Editorial: Trade Unions in Wartime—and After (1943)

Editorial from the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Judged by membership figures, war, with its busy factories, absence of unemployment, and rising prices, is a good time for trade unions. Total membership increased from 6 millions in 1938 to 7 millions at the end of 1941. The current total will he about 8 millions, of whom 1½ millions are women. Thus the British trade union movement touches again the peak membership reached in 1920, but lost in the depression years that followed. These are imposing figures, though it should be remembered that huge areas of industry are still little touched by organisation, as can be seen from a comparison with the much larger number of men and women insured under the Unemployment scheme. Insured workers totalled over 14 millions before the war, and the number of workers in employment has been increased since the war broke out, in spite of the millions withdrawn for the armed forces

Comparison with the position at the time of the last world war brings out a number of changes. One of these is the growing concentration of trade union membership in a small number of large unions—a development forced on by the concentration of capitalist industry. In 1913, when membership was 4 millions, the number of separate unions was 1,269. Now, with twice the membership, the number of unions has fallen to 983. These figures, however, do not bring out the full extent to which concentration has gone on, for over half the total membership is now to be found in just over a dozen unions, each of which has a membership of 100,000 or more. These include the Transport and General Workers’ Union with about 1,000,000, and several unions with upwards of 500,000. Over 6 million trade unionists are in the 50 unions which have a membership of 25,000 or more. This concentration, which was hastened by the last war, may go further still with such developments as the decision of the Amalgamated Engineering Union to recruit women and the tentative movements towards amalgamation of separate unions on the railways and in retail distributive and other industries. “Big unionism,” however, has not fulfilled all the high hopes of those who sponsored it, and the fear is often expressed that the, race for big membership has been accompanied by a slackening of zeal in the struggle against the employers. This fear has been increased by the close war-time association of the unions with the employers, and of the Trades Union Congress with the Government. The danger has been voiced that the trade unions may become permanently imbued with the idea of collaboration, so that they degenerate into little more than subsidiary organs of capitalist industry and of the Government. This reading of the situation fails to take account of evidence that, although the workers are more or less ready to accept collaboration now, they will strongly react against it when the war is over, if not before. It assumes that the workers can be permanently persuaded to ignore the stark reality of the class struggle based on the fact of capitalist ownership and control, and swallow the illusion of class unity. Sir Stafford Cripps may now address the workers on the Joint Production Committees as “comrades,” but this will soon be forgotten when the struggle resumes its normal intensity in the scramble for markers and profits after the war. In spite of all the official hopes of industrial peace, backed up by the powers of the Government under the various Orders imposing industrial conscription and banning strikes, the number of trade disputes increased from 875 in 1938 to 940 in 1939, 922 in 1940, 1,251 in 1941, and 1,281 in 1942. The number of disputes is actually larger than in the last war, though the number of workers involved, and the number of days lost, are smaller—due to the fact that “the great majority of the stoppages affected only individual establishments and were of short duration” (Ministry of Labour Gazette, January, 1943). In spite of the elaborate arrangements to secure the reference of disputes to arbitration, there is ample evidence that trade unionists have not accepted the defeatist view that they can afford to renounce what is in the last resort their main if not their sole weapon, the strike.

In a different direction, the decision of the Post Office Workers to ignore the 1927 Trade Union Act, which forbids their affiliation to Trades Councils and the Trades Union Congress, may be regarded as a sign of a widespread, if at present obscured, determination among trade unionists to retain their independence after the war.