It will not be possible to combat the employers' offensive without building a strong left-wing movement in the unions. The strongest such movement historically was the Minority Movement with its counterpart in the Labour Party of the National Left-wing Movement. The political weaknesses of the MM, that undermined its credibility and effectiveness, have been discussed above in chapter 5: Socialist Strategy for the Unions Under Capitalism. On the other hand, a hugely positive aspect of the MM is that it remains an important model of left organisation. Today the main way in which the left has organised in trade unions has been through the creation of 'broad lefts'. These are extremely varied in nature. In some unions, such as the NUT, what is called the Broad Left is actually the right wing! We will look at three kinds of more genuine broad left organisation and at some of the problems and opportunities which they point to. The first kind is typified by groups like the TGWU Broad Left. These generally have their roots in the old Communist Party tradition of organising in the unions. They do represent an opposition to the 'modernisers' around Blair who would give up any real conception of trade union struggle. However, it is a very limited kind of opposition. Such broad lefts are extremely secretive, and concentrate on electoral politics within the union to the exclusion of all else. Consequently, they have no real connection with, and are unable to mobilise, rank and file activity.
The second kind of broad left would include groups like the CPSA Broad Left and the old NCU Broad Left. These are more open organisationally and politically than the TGWU Broad Left. They have at times intervened into and led important disputes and become strong enough to gain majorities on union executives. But they still remain focused on union elections and tend to neglect other activity. As a result they have not had strong enough bases to put their policies into effect when they have had such majorities, and they have ended up compromising with the right wing. In addition, these broad lefts have shown important political weaknesses even on those occasions when there has been willingness to take action and they have had control of the union. They have, in
general, failed to take advantage of such situations by broadening the base of disputes in a determined way.
The most effective kind of broad left organisation at present is that typified by the Socialist Teachers Alliance in the NUT. Unlike the other broad lefts mentioned, the STA has given as much priority to campaigning activity within the union as to gaining elected positions. It has also taken up both immediate issues of concern to members (wages, conditions for example) and the broader political issues raised by the government's attack upon education and teachers. This has enabled the STA to play a crucial role in important struggles such as that against testing in schools and to win significant votes at NUT conference. The experience of the STA shows what can be done in the organisation of the left within trade unions. It has helped to stimulate the formation of other, as yet smaller, activist groups in different unions, such as the Campaign for a Fighting and Democratic Unison and the new Rank and File grouping within NATFHE. However, it also highlights some of the complexities of successful organising that remain to be resolved. While the STA has been very good at winning conference votes and has also gained a substantial minority of executive seats, many of the motions passed at conference have simply not been implemented by the NUT leadership. Increasingly that leadership has tended to appeal over the heads of conference to membership ballots in order to defeat the left. In addition, the NUT only organises a minority of schoolteachers. So even when it does take action, that action can be made less effective if it is not paralleled by similar activity from the other teaching unions where left organisation is much weaker, even non-existent. Further more the STA is not the only left grouping within the NUT. Success within the union depends on maintaining good relations with the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting Union (CDFU) which concentrates more on internal union affairs.
These examples show some of the difficulties as well as the importance of organising broad lefts. They also show that the issue of left organisation in the unions is inseparable from trade union democracy. This has a number of dimensions and we shall just look at three of them.
First, there is the role of union conferences. Here there are wide differences between unions, especially between industrial and public sector unions. In many unions, particularly the large general unions, conference sovereignty has not existed in practice for many years. However, in a number of public sector, particularly the white-collar, unions, this has not necessarily been the case. In such unions it has been almost possible for the left to organise to win conference votes. Now that is increasingly under challenge. Without a democratic conference, the decisions of which are implemented by a democratically elected union leadership, it will be impossible effectively to change policies and revitalise a union. A second crucial democratic issue is that of the right of
branches to initiate action. Increasingly central union leaderships are making it difficult for branches even to ballot on strikes or other activity. There has been a a strike ballot is growing use of the "consultative' ballot procedure in which only allowed if a previous ballot has shown that it is certain to be won. The struggle for union democracy, then, must involve the assertion of the democratic rights of both conference and of branches over the decisions of paid officials. It also has to involve the defence of decisions based on open discussion at conference and in the branches, as opposed to a decision-making machinery based on a structure of plebiscites and ballots which isolate the membership and can be manipulaled by the media and elements of the union leadership. Even when a decision to strike or take other action has been taken by ballot, it has often been overturned by union negotiators after management has presented a marginally different offer. An important part of the struggle for union democracy is the fight for such decisions to be respected and implemented Then there is the freedom to organise within unions, to meet outside official union structures and to criticise leadership decisions. Here again the pattern is widely different between unions. However, where branches have been able to organise unofficial co-ordinating conferences of activists this has played an important role. Examples are in the NUT, and in the CWU in the run-up to the postal strikes of 1996. A crucial democratic demand in the unions is for such freedom to organise and to publish freely. This is, of course, not meant to be counterposed in any way to taking demands through the official channels of the unions.
The third aspect of democracy is the provision of information about, and extent of control over, the funds of the union. Formal democratic rights are of little use if branches do not have the funds to campaign or to affiliate to and support other bodies. There is also the issue of the pay, privileges and conditions of paid officials and the union leaders. These issues are especially contentious at times of union mergers.
Ultimately, there are limits to what the broad left in one union can achieve in isolation, especially given the integrated nature of the current attack on workers by the government and employers. What is needed is effective co-ordination between the left groupings in different unions. Cross-union attempts to organise the left have not had a happy history. One persistent problem has been that they have been seen to be, and to a large extent have been, the property and initiative of one particular political grouping. This was the case, for example, with the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions in the 1960s and the Broad Left Organising Committee, Rank and File Movement and All Trades Union Alliance in the 1970s. Such an approach will not succeed today even to the limited extent that it did in the past. A more open, unsectarian way of organising is needed. A second problem lay with the political weakness of such movements
and of their 'parent' organisations. The various organisations veered either towards sectarianism, imagining that they could substitute for the existing trade unions, or adapted too far towards the incumbent leadership, or a supposedly left section of it. The lack of democracy in the organisations then made it difficult, if not impossible to rectify the mistakes that had been made. A key task in the current period is to develop some form of cross-union collaboration which avoids both of these errors and which maintains a democratic character, enabling activists to draw lessons from experience. Given current conditions the most likely way that this will develop is through the various broad left groups coming together to discuss joint initiatives and matters of mutual concern. In this context the 1996 proposal by the STA to other broad left groupings, which resulted in the calling of a joint conference is very important for the future. It is to be hoped that this will just be the fist stage in an ongoing process of collaboration.
Such a development might also aid the formation of new broad lefts in other unions. Here we can see an interesting paradox; some of the unions where there has been a great deal of activity in recent years have been those where broad lelt organisation has been relatively weak, the RMT, the old UCW and, most notably, the NUM. This gap has been a problem on both sides. First, the lessons of the struggles carried out by these unions have not fed through into the construction of left groupings. This has held back our knowledge of the problems such groupings will face in rejuvenating the unions. Second, the left in these unions has had to fight without the benefit of continuing, structured organisation. In the UCW this has meant that, while there have been a number of successful local strikes, particularly against casualisation and changes in working practices, which in several cases have defied the anti-union laws, these have not until recently been generalised to the union as a whole. In the RMT and NUM we have seen a similar failure to organise the left in the union. The combination of the ongoing campaigning activity of a group like the STA with the traditions of intransigent defence of members' interests found in the RMT and UCW would go a long way towards providing a way forward for the union movement in general.
The role of Trades Councils Trades councils can play an important role in this type of development. Although they are weaker now, with the decline of the unions generally, they survived the attempts of the TUC to close them down and, often play an important co-ordinating role at the local level. The annual conference of trades councils has become a good forum for cross-union discussion and contact and a basis of support for campaigns and solidarity initiatives. The trades councils
were a major component of the support movement for the miners and other sections such as the print workers and seafarers which have been under attack. They are capable of organising solidarity with a range of disputes at regional and local level.