With membership rising, UK trade unions are in a more up-beat mood of late and are seeking to influence the current political debate. In March 2000, participants at a conference organised by the Unions 21 network discussed the employment agenda of a second-term Labour government and the implications of the pursuit of a knowledge-driven economy.
On 4 March 2000, a conference on the theme of Tomorrow's unions: new century, new agenda, organised by Unions 21, afforded trade unionists, policy-makers, academics and other participants an opportunity to debate key issues facing the UK labour movement. Launched in 1993, Unions 21 is associated with the "modernising left", and exists to "provide an open space for discussion about how trade unions can modernise and win public support in a changing political and economic context". Speakers at the 2000 conference included the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) John Monks, cabinet office minister Mo Mowlam, and industry minister Alan Johnson.
The conference addressed a diverse range of topical issues including the "knowledge economy", the "partnership" agenda, the "European social model", young people and the unions, social exclusion, community regeneration, and the learning revolution. A key theme was the TUC's Millennium challenge, launched in April 1999, to highlight issues of trade union "branding", promotion, recruitment and service provision (UK9909128N). Of most pressing concern, however, was the question of how trade unionists could work most effectively towards a second-term Labour Party government, and the extent to which Labour's record on employment legislation had delivered so far.
The partnership agenda
In his opening address, John Monks observed that, with unemployment falling and membership up, British trade unions were in "the best position for decades" and that it was a "time for optimism". The task for trade unions was to "get in front" of the challenges that lay ahead and embrace "modernisation". At the workplace level, the social partnership agenda, he maintained, pointed the way forward, based on a strategy of "raising standards of employers, skill, as well as workers' pay and conditions", and altogether making work a "more civilised, family-friendly place" (UK9906108F). The 1999 Employment Relations Act, Mr Monks argued, would extend this agenda (UK9912145F): "If we can recruit, organise, win ballots, then we can make inroads where employers resist workers' desire to organise," he said.
A new political agenda
Mr Monks then went on to say that "e-commerce" - the explosion of business activity around the internet - was already confronting trade unions with new challenges. While he had "no doubt that the dot.com bubble would burst", it would, he insisted, "leave a changed landscape", and one that would require trade unions to provide a "responsive service to workers in a more diverse range of contexts where traditional collective bargaining is difficult".
Turning to "New Labour", Mr. Monks argued that the government was "keen to assert its independence and maintain a broad coalition of interests". This was the year, he said, when "key decisions will be taken that will form the heart of [New Labour's] appeal at the next general election campaign." At the last election, the aim had been clear and simple: the defeat of Thatcherism and the return of Labour to government. This time, he warned, "the message will have to be more complex" if it is to be capable of welding "old and new Labour voters behind a common programme". The "experience of Seattle" (EU9912217N), he suggested, had demonstrated that polices based on free trade, liberalisation and untamed capitalism would not be enough to win broad public support.
The "European social model", Mr Monks suggested, offered the only credible basis for the left's political project. That project, he insisted, "begins from a recognition of the productive power of markets" but maintains that, if unregulated, markets are a contradictory, "destructive force" that "spreads inequality, insecurity and holds back prosperity". He went on to argue that "taming the excesses of the market, reducing inequality, a strong welfare state and decent working conditions form the basis of any modern social democratic politics".
Defending Labour's record
Sharing a platform with the TUC general secretary, cabinet office minister Mo Mowlam endorsed Mr Monks' comments. "Without a broad coalition of New Labour and Old Labour, power was unattainable," she said. However, the most fundamental achievement of New Labour, she insisted, had been to "shift the culture of the debate with equality, fairness and justice no longer fringe issues but now absolutely central". New Labour, three years in government, had made "substantial progress", although she conceded that "there is still a long way to go." Change, modernisation and partnership was the key to "maintaining momentum" and bringing a long-term shift in the nature of British politics.
Industry minister Alan Johnson defended Labour's record on employment legislation. Out of "enlightened self-interest", the priority for trade unions must be the return of a Labour government to office, he asserted. Mr Johnson insisted that there could be no going back to the old 1970s agenda, when British trade unions were said to be locked into the narrow and self-defeating pursuit of "free collective bargaining, legal immunities and minimal state interference". Whatever gains that agenda had brought, he said, were far too easily wiped away when Thatcherism entered the ring in 1979. In the new century, the challenge for the labour movement was to "sink roots and minimum standards that will last into the future", and "consolidate trade unions in the legal and political infrastructure of this country". Defending Labour's record, he outlined a catalogue of new employment rights that had come through the UK signing up to the EU "social chapter" and through new employment legislation, a record which was "nothing to be ashamed of after just three years in government".
Engaging with the knowledge economy
A key theme of the conference was how trade unions might respond to the new challenges presented by "the knowledge economy" (UK9902182F). Internet consultant John Carr argued that e-commerce raised potentially very difficult problems for trade unions. The new technologies had already increased the power of employers to monitor employee activity and track transactions, e-mails and phone calls. The huge growth of "teleworking", he said, meant that much work could be outsourced across national frontiers, with radical implications for trade union organisation and bargaining. However, the most alarming prospect of the internet revolution was the extent to which it permitted businesses to establish direct contact with the customer, thereby raising the spectre of "disintermediation". Under this process, some businesses were now in a position to wipe out large swathes of jobs in middle layers of the supply chain as they went in search of potentially massive cost reductions in product delivery.
Jeannie Drake of the Communications Workers' Union also stated that "the American e-commerce model" already had a powerful and seductive appeal for new Labour, not least the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. For the latter, she said, US-style e-commerce was the holy grail that would solve the "high-growth, low-inflation paradox". Echoing concerns about the impact of "disintermediation" on the jobs of trade union members, she also argued that the increased mobility of capital across national boundaries afforded by the new knowledge economy would raise difficult regulatory issues at the level of the nation state. The challenge for trade unions, she insisted, was to "get up to date" and transform themselves into "e-businesses", embracing such changes as on-line recruitment facilities, direct personal communication with members via the web and e-mail, and a stronger focus on service quality and delivery.
Commentary
The Unions 21 conference demonstrated above anything else that UK politics now stands at a crossroads. This crossroads presents itself as a choice between, on the one hand, the American free-market model, and on the other, the European social model. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that "New Labour" and UK trade unions do not see completely eye to eye on this issue. Many of the new employment rights at work have come through the signing of the Maastricht social chapter, which New Labour seeks to implement in a minimalist fashion against the background of a flexible, weakly-regulated UK labour market. For Chancellor Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Tony Blair it is the American e-commerce dream that holds the most persuasive appeal. Much of New Labour's political economy - the so-called "third way" - is built around a framework of tight monetary and fiscal responsibility, innovative entrepreneurialism, a competent workforce, welfare reform, a weakly-regulated labour market, "employability" and US-style "workfare". Such an agenda tends to have a much stronger affinity with Thatcherism than either the more robust versions of the European social model or, for that matter, British social democratic traditions. Indeed, new Labour's political project can be read as an attempt to export this product and its American affinities to mainland Europe.
British trade unions therefore have to walk a difficult tightrope. On the one hand, they have to work towards a second-term Labour government. On the other, the likes of John Monks are engaged in a subtle attempt to use the language of New Labour to shift the focus of the government's political economy and employment agenda towards a much closer alignment with "social Europe". On this point, Mr Monks is adamant: as long as the present government is determined to conduct the political debate in the language of US-style free-market individualism, it will not carry with it New Labour's core constituency, new or old. People, he says, will want much stronger social assurances and protections in the new Europe. If New Labour signs up to a Europe for business and bankers, but not working people, then it may very well plant the seeds of its own destruction at the ballot box. Only by closing the gulf between New Labour's Europe and the social Europe in which John Monks believes, can the aspirations of the labour movement be secured into the new century. (Jonathan Payne, SKOPE)