitely, and was soon to lead to profound changes in the trade unions. The compulsory election of trade union executives and officials introduced by Margaret Thatcher to keep out the militants was about to backfire in the most unexpected and dramatic way.