Politics: Adieu to trade unions? (original) (raw)
Are trade unions dying? Trade unions have been the quintessential institutions of the twentieth-century political economy. But are they Y2K compliant? Will they survive the next century? Even to pose these questions is what the thought-police of the left would call a provocation. I owe almost my entire political life and work to trade unions. I was a militant union leader in the 1970s when I organised the first ever strike at the BBC which took television, radio and World Service news off the air in 1975. I became a TUC union president before I was 30 when I led the National Union of Journalists into its first ever nationwide strike by provincial newspaper journalists in the 1978±9 Winter of Discontent. I worked overseas for trade unions in the 1980s. Firstly, with the Polish Solidarnosc. Then with the South African black trade unions who took apartheid by the economic throat in a manner that the pin-prick attacks of guerrillas could never manage. Finally, in South Korea, in 1987 when a six-week general strike and occupation of factories brought to an end the rule of South Korean generals and ushered in democracy. The activities of workers in Poland and South Africa commanded world attention. The equally historic political intervention by Korean workers was largely ignored even though it helped fatally undermine the claim to authoritarian rule by military leaders in Asia. These biographical notes are set down to underline a personal commitment to trade unionism. In my view, the moral claim and the material need that trade unions seek to formulate in an ever more unequal society remain valid. But the political claim to a place in the organisation of powerdistribution in the modern economy that unions seek to sustain is becoming less and less easy to justify. Unless trade unions reinvent themselves their role in the twenty-firstcentury political economy will get smaller and smaller. The old language of writing about unions in Britain was to describe their leaders as barons, forcing weak kings, a.k.a. prime ministers, to do their bidding. The
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Worldwide Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Studies | Published by: Dama Academic Scholarly & Scientific , 2020
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The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century.
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