The British working class and its trade unions

What are trade unions? What are they for, and what should they do? Any glib one-line answer would be a glib one-line answer about the British working class as a whole, and that won’t do.

We would never say, “the British working class has no purpose, I don’t like its leaders, I’ll refuse to join it.” So we shouldn’t say those things about the trade unions, either. And the reason is that the British working class created those unions, and the latter are as much a reflection of the former now as they ever were.

British unions are special. Like darts, shove ha’penny and association football they are great British inventions which have been taken across the world, with differing degrees of success.

The specific origins of trade unions here are important. In many countries unions have been set up by employers or governments, or they are divided along religious lines, or they are company unions or works councils. Or there is more than one national trade union centre. Here none of those things has ever applied.

After the Second World War, British trade union leaders set up unions in west Germany, and they give a fascinating glimpse into what those leaders thought an ideal union should look like. Industry-based, not trade-based, and nationally focused, with little attention paid to local organisation. Division was encouraged over unity, certainly not unity with unions in the other part of Germany. 

Differences introduced

In Italy religious differences have been introduced into trade union organisation, and in France political divisions created. Only in Britain have none of these divisions flourished, and only one national centre obtains. But workers do not follow it blindly.

The EU referendum was instructive. Almost all unions did all they could to convince their members (with EU money they didn’t tell their members about) to remain. Yet a great number of trade union members did the opposite and voted to leave. Today, they want an end to mass immigration, but still they allow their unions to encourage it.

In this country trade unions began locally, sometimes very locally. Some embraced one workshop in one trade in one town. They didn’t need to be regional, or national, because they were dealing with a local employer. As employers became regional, and national, unions responded. That’s how they became national unions. 

Having said that unions here have some special characteristics, two countries have unions with some marked similarities to ours: Russia and Cuba.

In both countries trade unions locally organised in a single national centre that pre-dated their revolutions, and, like ours, were created in illegality. Often derided as being agents of a socialist state, they began, and in the Cuban case mainly remain, fiercely independent. Cuba and Russia learned a great deal from British trade unions. What could British workers learn from the history of Cuba and Russia?

The origins of British unions go back well before the Industrial Revolution – the stonemasons who built the cathedrals more than a thousand years ago were among the first to create what were essentially trade unions without the name – but it is with the Industrial Revolution that trade unions became what they are.

Trades

In Britain we talk of trade unions, rather than labour unions, as the Americans and some other countries do. Here unions were specifically created to represent workers in particular trades, ultimately to seek to regulate or even control those trades, not just represent anyone who happened to come to work.

This has sometimes been derided as elitist. Yet it has always been the most skilled in a trade who have led the way against the employers, to be followed by those whose employment is by definition more precarious because it is less skilled.

'The British working class was created by, and in turn created, the Industrial Revolution. And to survive they, we, created trade unions...'

The British working class was created by, and in turn created, the Industrial Revolution. And in order to survive they, we, created trade unions. Had we not, then early industrial capitalism would have destroyed itself because it would have destroyed the working class, it would have starved and worked us to death. Only trade unions stopped that – and it was the first of many times that trade unions saved capitalism.

Workers erected a machinery to stand between them and their brutal employers. And the brutality of those British employers should never be forgotten. Deportations as well as executions for the crime of setting up unions were not uncommon. 

Who likes them?

British unions are unique as an institution in Britain now, because no one likes them. The state doesn’t like unions and is always seeking to criminalise their activities. The law despises them, because they stand for collective, not individual rights. The public seem not to like them, or they would join in greater numbers. The media don’t like them – when did you last see a piece on the news about some good work a union did? 

Even their members don’t like them. But that’s all right as long as criticism is constructive. We only have a limited right to criticise another person’s union. We have more than a right, we have an obligation, to criticise our own. But in the proper sense of criticism: to evaluate, to seek to improve. 

Far too many dilettantes who think they know what they’re talking about criticise endlessly from the sidelines. These are usually people who have never pulled their weight in their own union, if they even belong to one, and never recruited a member. If you’ve no useful suggestion, shut up.

The good and the bad

The trade unions contain everything that is good about the working class, but also everything that is bad about the working class. The courage and clarity of their establishment and organisation are mirrored by their worst outgrowth, social democracy, the desire to live with their employers, ultimately to live with capitalism. 

You could say that social democracy began with the restoration of the monarch in 1660, eleven years after the execution of his father. But trade unions are unique in inventing a collective, institutionalised wish not to run their own country. The institution they invented for this purpose is the Labour Party. Created deceitfully, not to achieve socialism as they said, but to prevent socialism, as they’ve done. Actions speak louder than words.

But trade unions can, and often do, control their own workplaces. A strike should be a taking control of your workplace. But rarely does a union control its industry. We are taught to believe that they should not. How can the government threaten the existence of trade unions, but not the other way round?

Unions are not organs of political change. They are workplace protection. Indeed, if we can’t control even our workplace, how can we control our country? There needs to be a specific organisation created whose sole objective is to address that question of political power. 

How does the working class, for its own safety, achieve real political power, how does it become the ruling class? And the organisation that was created by trade unionists to seek to fulfil that aim is this Party, the CPBML.

Defence, no matter how good, is not enough. Because just like darts, shove ha’penny and football, permanent defence wins no trophies. No matter how good the defence, if you don’t remove the attackers, they’ll just keep coming back. And that is the history of the last 50 years. Of the last 350 years, in fact. What’s new is that capitalism is destroying Britain, industry, sovereignty.

Joining

The issue of the day is recruitment. Why don’t more workers join? Why don’t those who do join, then join in? Are the so-called “new industries” impossible to organise? Yet how can they be more difficult to organise than farm labourers 200 years ago? The real significance of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, perhaps, is that they make you think about all those who didn’t get caught.

Every new industry, every new set of skills, always began without collective organisation of the workers. Individual stonemasons preceded the collective organisation of masons. Agriculture was around for thousands of years before agricultural workers formed unions. Pits, engineering and docks all existed before their respective unions were formed.

Now we are in a period of the creation of new technologies, and new ways of working. There will be a time lag before zero hours contracts, home working and AI can be collectively mastered by being unionised. And many of these problems are old, not new: zero hours contracts are as old as slavery, never mind capitalism, and new technology started with the invention of the wheel.

But the ways to master these modern forms need to be the subject of much and deep discussion among the workers in those fields. What would we say to assist them?

‘One great advance is that, in practice if not in theory, people recognise that there are really only two classes in Britain…’

One great advance has been that, in practice if not in theory, people recognise that there are really only two classes in Britain. Some might prattle on about middle class, or even lower middle class, but as far as unions are concerned everyone except a capitalist, an employer, can, and should join.

Unions have long since ceased to be the preserve of manual workers and now embrace all types of worker – a far better, prouder term than the limp “employee”, or even worse, “member of staff”. If you go out to work for a living, join a union, even if nobody else does (just don’t feel obliged to tell anyone, until you’ve recruited a few). 

A platform

The really difficult thing to say in a trade union is that it’s not an end in itself. It’s a jumping off point, a platform, a base from which to advance. This isn’t to be manipulative, quite the reverse.

The proponents of living with capitalism are the dishonest ones. They don’t say: this is as good as it’s ever going to get; expect no more; let the bosses get on with things and leave us alone. Oh, and get ready for war, that’s what we’re working on now. No, they say none of these things, they say the opposite. They say, vote Labour and we’ll get what we want.

But look where that’s landed us, with the worst Labour government in history, and that’s saying something. The question isn’t why is this Labour government so bad, rather it’s why on earth are we putting up with it? 

It is the British working class that is the issue, the problem, not the unions they have created. But the idea that real progress towards a change of class power could be made without trade union members is fanciful.

At present it’s clear that British workers want progress, they want change. But they want someone else to do it for them. And that’s what really has to change.

• This article is based on the introduction to a CPBML online discussioni meeting in September