BA strike at Warton (1984)

From the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

For three weeks during the height of summer the local communities where the employees of the Warton Division of British Aerospace live were buzzing with talk of “the strike". This is the time of year when most of the local carnivals are held, when brass bands, rosebud competitions, Morris dancing and a host of other pleasant things are supposed to put all thoughts of discord and strife into the background. This strike, however, was not the miners' strike, which is still with us, but involved so-called white-collar staff, members of AUEW-TASS. Compared to the prolonged miners' dispute the local Warton affair inevitably looks small beer. It only just managed to reach the national press, its start and finish being briefly reported in a few inside page sentences. The idea of white collar workers with degrees and smooth, uncalloused hands withdrawing their labour was almost unthinkable a generation ago. Times have indeed changed. Earlier this year a similar strike at Westlands, the helicopter firm based at Yeovil, lasted four weeks. The GCHQ situation at least shows how civil service employees have become unionised. The writer can even recall a long dispute involving the drawing office at Handley Page in the late 1950s, but that was really exceptional for those times.

Since 1970 when certain departments at Warton organised under the TASS banner there have been a series of actions such as go-slows and one-day stoppages, so that the final resort to a strike should have surprised no one. The situation which escalated quickly into a major confrontation started with a course of computer software training. Many who were put on this course came from the production side (the factory floor), reflecting the increasing importance of newer branches of technology in comparison with traditional industrial skills. As a result of the long period during which the shop floor unions have exhibited greater militancy, newly trained operators transferred from production were found in many cases to be on higher rates of pay than workers with some years experience of computer software operation. This led the union ( TASS) to demand a pay adjustment and the employers in turn to stall, saying that this could not be considered until the next round of pay negotiations at the end of the year. TASS then applied a policy of refusing to operate what was termed "new technology”. The company- responded by suspending those who refused to perform tasks within their job descriptions. The next TASS move was rather more controversial; suspended members were temporarily appointed as union officials and thus remained on site although not working, contrary to company rules on suspensions. A strike became inevitable when this breach of rules was used as an excuse to sack workers, but a stoppage would obviously have occurred anyway had the suspension policy been carried to its logical conclusion. The point here is that the company was in fact disciplining individuals for taking part in a collective industrial action.

The strike ended after a package had been agreed including unconditional reinstatement of all sacked and suspended employees but on the question of pay only offering to accelerate talks on a new structure. It still remains to be seen whether anything will be gained in the end. At the time rumours were rife that the employers planned to reduce the workforce and had engineered the strike situation to help towards this end. The projected merger with GEC was mentioned as a possible reason for a policy of contraction. However the current situation was that short term commitments had led to contract labour being employed in certain areas. Unless it was proposed to back out of these contracts the firm could scarcely consider losing the suspended workers permanently, contract labour being considerably more expensive. There is also the brain drain of young able workers to more lucrative contract work overseas. Israel. West Germany and the United States are the most popular places at present. Here the firm is probably unable and certainly unwilling to compete. Therefore it was always likely that reinstatement would be the outcome. Where however TASS do appear to have been successful is in disproving the persistent idea, widely held outside the actual membership, that despite all the evidence accumulated over the previous 14 years, the union need not be taken seriously. One head of department put it like this: "When their wives hear that there will be no pay packet next week, they will clonk them one and that will sort it all out”.

By comparison with the miners' strike certain similarities and also certain differences can be noted. The former are the more fundamental but there is value in discussing points from both categories. There have been some strikes which arose purely from sectional rivalry and which were not in the interests of the working class. The great majority, however, are directly attributable to the subject status of the workers under capitalism. There is no other means open to the workers to gain access to the means of living than to sell their labour power to the capitalists in return for a wage or salary. There is an inevitable struggle to increase the price of this labour power (and reduce the capitalist's profit margin resulting from the difference between wages and the value of the work actually performed) sometimes by striking or otherwise producing more slowly than the employers wish. Viewed like this there is no basic difference between the Warton strike and any others.

Indeed it can be argued that in one respect Warton actually puts one over the current miners’ dispute. The NUM protest centres on pit closures and impinges on reformist politics by implicitly arguing for a different energy policy (a greater use of coals from seams harder and therefore more expensive to mine) from that favoured by the government. On the other hand TASS has compromised itself in the recent past by joining hands with the employers in begging for government funding for new aircraft projects. As the Lytham St Annes Express put it (19 July 1984):

It is perhaps ironic that many of the men and women who went on strike in Warton's "Black June" were among those who fought most fiercely to aid the “Save British Aerospace" campaign launched last year.

And while no violence occurred. Warton saw both picketing and a police presence which the strikers rightly regarded as provocative. Generally speaking lorry drivers turned back of their own accord when they saw the official picket line. The refusal of drivers to deliver aircraft fuel led to a request from the firm that different drivers be sent next time! In the main the only awkward ones (who insisted on going in) were from small local firms staffed by non-union labour.

The differences arose largely from the inexperience of the strikers. Whereas miners from bitter experience have come to expect fairly frequent strikes and make communal provisions to ease the inevitable hardship, the Warton technicians had never really faced up to the possibility and had mostly made commitments to house purchase and so on which assumed continuation of current levels of finance well into the future. At Warton lack of solidarity was also apparent although in a somewhat different form to the NUM. The problem for TASS has been its inability to recruit members evenly throughout the technical area. In areas where membership was weak, those who were in the union tended to drift back after a few days and hand in their union cards. This sort of situation has obvious dangers as it opens the way for the employers to maintain a tolerable level of work overall by transferring labour from non-union departments. Contingency plans to do this were allegedly in preparation, but the virtually complete solidarity of the strike within the drawing office and among all but the newest recruits in the stress office meant a virtual halt to design work. But greater solidarity will obviously be necessary before a longer stoppage could be contemplated.

So-called junior management were put into an unusual position by the strike. These are group leaders whose job it is to decide on the share of work within their area of responsibility. Consequently their decisions could directly lead to suspensions. Yet whatever title they are given they are clearly members of the working class in no fundamentally different position to those whose efforts they supervise. Indeed many have recognised this to the extent of trying to organise themselves within TASS in what are termed Senior Staff Branches. During the Warton strike the local senior staff branch found itself unable to join and limited itself to advising members not to undertake work normally done by those on strike. This naturally caused some resentment among the strikers who expected fuller support from fellow union members, but the membership of what is known locally as Supertass is not yet widespread enough to adequately protect individuals who may have been disciplined by the employers. The main point here is that there is a growing recognition by sections of the working class who have previously adopted superior "middle class" attitudes, that they are in fact in basically the same position in society as the rest of their class. Maybe organising within different branches (effectively not greatly different from being in different unions) is not a good idea, but a further development of this encouraging trend will reduce the friction which has developed. A revealing incident occurred when the chief stressman criticised group leaders because fewer TASS members had been suspended in his department than elsewhere. "I get the feeling that you aren't going to do this, but it’s your job to do it" he said.

One of the things highlighted by the dispute was the persistence of the idea that a solution could be found that would not only end the immediate conflict but prevent any confrontations in the future. Those who talked like this, as though the strike had arisen only because of stupidity on both sides, were ignoring the class structure of capitalism where capital and labour clash as buyers and sellers of labour power and capital lives on the difference between what labour produces and receives. An illustration of this ignorance was the objections raised to making an interim payment to bring the more disadvantaged workers up to the level of those transferred from the shop floor. This, it was argued, would merely lead to other groups claiming they were hard done by, taking action themselves and the process would never stop. Internecine struggles often take place as one section of workers seek to keep another in their place. At Warton some strikers tended to sec the issue in these narrow terms rather than as part of a larger inevitable conflict. Expanding class-consciousness. backed up with the intensive efforts on the political field by the Socialist Party, will ensure that the bitterness between various sections of the working class gives way to an unshakeable realisation of the essentially common interests of all workers everywhere.

E C Edge