Like a stillborn child, the National Union of Railwaymcn's strike simply lacked the nutrition to keep it alive. And if it had lived for any time, its strength would have been quickly sapped by some debilitating social viruses.
There was. to begin with, the matter of the NUR’s tradition. Not since 1926 had the union called an indefinite national stoppage; a more usual tactic had been to threaten a strike and enforce a discussion with the Prime Minister of the day, from which both sides would emerge apparent victors and agree to co-operate in an enquiry. But in 1982 the government, far from sending Thatcher to talk with the NUR. is exerting determined pressure on them. British Rail’s stand on the matter of wages was given strength by the government’s refusal to subsidise any concessions at a time when, in pace with the industry’s decline, the railway unions are already in retreat. With the shrinking of steel and engineering, freight carried on the railways has fallen since 1960 from 16 billion tonne miles to 11 billion. Since the railways were nationalised the work force has been cut by about 450,000.
This depression has had its effect on railway workers’ wages; signalmen and shunters have fallen from 13th place among manual workers to 21st. Total earnings of railwaymen are now often below the level at which they qualify for Family Income Supplement. In other words, they are being worked progressively harder for less in terms of real wages, some of them at starvation level. And each negotiation for more pay is surrounded and bedevilled by the employers' demands for more intense work, with the railwaymen condemned as Luddites and worse if they don't immediately accept these conditions.
The NUR’s weakness was personified by its General Secretary Sid Weighell, who is famous for the terrier-like acerbity with which he deals with the other railway unions and with those of his members who are "militants" — which often means that they want to resist any downward pressure on their working conditions. In spite of his confident cry, as the strike began, that "Our case is overwhelming”, it is no secret that Weighell was vastly relieved when the NUR conference accepted what he saw as reality and common sense and decided to take the issue back to the industry’s arbitration machinery.
This did not case the pressure on the railwaymen. British Rail soon announced the withdrawal of their original low offer of a rise and said loftily that it was no concern of theirs if the the NUR chose to go to arbitration; they would not discuss the matter again until the union had given way over “productivity” — more intense exploitation. Tory chairman Cecil Parkinson, in a speech positively rotten with false assumptions and non sequiturs, unblushingly threatened that a patriotism newborn through the Falklands war “. . . will not take lightly the return to the pursuit of self-interest over the national good”. (He was not discussing members of the Stock Exchange, or the royal family at Ascot or the firms which sold all those weapons to Argentina.)
In sober reality, history is not at present on the side of the railway workers. Railways were once part of the romance of Victorian capitalism. Their competition finished off the canals in the late 19th century and for the next 50 years they were integral to the economic and social fabric. "In South Lancashire", wrote M. Robbins (The Railway Age), "people associated the London and North Western with the Church and the Conservatives; the Midland with Chapel and the Liberals”. There were few admitted to be railway workers; those who laboured to produce the profits for the shareholders were referred to as servants of the company and were expected to forego too uncouth a preoccupation with their material welfare for the paternalism of the company. In 1871, when the economy was booming, when unemployment was low and recently passed legislation seemed to put them on a secure footing, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was formed. In theory this was a Friendly Society (its patron was the Earl de la Warr) which did not intend to organise strikes. At the time, a normal working week for a guard could be 90 hours.
The boom collapsed a few years later and from 1876 wages were cut and hours increased. One result of this was the reduction of ASRS membership from 17,000 in 1872 to 6,000 in 1882; another was the formation in 1880 of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) and later, in 1889, of the General Railway Workers Union in direct opposition to the ASRS. In most cases the employers refused to recognise or negotiate with the unions; the general manager of the London and North Western told the 1893 Royal Commission on Labour: "You might as well have trade unions in Her Majesty’s Army as have it in the railway service” — an apt comment, in view of the hard conditions and the quasi-military assumptions of employment on the railways.
This attitude was expressed in the action of the Taff Vale Railway Company in 1900. when they sued the ASRS for damages following a strike in which there was some violence. Against all expectations, the company won £23,000 damages from the ASRS — a judgement which struck at the heart of all trade union activity. Every strike has to cause damage somewhere and there is. of course, no parallel provision in the law for unions to claim redress for the effects of a lockout nor for those of a company closing down. The Taff Vale judgement has much to answer for, since it motivated the founding of the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party and of all those governments which consistently fought the working class and the interests of trade unionists.
The National Union of Railwaymen was formed in 1913 from the combination of three out of the then five unions in the industry. Among the many ironies accompanying the event is the fact that it was hailed as a venture into industrial unionism — the establishment of one trade union to cover an entire industry as a step towards the working class taking over the means of production. Some craft unions remained outside the NUR, as did ASLEF and the Railway Clerks’ Association (now the TSSA). Traditionally (and the railways are a great place for tradition) there is little love lost between ASLEF and the NUR. Sid Weighell recently called the ASLEF president a liar, at which the offended man threatened to pick Weighell up by his braces and drop him down a lift shaft.
During the First World War the importance of the railways to the British capitalist class was asserted when they were taken under state control. The war emergency offered the unions a chance to improve wages, and the railwaymen emerged, in 1918, among the better paid sections of the working class. In 1921 the Railway Act, which effectively ended state control, imposed a measure of government influence by reducing the 120-odd companies into four groups, each with a territorial monopoly and allowing for the government to keep an eye on the rates charged by the railways. A negotiating procedure was defined which was greeted with relief as the end of disputes in the industry, on the mistaken assumption that strikes are caused by the absence of machinery to negotiate the conflicts away. This assumption was soon exposed in the post-war slump, as the new, larger and more powerful companies responded to the fall in traffic by cutting wages, sacking workers and imposing longer hours on those who were left.
This process was cynically called “rationalisation”. Although the unions resisted it there were few strikes and one which was called, just as the first Labour government were taking office in 1924, was doomed because the NUR accepted the lower wages and kept services going against the striking ASLEF men. In 1928 the NUR agreed to a 2½ per cent wage cut. an agreement described by their general secretary as “the best ever made”. He was probably referring to the fact that there was an undertaking to restore the cuts when business got more profitable; but when the unions asked for this, in 1934, they were again resisted by the companies. There was then the growing competition from the road haulage industry, boosted by the experience of it during the war. NUR conference delegates were warned by their secretary, John Marchbank, that if they struck there would be no road stoppage and that many NUR members would be "walking the streets” afterwards — words which might well be used today by Weighell.
The railways were again taken understate control during the Second World War and soon after the NUR's longstanding dream of nationalisation came true. After the years of cuts, sacking, closures and battling against the railway workers, only the politically misinformed would see an unpredictable irony in the hopes which inspired that dream:
Ideologically, public ownership was regarded as the gateway to a new society, in which there would be greater plenty and less hardship for the toiling masses. Materially, the unions and their members. . . hoped that the elimination of profits would bring them higher wages and better working conditions, that State control would ensure full employment . . .(Nationalised Industry and Public Ownership, W. A. Robson).
In contrast, the reality has been a continuing struggle against the stale machine which had taken over from the private groups. The NUR threatened a strike in 1953. in an effort to improve a low wage offer. A hastily set up Court of Enquiry secured them a much higher offer. In 1958, when the employers rejected a pay claim, a strike was averted by yet another enquiry, which recommended that railway wages should be set by reference to "comparable” jobs in other industries. This was greeted as a “common sense" solution which would eternally remove all conflict. But in 1965 it clashed with the “common sense" of the Wilson government's pay policy, which was to restrict rises to those cases where the workers could prove they were working harder, no matter what was happening in “comparable" industries. There was another threat to strike, averted by Wilson’s personal intervention. The Labour Prime Minister kept the union officials talking on beer and sandwiches (Tory Premier Macmillan had beaten them with tear-swept memories of the Flanders battles of 1914/18) until they all agreed to yet another enquiry which would produce a report to be greeted as an eternal piece of "common sense".
The plight of the unions, then, is not the making of any feeble, or militant, leaders, nor of transport ministers getting their own back for past concessions. Railways were once dominantly powerful in capitalism and had that sort of glamour. Now they struggle, with the help of Jimmy Savile, against the drab image of the outmoded. None of this has anything to do with their usefulness to people or their material efficiency; it is all judged by their contribution to the overall profitability of British capitalism. By these standards their future looks pretty precarious. This is no time to be playing at trains.
Ivan
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