The trade union story: 1945-1997 – From fifth estate to enemy within
The election of a majority Labour government in 1945 appeared to herald what a later historian of the Labour Party would call a New Jerusalem. The incoming government had 393 MPs and enjoyed a majority of 146 over all other parties combined. In a few short years it was able to take into public ownership the Bank of England (1946), the coal mines (1947), the electricity and gas industries (1948 and 1949), the railways (1948) and the steel industry (1950), while also setting up a National Health Service (1948). By the time it next faced the electorate, the government had nationalised some 20% of the economy and made a further two million people public employees.
Since the British economy had been all but bankrupted by six years of war, all this was no mean achievement, and it largely fulfilled the trade unions’ long-standing demands on economic matters. On trade union issues, however, Labour’s record in office was less radical. In 1946, the government repealed the Trades Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927, allowing civil service trade unions to rejoin the TUC and reintroducing an “opt out” in place of an “opt in” arrangement for union political funds. But faced with an economic crisis in 1947 as the impact of Britain’s indebtedness to the United States became clear and a harsh winter led to fuel shortages across the country, the government turned towards austerity measures, and in 1948 introduced a wage freeze. The TUC accepted the freeze without enthusiasm, understanding its necessity, but aware of the hostility this would provoke from many rank and file members.
FULL EMPLOYMENT: THE PEACEFUL YEARS
The second world war had transformed the standing of trade unions in British society. The political consensus that emerged included a corporatist approach which favoured involving workers’ representatives in decision-making, and a commitment to full employment. This was not simply an approach favoured by the 1945 Labour government. It was also endorsed in the then Conservative opposition’s Industrial Charter, published in 1947, which with its talk of industrial co-partnership and joint production councils set the tone of the party’s approach to trade unions for 30 years. The document even proposed a Workers’ Charter setting out good practice for employers to follow, with more than a hint that those who failed to do so should not expect to win public sector contracts.
As the austerity of the 1940s gave way to greater prosperity and full employment, the number of trade union members also rose, from just under 8 million in 1945 to pass the 10 million mark in 1962 and on again to 11 million by the end of the decade. Trade union influence in the workplace even began to find a reflection in popular culture – from the 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit, in which managers and unions join forces to prevent the inventor of a new miracle fabric from ruining their industry, to the Boulting brothers’ I’m All Right Jack of 1959 featuring the actor Peter Sellers’ portrayal of change-resistant shop steward Fred Kite.
The 1950s and early 1960s were not entirely without disputes. In 1955 a strike by maintenance engineers and electricians halted national newspaper production for four weeks; the train drivers’ union ASLEF brought its members out for a fortnight the same year; and in 1958 bus workers brought London Transport to a halt for seven weeks in a dispute over pay. In all these disputes, however, the TUC attempted to play the role of ‘honest broker’, seeking a negotiated settlement rather than whipping up support in the wider trade union movement for sympathy strikes. Perhaps the most visible sign of the unions’ incorporation into national life, however, came in 1962 when the Conservative Government established the National Economic Development Council (swiftly nicknamed Neddie) as a tripartite body of union, employer and government representatives. Neddie would be at the eye of all future economic storms until the incoming Thatcher government sidelined it in the 1980s and it was finally abolished in 1992.
By the end of the 1960s, however, the world of work was changing rapidly – not least because of the rising number of women in employment. In 1968, 850 women machinists at the Ford car factory in Dagenham struck successfully for equal pay. Their campaign inspired the Equal Pay Act of 1970, and opened up a whole new area of industrial relations.
REORGANISING THE UNIONS
While trade union membership cycled through periods of growth and decline throughout the twentieth century, the number of trade unions headed inexorably downwards as mergers and amalgamations led to the creation of fewer, larger organisations. Trade union numbers had halved in the first half of the twentieth century, from more than 1,300 at its beginning to fewer than 800 by 1945. The vast number of unions in existence in the early years of the century had proved to be a weakness for trade unionism as a whole. Many small organisations lacked the resources to sustain even a small, localised dispute, were often in dispute with each other over which union had the rights to organize and represent certain groups of workers, and lacked a professional infrastructure. In the wake of the 1926 general strike, the TUC had agreed to encourage union amalgamations, and in 1939 it adopted the Bridlington Principles, which were aimed at preventing unions competing for members or straying into other industries.
Despite a continued programme of amalgamations (in which two unions come together to create a new, third union) and mergers (in which one union is wound up and transfers its engagements to a second, usually larger union), in 1962, the TUC adopted a more aggressive policy of rationalisation, sponsoring a series of conferences which set in progress amalgamation or closer working among fourteen groups of unions. As a result, many older unions were to disappear forever, the boilermakers, who could trace their history back to 1834, joining forces with the shipwrights’ and blacksmiths’ unions in 1963, while the pivotal Amalgamated Engineering Union amalgamated with the foundry workers and draughtsmen in 1971 after many years of negotiations. This process of merger and amalgamation has continued on, through periods of membership rise and fall, through full employment and high unemployment. By 2008, there were just 167 trade unions.
Coupled with this, the decline of old industries and the rise of new, mostly white-collar jobs brought about a fundamental shift in trade unionism. The long decline of the Lancashire cotton industry saw the Amalgamated Weavers Association reduced from some 219,000 members at its peak in the 1920s to just 33,000 by 1968. The miners and railwaymen, also both long-standing stalwarts of the trade union movement, also saw their numbers much reduced. At first the trade union movement was slow to make up these numbers by recruiting elsewhere. During the 1950s and early 1960s, white collar jobs grew at a much faster rate than white collar union membership. However, between 1964 and 1970, white collar union membership grew by more than a third, while the number of white-collar jobs increased by less than 5%. By 1979, about 44% of all white-collar workers were union members, and 40% of all trade union members were in white collar jobs.
A further shift in trade union organisation came about as a result of the Labour government’s Royal Commission on Trade Unions. Set up in 1965, the Donovan Commission was intended to address concern about the growing number of unofficial strikes, organized at local level but without the official sanction of union governing bodies. Its report, in 1968, said there were two systems of industrial relations: an official one, in which national union leaders sat down with industry and government but had little real control over what happened on the shop floor, and an unofficial one in which shop stewards wielded real power in the workplace and in negotiations with managers. Its solution, largely adopted over the next few years, was for unions to bring the unofficial shop steward networks within their official structures by providing training and support to local officials, and for a more formal recognition of plant and company level industrial relations.
However, a further Government white paper put forward by the Employment Secretary, Barbara Castle, and titled In Place of Strife, proved to be too much. Its call for compulsory pre-strike ballots and a central board able to force settlements in industrial disputes provoked in-fighting within the Labour Government and the unions and may well have been a factor in the Conservative election victory of 1970.
THE 1970s: ‘OUT BROTHERS, OUT…’
By 1970, the Conservative Party’s attitude towards trade unions had undergone a complete reversal. That year’s general election brought to power a Government committed to cutting trade unions down to size. By the end of the decade, the unions themselves had brought down two governments and their membership numbers were at an all-time high.
In 1971, the Conservative Government introduced an Industrial Relations Act which required trade unions to register with a government-appointed body and established a National Industrial Relations Court able to ban strikes and force the settlement of disputes. Led by the TUC, the unions launched a massive campaign to ‘Kill the Bill’, resulting in a one-day strike by 1.5 million engineering workers and an instruction to member unions to refuse to comply with the law. The Transport and General Workers Union was fined twice for contempt of court over its refusal to register under the Act, and the conflict came to a head when five dockers’ shop stewards were imprisoned for failing to appear before the National Industrial Relations Court. Amid a massive campaign of strikes and protests, the official solicitor eventually went to the prison in person and exercised almost forgotten powers to have the ‘Pentonville Five’ released.
Forced into retreat on the legal front, the Government also suffered defeat at the hands of the National Union of Mineworkers when, in January 1972, 280,000 miners walked out after rejecting a pay offer. Amid power cuts and following the declaration of a state of emergency by the Government, they returned to work having rung an additional 15% out of the National Coal Board at the end of February 1972. Two years later, yet another pay dispute saw the miners out on strike once again. This time, Prime Minister Edward Heath called the unions’ bluff and called a general election, asking voters to decide ‘Who governs?’ The electorate’s response was to return Labour’s Harold Wilson to power in Heath’s place, and after 16 weeks, the miners ended their strike with a 35% pay rise. The Industrial Relations Act was repealed before the end of the year.
The 1970s have a reputation as a period of industrial militancy. By comparison with the previous four decades it is a well-deserved reputation. But in fact the number of days lost to strikes during the decade was never as bad as it had been in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Even so, the success of the unions in winning concessions and pay rises for their members did wonders for recruitment. Between 1970 and the end of the decade, trade union membership rose by nearly 3 million, peaking at 12,947,000 in 1980.
Wilson’s government took a more conciliatory approach to trade unions, introducing a right for local union representatives to paid time off work for training in industrial relations and health and safety. But it also had to confront the continuing problem of Britain’s industrial decline. The spiral of rising wages being passed on to customers through rising prices made inflation a significant problem, and worsened the difficulties of exporters as British goods were now comparatively expensive. The Government tried to address this first through voluntary wage restraint on the part of the unions, and when this failed through a stronger ‘social contract’ with the TUC which set limits on pay rises. But in the wake of a series of public sector strikes over the winter of 1978-79, the government fell – and the long rise of trade unionism came to a sudden and abrupt halt.
PUBLIC SERVICE UNIONS
Public service trade unions were the great success story of the post-war years. The Confederation of Health Service Employees, created through a 1946 amalgamation, increased its membership from fewer than 30,000 at the outset to some 230,000 by the early 1980s. Similarly, the National Union of Public Employees entered the post-war era with 130,000 members and forty years later could claim 690,000, while the National Association of Local Government Officers had 140,000 members in 1946 and 850,000 at its peak in the 1980s. NALGO’s expansion had been helped by its decision to join the TUC in 1964, but even unions which remained on the outside benefited. The Royal College of Nursing, which remains outside the TUC today, had 45,355 members in 1948 and. Elsewhere in the public sector, trade unions representing teachers, civil servants and other groups all saw their membership figures take off in the three and a half decades after 1945.
In part the growth in public service trade unionism was a reflection of the fact that there were vastly more jobs in local and national government, education and the public provision of healthcare than there had ever previously been. But public service employers were also more prepared to operate a ‘check off’ system which allowed union subscriptions to be deducted directly from a member’s pay. For the unions this solved the perennial problem that new members would sign up with enthusiasm but eventually cease to pay their subscriptions through apathy. Under check off, apathy worked in favour of continued membership. But the system also meant that most members were increasingly unlikely to take an active part in their union, while the unions were more dependent on employers’ assistance. Cut off from the unions’ internal decision-taking processes, the views of these largely passive members were often not reflected in the policies put forward by unions’ national and local leaderships. Worse, when in 1993 British Rail decided to withdraw check-off facilities, it threatened the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union with a potential loss of subscriptions from 85,000 members. It was only saved from financial meltdown by a good computerised membership system and an effective campaign to convince members that they should pay in other ways.
AFTER 1979: DECLINE AND FALL
The Conservative Government that came to power in 1979 did not immediately set out on a mission to destroy the unions. Jim Prior, who served as Margaret Thatcher’s first Employment Secretary from 1979-81, was often reported to be at odds with his prime minister, who felt he was sufficiently robust in his approach. But the economic recession that arrived hard on the heels of Mrs Thatcher’s entry into 10 Downing Street sent trade union membership into freefall as not just companies but whole industries collapsed. Massive cuts in public spending and the contracting out of many public services to private firms also struck at the heart of the unions’ in their public sector strongholds. During the course of the 1980s, trade unions lost nearly three million members, and by the early 1990s membership numbers were back to those last seen during the second world war.
With her own position in power cemented by the removal of Cabinet-level opposition within her own party, Mrs Thatcher exploited the unions’ weakening position to introduce a raft of new laws. Through a series of Trade Union and Employment Acts, unions now found themselves forced to hold postal ballots before industrial action, to elect their most senior officials at five-yearly intervals, and to hold regular ballots of members over the continued existence of their political funds. All of this made it difficult for unions to act quickly and effectively on behalf of their members. Coupled with their exclusion at national level from any hope of influencing government, they found weaker than at any time since the aftermath of the 1926 General Strike. Yet there were a number of unexpectedly beneficial consequences of these reforms – not least in helping to ensure that the leaderships of trade unions became more representative of their members. To give an extreme example, the health union COHSE had previously operated a form of indirect democracy under which members of its national executive were elected by regional delegate conferences of branch activists. As a result, by the mid-1980s, while 80% of the union’s members were women, its 26-strong national executive included 23 men and there were few female full-time officials. The legal obligation to hold postal ballots of individual members meant that, for the first time, the union had to compile a database of all members and that by the time it amalgamated with NALGO and NUPE in 1993 to create Unison, the majority of its executive and a far higher proportion of its full-time officials were women.
Once again, however, the main point of confrontation between the organized labour movement and a Conservative government was in the coalfields. Early in 1984, the National Coal Board announced that it was planning to close twenty pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Strike action began at Manvers in South Yorkshire, with miners at Cortonwood and other collieries in the area soon joining the dispute. Within a week, the National Union of Mineworkers had declared a national strike, and its president, Arthur Scargill, urged members across the country to join it. In the absence of a ballot, many Nottinghamshire miners refused to halt work, severely weakening the union’s position. The Government also took a tough line, mobilising massed ranks of police officers to deny NUM pickets the victories they had been able to achieve in earlier disputes, and declaring the striking miners to be ‘the enemy within’. It even used MI5 to tap union leaders’ phones. The year-long strike left a bitter legacy within the trade union movement and more generally in the country. But by the time it ended, the NUM was in dire straits, its power broken and its ability to defend its members’ jobs destroyed. In due course, pit closures and privatisation would reduce NUM membership from more than a quarter of a million in 1979 to just 5,000 today.
The defeat of the miners was a blow to the morale of the labour movement. This was compounded by the defeat of the print unions in their dispute with News International in 1986, and by the continuing decline in trade union membership. Between 1979 and its eventual merger with Amicus (itself a merger of the engineering unions, print unions and others) in 2007, the Transport and General Workers Union alone lost more than one million members. And by the time the next Labour Government came to power in 1997, overall union membership had declined to just 8 million. Unlike previous Labour governments, this one made few promises to the unions. Although it did deliver some respite from the worst excesses of the union-hostile legislation of the 1980s, its main efforts were focused on improving the lot of working people rather than strengthening their institutions – making it more difficult to dismiss employees, introducing a national minimum wage and improving maternity rights. The effect has been to slow the decline of trade union membership. By 2008, there were a total of 7,628,000 trade union members in 167 trade unions, and by 2023 there were 5.5 million members in 128 trade unions.