Gill Ursell

Processes of Decision Making in a Trade-Union Branch

Whether the loci of power are to be found within the rank and file membership or the branch leadership in a British trade union are investigated by focussing upon the decision-making processes attendant upon four decisions. Comparison of the processes characterizing different decisions reveals significant shifts in the loci of power within the branch structure. Some decisions are shown to favour more bureaucratic handling with minimal membership participation, while others tend to draw authority away from the branch leadership. Tendencies to bureaucratic elitism are shown to be inhibited by (a) the leaderships dependence upon membership support for the implementation of many decisions, and (b) ambiguities and tensions in the formal organizational structure which are revealed under conditions of extreme pressure. Attention is also paid to the theoretical issue of whether decision type can be seen to affect organizational structure, or vice versa.

State, Capital and Labour: Changing Patterns of Power and Dependence

An empirical and theoretical investigation into the factors responsible for the changes in the fortunes of British Labour in relation to State and capital.

The Century of Industrialisation

This chapter indicates the inappropriateness of imparting too much homogeneity to the three interest groups of state, capital and labour. During much of the period under discussion, labour is clearly divisible into those scarce skilled trades on which unionism was founded, and the mass of unskilled labour, a substantial proportion of whom were impoverished by the social experience, if not the economic rewards, deriving from industrialisation. Indeed, during the early period of industrial growth the upper echelons of the artisan class are barely distinguishable from those small masters who comprised such an important segment of capital. Both the objective mobility between these groups (with some skilled workers becoming small masters during prosperous times and returning to employed status at others) and the vertical bonding which took place by skilled workers adopting the outlook, values and aspirations of those immediately above them, acted to obscure, the delineation of capital and labour. Similarly, the state may be identified as a diverse institution with, for example, the judiciary often acting against the spirit, if not the letter, of legislation emerging from Parliament.

The Impact of the Two World Wars

The First World War seems to have come as a shock to the government of Britain. In spite of the increasingly large public expenditures of the previous three decades on the Royal Navy, and in spite of the emergence of its own military-industrial complex, Britain entered the First World War almost wholly unprepared for it. This sprang largely from the inability of Britain’s military advisers to consider anything but past glories, glories, moreover, of the 18th century rather than the 19th. As French’s (1986) investigations reveal, Liberal military policies in 1914 reiterated those of the 18th century in giving primacy to the role of the Navy to keep the seas open, and to financial and banking support of continental allies whose armies would do the main land-fighting. Britain went into the war with a Navy confident of a short, sharp and successful engagement with the German fleet, and a small professional army not expecting to be called out but grooming their horses just in case. In the event, the German fleet proved equal to the British, the Army had to be massively expanded via conscription and Britain’s ability to fund and manage the finances of its allies collapsed only marginally less quickly than did theirs.

The Argument Outlined

The 20th century has seen, perhaps for the first time in human history, the emergence of some of the world’s common people into the arenas of economic and political decision-making. That is remarkable. The very designation ‘common people’ is enough to tell us that these are people without the political clout of economic ownership or high status. Yet they can be shown to have exercised considerable, if not complete, influence over the policies of both state and entrepreneur via electoral and party access to a parliament and by independent trade union organisation. Such achievements are often construed as evidence of enlightened attitudes, of civilised society, of the realisation of the superior political ideals of liberal democracy—the Whig view of human progress. We, however, take a less congratulatory view. While democratic ideals and enlightened attitudes have mattered historically, there is still to be explained the slowness and sometimes too the bloodiness of the processes whereby common people have secured these measures of legitimate authority over their own conditions of existence. Democratisation, which is what we take these processes to be, demands further explanation than a reference to ideals and attitudes if only to give us some basis for prognostication, the latter being particularly urgent given the intensifying political predicaments of the western world and what many writers herald as the collapse of democracy in the west (Miliband, 1982; Moss, 1975; Hain, 1986).

The Emasculation of Labour

If the 1970s contained the high water mark of labour’s influence, the tide has clearly turned in more recent years. Indeed, to continue for a moment this aqueous analogy, several undertowing currents were already present by the 1970s, handicapping labour’s advance and indicating the means of its subsequent decline. Yet, whereas tides flow as well as ebb, there are indications that both employers and the state have erected strong sea-walls to reduce the likelihood of any future return to the levels of dependency on labour witnessed in the 1960s and early 1970s. What is remarkable is how a series of factors have coincided—not wholly fortuitously, as we shall see—to diminish the position of labour vis-a-vis both state and capital.

From Feudalism to Industrial Capital

Capitalism, said Marx, constitutes a radical change in the relations of interdependence. What he had in mind was, in one respect, the creation of landless labourers reliant on wages for survival and, in another, the political ascendance of those in command of productive, wealth-generating capacities. Speaking generally of the impact of capitalism on labouring people, Marx understood it as a process away from the personalised relations of subordination which characterised feudalism towards the alienation of labour power from its human source, and its commodification for sale on the market. Under the ethos of capitalist market relations, the seller of labour should logically be free both to contract (that is, to select and negotiate with the purchaser on equal terms) and to associate (so as to improve the commodity’s price by controlling its supply). According to this logic the transition from feudalism to capitalism should be a transition in constitutional-legal terms from status to contract relations.

Conclusions: Nationalism, Internationalism and Democracy

By the mid-1970s the state in Britain had become the largest single employer (Social Trends, 17, 1987), spending almost 60 per cent of national output each year (Robinson, 1978), the consequence of popular pressures in a context of particular types of economic problem, industrial technology and warfare needs. State employments by mid-20th century fell into the broad categories of Armed Forces and arms manufacture; law and order; welfare and education; other administration; and infrastructural provision (primarily transport, communications and energy). A failing economy leaves the state incapable of funding all these activities at unchanged levels, and forces politicians to make choices between them. The Conservative government in power from 1979 spelt out its choice as less government; a shrunken budget deficit; ‘sound money’; incentives for the rich in the shape of lower taxes; and incentives for the poor in the shape of lower benefits and wages (Johnson, 1982). The steady redistribution of wealth towards the already wealthy has been detailed earlier. The monetarist fight against inflation so as to achieve ‘sound money’ has also been addressed, its destructive impact on manufacturing capital and employment levels being notable among its achievements.

Labour as an Arm of the State

British political history from the 1940s to the late 1970s is very much that of ascendant labour. In harnessing a labour-consuming economy more or less in its entirety to a labour-consuming war effort, Britain’s fight against fascism had ensured the incorporation of its labour representatives at the highest levels of government decision-making. It was a ‘People’s War’, says Calder (1969), and in the votes they cast in 1945 the people seemed to show a decided preference for perpetuating this people’s society. The first Labour government with a workable majority was elected, a 12 per cent swing in its favour resulting in 393 Labour seats, 213 Conservative and 12 Liberal. In the next six years, Labour ruled over full employment, the initiation of the welfare state, and the relocation of 20 per cent of the national economy into public ownership. It repealed, in 1945, the 1927 Trades Dispute Act, thus enabling Bevin to continue the wartime concordat with the unions such that, by 1948–49, the Trades Union Congress had representatives on 60 government committees (as against 12 in 1939). The figure was to rise yet further in subsequent years (180 by 1977 according to the Observer, 7 September 1977).

Capital, State and Labour

A very great deal has been written about the political and economic features of the epoch dubbed as ‘capitalism’. Much of this writing has been heavily theorised: quite properly so, given that the best achievement is to understand and not merely to describe. Since the ambition of the present book is to trace and analyse the fortunes of the common people within British capitalism, it is necessary not only that we offer our own theorisation but that we do so sensitive to what others before us have said. That is the purpose of this present chapter. We are mindful that the concepts of ‘state, capital and labour’ are theoretical abstractions rather than homogeneous empirical agents, and we need therefore to elucidate our understanding of them and their interrelationships.