Turning to the unions?
END TO EVERY YEAR after Labour Party conference the left experiences a surge of renewed interest in the unions. After Blackpool we can sately predict yet another round of debate over whether and how the block vote should be reformed and its use democratised. The issue is important: however, if past form is anything to go by, interest will fade as the debate goes on, and by next year's trade union conference season the left will find itself once more on the defensive, seeking to combat a much more developed attack.
The right wing have their own axe to grind. Kinnock's antipathy to the block vote system, and the willingness of arch new-realist GMB leader John Edmonds to see its influence curbed have nothing to do with any desire for democratisation: neither Kinnock nor Edmonds has been averse to the systematic use by male-dominated unions of block votes to crush the demands of Labour's women's section. But now they see the block vote as an expression of the collective, class politics of the working class - and as such an electoral embarrassment. They much prefer the politics of the passive individual which 'new realism' has borrowed wholesale from Thatcher.
Of course we must not ignore the Labour Party dimension of the trade union struggle: the line-up of block votes prior to Blackpool made not only the leadership election but the endorsement of the policy review documents a formality. Only the defiance of Transport and General Workers Union leader Ron Todd - under seige from a Hammondite right wing inside his own union, and desperately seeking to buttress himself with left wing support - offered any respite from the new realist juggernaut.
While the Tory press kept querying whether Todd's stand on unilateralism represented his members' views, there is no reason to believe that the block votes cast by hard right union chiefs are necessarily representative of their rank and file. The size of the fringe meetings that were organised at this year's union conferences by the Benn-Heffer campaign, and the support for the campaign among stewards and union militants showed as usual much greater support in the unions than the minuscule union vote they attracted in the leadership election. Labour Briefing's analysis of the voting showed some unions voting 40 per cent for Benn, yet casting block votes for Kinnock.
However this pool of largely untapped support also tells its own story about the way left activists tend to approach the trade unions: for many, the unions are seen primarily in terms of their block votes at Labour conference or as a factor in Constituency Labour Party and other internal Party battles.
This approach is dangerously mistaken. The unions represent much more than block votes: they are the basic form of organisa tion of the working class at workplace level. They must do much more than decide Labour policy on unilateralism once a year: they must lead struggles over jobs, pay, and health and safety. And for the left to strengthen its hand inside the unions, we must be identified with these bread and butter issues as well as the jam of conference resolutions and policy debates.
There is a continual overlap of issues - all of which point to the need for the left to become more systematically involved in trade union struggles. The same union bureaucrats who stitched up the leadership election and policy review votes also conspired to isolate and ensure defeat for the miners in 1984-5 and the News International printworkers: they are even now isolating and betraying the P&O seafarers. Tom Sawyer and the leadership of the National Union of Public Employees are not only right wing in the Labour but doggedly opposed to strike action to fight cuts or privatisation in the NHS or local government.
Many campaigning issues taken up by the left in the Labour Party can also be given real teeth in the unions. Obvious examples include taking up the plight of part-time workers, the fight against low pay, for women's rights at work, and supporting struggles of black workers. Some unions already offer opportunities for self-organisation of black workers and women. Others, like the GMB and TGWU made oniy token gestures.
While the existing union leaderships consistently limit, isolate and sabotage the disputes which continue to erupt, there has been a small but significant initiative by left wingers who have learned the hard way that they must fight for an alternative approach. The Solidarity Network, drawing together militants from the miners strike, the Silentnight strike, the printworkers' strike and other support movements, was launched a year ago at a conference in Leeds. Its small beginnings accurately reflected the levels of awareness on the left of the need to organise such work and create a systematic fightback in the unions which can in turn offer practical support and leadership to new sections of workers as they become involved in strike action. The Network has made important links with the Socialist Conference movement and done useful solidarity work with P&O and other disputes, and is to hold a further con-
There are other important beginnings of a fightback, with active, if small, broad lefts in many unions committed to challenge the present bureaucratic leaderships.
Such trade union work does not begin or end with Labour Party issues: indeed there are many important battles to be waged in unions (NUT, NALGO, civil service unions) that are not affiliated to the Labour Party - but which are also helping to reinforce the new realists through the TUC.
Serious trade union work is a tough fight, battling to organise the left to oppose the bureaucracy, giving attention to the day to day detail of workplaces, and becoming involved in often less than glamourous disputes, as well as close contact with militants newly
But without such a fight at the base of the unions and the building of a political opposition to the new realists at the top, workers are not going to be mobilised to break the right wing grip on the union structures - including the block vote. There is a real danger under these conditions that socialism can be reduced to empty propaganda - and that all the good intentions of following through Labour's conference by a renewed fight in the unions could come
Let's take up the debate on the block vote - but from a position of strengthened involvement in the unions at every level: that's one angle of attack Kinnock & Co. will not expect from the left!