PICTURE the scene: You make a mild comment about union power and how the Government is right to continue efforts to curb it lest we return to the bad old days of the seventies when the nation was held to ransom by the “barons” of the labour movement.
A bloke next to you, with a grey beard and bristling demeanour turns and says: “Union power? Don’t talk to me about union power. My grandfather, a shop steward at Robb’s shipyard in Leith plunged to his death through faulty scaffolding in 1943 and because it was wartime there was no inquiry and no compensation.
“My mother, who had been accepted to study science at Heriot-Watt College, had to give up her dreams and become the breadwinner. She found herself in the line at the VAT 69 bottling plant where the women were forcibly searched at the end of every shift and ordered not to use chewing gum in case they dipped it in the passing whisky.
“Don’t talk to me about the seventies and unions holding the country to ransom.”
As you sidle away from this stranger’s angry tirade you hear references to him reporting on the miners’ strike, someone called Debs having a dream and something called Peterloo. You make your escape, realising that not everyone favours yet more curbs on the trade unions.
And yet many do, which is why the Conservative Government believes it can get away with further curbs on unions levying their dues in the public sector. It is the natural next step, having largely neutralised unions in the private sector. In the near-future battles over not just public sector jobs but welfare assaults on the poor, these unions will rightly play a role.
And yet, bizarrely, we get breathless coverage of the supposed evils of Amazon as an overbearing employer, prompting disquiet and knowing nods and murmurs about boycotting the internet retailer, from the same people who are down on trade unions. As our American friends would say, go figure.
But then, the United States broke and imprisoned union leader Eugene V. Debs — the dream mentioned above is a Jack London story — who said at his sentencing hearing in 1918: “Your Honour, years ago I recognised my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth.
“I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
He did not long survive his ten year sentence, nor did the health of US trade unionism, which was corrupted into cronyism. By 1970 US union membership stood at 17 points below the average of developed countries. By 1987 the gap was 37 points.
Jeff Bezos has ridden his Amazon wave on being at the front of massive technological and social changes but he would never have got away with his megalomaniac tendencies in a unionised culture. What Amazon does, shocking though it seems to the easily shocked, is simply what most companies will get away with given the chance. The only difference is scale and technology.
In the fifties and sixties "time and motion" experts brandishing clipboards became a staple of popular humour, but overzealous checks on worker output go back to building the pyramids. Think of the term “ca' canny" in mining as a way of resisting this, or of Alexey Stakhanov in Russia, the comrade celebrated and later reviled for always meeting his targets.
Yes, it is shocking and wrong that underpaid warehouse workers are computer tracked as they cover a half marathon on a nightshift, subjected to zero hours contracts and minimalist wages.
The answer is not hand-wringing and talk of boycotts of any single company. It is to even out the battle by making it easier for trade unions to operate properly, fighting for their members' rights. If Jeremy Corbyn becomes Labour leader, and wins power — the former likely, the latter perhaps less so — there is a chance that we will once again seek to redress the balance of workplace power at UK level.
In Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been keen to embrace the unions and invoke the spirit of German-style tri-partisan cooperation between Government, employers and unions.
But don't hold your breath for that happening under this Westminster Government which is still going in the opposite direction, tightening trade union legislation legislation ever further and encouraging rapacious, tax-dodging companies who will back the doctrine which places an elephant on one side of the scales.
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