In Place of Strife

I know that deconstructing Martin Kettle's Guardian columns is just shooting fish in a barrel, but I'm easily-pleased, so here we go again. In his latest, Kettle imagines that Keir Starmer is embarked on a course of action that could fundamentally change Britain and its economy. This obviously begs the question about Starmer's commitment to fundamental change of any kind. The reason for this progressive optimism is that "The watchword of the industrial relations section of Labour’s election manifesto this year was not conflict but its very opposite: partnership." There isn't, in fact, an industrial relations section in the infamously lightweight manifesto, but one on industrial strategy, a much more vague concept. The partnership described in this section is clearly between government and business, with the role of the former to provide the necessary conditions for the latter to deliver growth. If that proves elusive, the onus will be on government to redouble its efforts. In contrast, trade unions will have a merely advisory role through a probably toothless Strategy Council. The phrase "industrial relations" appears only once in the document and then in the context of the Tories' poor record. 

What the manifesto did emphasise was Labour's "new deal for working people", but this has always been framed as government granting protective rights to typically unorganised labour (e.g. gig workers) rather than removing the restraints of employment law from organised labour. This is something Kettle implicitly recognises - "Employment law reform is not the same thing as trade union power" - but he is reluctant to draw the conclusion that this means there is an industrial relations void at the heart of Labour's policy that the emphasis on partnership cannot fill. This void reflects two realities. First, that the rightwing of the Labour party long ago switched its allegiance from organised labour to business. As Andy Beckett noted, in what is in some ways a rejoinder to Kettle, this has been a criticism of Labour since the 1960s, with its roots in the 1930s (if you accept Ralph Miliband's analysis in full). The second reality is that the trade unions have, since the defeats of the 1980s, pursued an ameliorative strategy that has seen them simultaneously lose members and influence within the party. As the Guardian's political desk are only to happy to point out, the unions are in hock to the party, not the party to the unions.

This context helps explain Kettle's anecdotes about Hugh Scanlon, the leader of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers from 1968 to 1978. Though he was black-balled by the security services for his youthful communist affiliations, and routinely painted as an anti-democratic "baron" by the press, Scanlon was by the 1970s a mildly progressive moderate in the context of union and Labour politics (he was elevated to the House of Lords in 1979). Along with Jack Jones of the TGWU, Scanlon was central to the Social Contract of the mid-1970s, a voluntary agreement between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan and the TUC to restrain wage demands and limit strike action. This proved unable to hold, largely due to the inflationary consequences of the successive oil crises between 1973 and 1979, leading to the rise of unofficial stoppages and eventually the "winter of discontent" in 1978 that famously contributed to the Conservative victory in the general election of the following year. 

The historical point, all too clear in retrospect, is that the partnership of the Social Contract was doomed to failure due to structural forces beyond the contracting parties' control: the geopolitical disruption arising from the Yom Kippur War, the decline in capitalist profitability starting in the late-60s and consequent squeeze on wages, and the beginning of the process of globalisation that would radically reconfigure the UK economy in the succeeding decades. Again, this is a point that Beckett makes in asking whether a centre-left government can ever succeed on its own terms: "Such governments typically try to find a balance between boosting capitalism and regulating it, between redistributing wealth and keeping economic elites content, between making foreign policy more ethical and accepting existing power arrangements." Such a careful balancing act is easily unbalanced by contingent events, which invariably reveal the underlying biases in play. As Beckett notes of Tony Blair, "as soon as he tried to combine this mildly progressive project with more rightwing policies such as the privatisation of public services and participation in American wars, the credibility and coherence of his government were fatally damaged."

One reason for referencing Scanlon is to revisit what Kettle and other centrists, like Will Hutton, imagine to have been the lost opportunities of the 1970s: "One of the prime reasons for Britain’s low productivity is that we have failed to revisit the role of codetermination between employers and employees over issues of workplace and corporate governance." This ignores that codetermination wasn't killed off by the 1977 Bullock Report, which revealed intractable differences between capital and labour, but by the steady erosion of workers' rights in the name of deregulation pursued by central government since then. Even in Germany, its traditional champion, codetermination is on the defensive after the "liberalisation" of employment law through the various Harz reforms. You also have to question Kettle's assumption that codetermination would magically raise productivity, as if the current low levels of the UK owe more to prickly shopfloor relations rather than under-investment and the heavy bias of the economy towards services rather than manufacturing.

The idea of industrial "partnership" has a long history, originating in the reaction against organised labour. Unions were originally presented as a Jacobin threat to the established order in the days of the Combination Acts, but in the later nineteenth century the rhetoric changed towards the idea that organised labour was selfish and lacking in national spirit at a time of imperial expansion. This was exacerbated by the Russian Revolution, which revived the older trope of a malign foreign threat, and culminated in the corporatism of Fascism and Nazism. Milder forms of corporatism were also advocated in the liberal democracies during the 1930s. Unsuprisingly, partnership became the watchword in the UK and US during wartime, when labour was expected to make sacrifices not only for reasons of patriotism but to defend ideals such as democracy itself, despite this being notably absent in industrial relations. That strikes peaked after both World Wars was not coincidental: wartime merely obscured that the opportunity to address the underlying friction between management and workers had not been taken. One predictable result of this was that nationalisation in the UK largely retained the existing management, which brought with it the existing frictions.

In this historical context, a "new deal for working people" is the worst kind of rhetorical nothing, suggesting progress and fairness while excluding those who don't work, as if the population is neatly divided into two groups when the reality is that many are obliged to flit from employment to unemployment and back again while even more are under-employed and reliant on in-work benefits. Kettle's lack of understanding of the contemporary economy leads him to nostalgically imagine a society divided into two blocs: "For too many years, both sides of the divide have preferred a more zero-sum approach. Too many employers have simply been anti-union as well as indifferent to their workforces. Too many unions have seen industrial action as the only way to get what they want. It is why some on the employer side hark back so often to the Thatcher years, and some on the union side to the days when the law was largely kept out of industrial relations. And it is why some on both sides are so slow to change." 

This is the classic centrist "each as bad as the other" lament, but it is also a refusal to acknowledge class interests. Employers aren't anti-union because of a personal lack of virtue, any more than trade unionists are monomaniacs who cannot appreciate the value of negotiation (most "disputes" are settled without recourse to industrial action). It is notable in his sketch that Kettle personalises capital ("employers") but present labour as a collective ("unions"). In other words, labour is a class for itself, and therefore selfish in the eyes of centrists, while capital has no class consciousness and should be understood as simply a set of individual entrepreneurs. Not only does Kettle fail to understand the composition of today's working class, three quarters of whom are not in trade unions, he is unwilling to acknowledge the organised power of capital, despite the ample public evidence of business lobbying of the government to water down the proposed "new deal". It is ironic that Kettle accuses "both sides" of being slow to change, when it is clear that his understanding of industrial relations hasn't altered since he enjoyed an expensive lunch with Hugh Scanlon in the 1980s.