Suddenly, the cry “All out, brothers” threatens to take on a new meaning, becoming not the command of the shop steward but the frustrated wail of the locked out worker, pressing round the unyielding factory gate.
For over a year now, workers in The Times newspapers have been locked out —and there are reports that, rather than face another twelve months of negotiations, the Thompson Organisation will close the papers down permanently. In case anyone has forgotten, this dispute began over the workers’ resistance to new methods of compositing, with likely redundancies. During the recent two day strikes in the engineering industry, the companies who are members of the Engineering Employers’ Federation retaliated by laying off workers and locking out others—notably at Rolls Royce. An article in the Observer (23.9.79) by Robert Taylor gave the substance of some guide lines issued by the EEF:
“Industrial action, such as go-slows, refusal to work normally and blacking of employees, products or machines should not he tolerated for more than a few days. After warning, with a sufficient period allowed for reflection, suspension without pay should be the normal response.”
This attempt at the sort of solidarity more usually expected from trade unionists —which employers, because of the essentially competitive nature of capitalism, will find rather more difficult—was illuminating. When factories stop because of a strike, we are subjected to a barrage of clap-trap from the press about, disruptive workers preventing the production of essential goods needed by pensioners, sick children . . But when the employers, also in the act of protecting their interests in the class struggle, bring production to a halt there is not a word of protest; withers in Fleet Street remain unwrung over jeopardised export markets, frustrated customers, deprived consumers and so on.
Agriculture
Perhaps the press will need a little time to catch on. The relative prosperity of British capitalism for some twenty years after the war outmoded lock-out; it was usually better to pay up on a wage claim than to shut the firm down. But it was not always so.
In the earlier days of British capitalism, before the unions were strong enough to offer effective resistance, the lock-out was often wielded to beat down living standards. In the 1830s it was used against the attempts to form an Operative Builders’ Union: the employers won, as the lock-out forced the OBU into deep financial trouble. In 1897 the Amalgamated Society of Engineers struck for an eight hour day, after a prolonged wrangle over the introduction of new machinery. The employers retaliated, with the first national lock-out ever. After six months the ASE was crushed and the employers, proclaiming themselves “masters in our own shops”, dictated the terms of the surrender.
There was a similar’ bitter story in agriculture, where workers were trying to live on appallingly low wages. In 1872, in Warwickshire, 200 farm labourers struck for a rise to 16s (80p) a week for their eleven hour day. Their case was such as to attract some support from the press (although not, presumably, in Church Times; the Bishop of Gloucester advocated throwing the strikers into the village pond). It was a bitter fight, which spread as the farmers imposed a general lock-out. At Chipping Norton, two magistrates who were also clergymen did their duty by both god and Mammon by sentencing sixteen women, some still suckling their babies, to hard labour for “intimidating” blacklegs. The strikers were defeated, partly by the effects of the agricultural depression of the 1870s, which helped to cripple their union.
Coal Mines
The Webbs described this type of dispute as the “.. . insurrection of the village and the autocratic spirit which it aroused in the owners of land and tithe. . . ” an attitude which lingered, even in more modern industry, almost as if the employers saw some advantage in behaving like feudal barons.
Before the First World War, there were about 1,500 separate companies owning the coal mines in Britain. In many cases, the company was personified by one rich, influential owner—Lord Londonderry, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Rhondda, Evan Williams. Some of these companies were more “liberal” and “enlightened” than others — and some more efficient and profitable—and the mines were a traditional battlefield over wages and conditions, marked like shell-holes by strikes and lock-outs. The miners were bonny, experienced fighters and among the higher paid workers in Britain.
As part of British capitalism’s war effort, the mines were taken effectively under state control in 1917. After the war, there was a brief, hectic boom for the British coal industry as it filled the gaps left by the devastated French mines and the immobilised German pits. This did not last long and the British export markets in Europe and South America abruptly contracted. Coal had been the basis of the power of Victorian capitalism; now it symbolised that power’s decline. By 1921 the losses of the mines were growing beyond the scope of government subsidies and in April that year, with a wage claim pending, the industry was abruptly passed back to the private owners.
Far from being about to negotiate a rise in wages, the private owners were proposing a reduction of over £2 a week. Flexing their muscles as they took over the pits again, they posted lock-out notices. The miners expected support from the railwaymen and the transport workers and when this did not happen the episode became notorious as “Black Friday”. The struggle went on for three months, until the miners were forced back to work on terms worse than they might have hoped to get originally.
Newspapers
More recent times have seen little use of the lock-out in Britain although, according to Robert Taylor, in France and Germany it is more common than the strike. But now, with the employers struggling from the desperation of a prolonged recession, may be the time for its revival. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph (23.9.79) Peregrine Worsthorne gloated over the engineering workers:
“Last year an engineering strike might have shown the workers to be invincible. So may one next year. But the same could be said about any momentous historical miscalculation — even the Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Of course Worsthorne, like all the conventional observers of capitalism, is seeing things very much in the immediate, superficial sense. Every dispute has its immediate causes and how it is fought out—and who wins—must depend on the conditions prevailing at the time. Strikes have a better chance of succeeding in a boom and by the same token a lock-out is more likely when there is a slump. This was the case with the farm labourers and the engineering workers in the 19th century and with the miners in 1921. And it is so today.
The Times shut down was an episode in a long decline in the newspaper industry, in which many papers perished and the profits of the survivors have been under strong pressure. The malaise is widespread; the September report of the Confederation of British Industry showed how the rest of the employers view their prospects. They expect their profitability for 1979 and 1980 to fall below the previous poor levels of 1974-5.
Behind such immediate prospects, and behind the temporary changes in balances of strength, lies the basic, inescapable fact ‘of the class struggle. This struggle continues without pause — often without its participants realising that they are involved in it.
Firstly, the struggle is about the division of wealth in capitalist society and this is where the unions and the employers’ federations operate. There are still a few strange people who doubt the need for the struggle, who doubt that wealth is divided so that some people have vastly more of it than others.
Poverty
Reality is against them. For a long time a mass of evidence has been accumulated, using different methods—income tax returns, estate duties, social surveys—measuring the extent of this inequality. Sir Joshua Stamp, in 1919, estimated that one per cent of the population owned over 65 per cent of the national wealth. Nearly sixty years later Louie Burghes found that one per cent owned 31 per cent of the wealth and the top 10 per cent owned 70 per cent. An article by Anthony Giddens in New Society (4.10.79) estimated that the top five per cent of “the rich” own 98 per cent of the total of privately held corporate stocks and shares. At the other end of the scale the Low Pay Unit reports that at the end of 1977 one family in eight was living at or below the supplementary benefits line, which itself is little better than starvation. The figures, along with the methods of collecting them, may vary from time to time. But the fact of inequality—and of the existence of riches alongside poverty—remains.
This brings us to the wider, more fundamental, aspect of the class struggle. In this case we are not discussing a struggle participated in by thousands of trade unionists, which gets the big headlines and has union leaders hurrying to and from Downing Street. We are talking about the ultimate, about the struggle over who owns the means of production and about establishing a new society of common ownership and free access to wealth.
For the present this struggle is the work of a minority, of a few who are aware of what capitalism is and of how it operates. This conscious few know that industrial disputes are not moral issues; they know that workers who strike, and employers who lock out, are simply acting in accordance with their interests in the class struggle. They are expressing the fact that capitalism does not produce its wealth for the benefit of its people, that capitalism is a society of disharmony.
And capitalism continues only because the rest— the unconscious majority—want it to. This was the symbolic quality about those pictures of the engineering workers hammering on the factory gates. The limit of their ambition is another style of exploitation. They are, brothers and sisters, on their way to nowhere.
Ivan
No comments:
Post a Comment