The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  TUC Library Collection

  While men and women were divided into different roles, the true winners were the employers, who had the advantage of a male workforce that was committed whole-heartedly to the workshop, having been fed and kept by the unpaid work of women; and they had on top of that an additional reserve of labour that, being less organised and already dependent, was more malleable.

  Labour and empire

  Between 1815 and 1914 Britain was at the centre of a transformation in the organisation of the global order. Ten million square miles of territory and 400 million people were colonised by Britain. The imperial economy secured raw materials for Britain’s industrial surge, and increasingly native labour was working to enrich Britain. Now it was Britain’s surplus capital that was overflowing, and rushing into the new territories.

  At first it was the well-to-do who profited by the expansion, which the radical John Hobson called ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’. Britain’s imperial grandeur was also a powerful draw upon the imagination of working people. In the first half of the twentieth century, social reforms bound the British worker more closely to the Empire project, while at the same time raising up a great barrier between the British worker, who enjoyed greater rights, and colonial labourers who had very few. The ‘new Liberals’ of the turn of the century brought in a policy of social reform with investment in municipal and public utilities that was known as ‘Gas and Water Socialism’. Lloyd George overcame Tory opposition to a tax-raising budget that paid for pensions and primitive schemes of worker’s compensation and pensions. Trade union officers were drawn into the administration of social reforms through local boards, solidifying their identification with the state.

  There had been a spate of conciliation boards — as on the railways and in the cotton industry — set up to moderate trade disputes in the 1860s. These were enshrined in law in the 1896 Conciliation Act and a special Labour Department in the Board of Trade set up in 1911 brought government directly into industrial relations. The conciliation boards gave union representatives recognised official status, and were conceded by employers as a part of the ‘routinisation of social conflict’.19

  Herbert Asquith’s Liberal administration passed an act in 1909 that set up Labour Exchanges, and then in 1911 the National Insurance against unemployment and sickness. Unions were asked to help work the National Insurance fund, so that the militant labour activist Jack Murphy would write that ‘the unions were drawn closer to the state by the ingenious means of giving them a share in the administration of the state insurance funds’.20 Home Secretary Winston Churchill voiced the hope that reform would moderate labour: ‘With a “stake in the country” in the form of insurance against evil days these workers will pay no attention to the vague promises of revolutionary socialism.’21

  The sociologist Robert Michels, looking at English and German labour organisation in 1915, said:

  There already exists in the proletariat an extensive stratum consisting of the directors of co-operative societies, the secretaries of trade unions, the trusted leaders of various organisations, whose psychology is entirely modelled upon that of the bourgeois class with whom they associate.22

  This new layer of labour bureaucracy became the foundation of the Labour Party, and an essential support to the corporate society that was built after the Second World War. It would also bind organised labour ever-closer to the fortunes of the British Empire.

  Against immigration

  One sign of organised labour’s identification with Britain was its opposition to immigration and hostility to foreigners. In 1889 union leader Ben Tillett published a pamphlet, The Dock Labourer’s Bitter Cry, which carried this attack on the migrants:

  The influx of continental pauperism aggravates and multiplies the number of ills which press so heavily on us… Foreigners come to London in large numbers, herd together in habitations unfit for beasts, the sweating system allowing the more grasping and shrewd a life of comparative ease in superintending the work.23

  Tillett welcomed new immigrants at the dockside: ‘Yes, you are our brothers and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come.’24 In 1894 and 1895 William Inskip and Charles Freak, officers of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, put forward resolutions against Jewish immigration — a ‘blighting blister’ upon the English worker — to the Trades Union Congress, and won.25

  A Royal Commission on Alien Immigration of 1902 became the focus of a lot of hostility, as its hearings were reported in the press. Another Tory MP, William Evans Gordon, started the British Brothers League, which paraded in military fashion to protest against the influx of Jews.26

  From all of this one might get the idea that the new unionism was a step backwards, hopelessly reactionary, sexist, and racist. But that would be wrong. This was a movement that fought and won rights for working people and defended their interests. The very idea of equality was defended and promoted by the labour movement. The new model unions took up the cause of the Bryant and May Match Women’s strike, and in 1925 Tom Mann helped organised a seaman’s strike that spanned the Empire, from London to Cape Town and Australia.

  Bryant and May strike committee

  The union movement was limited. It was limited to what was achievable within the relationship between capital and labour. Trade unionism was a bargain between two parties. Its achievements were what was possible within those terms. The gains for working people — English men for the most part — were circumscribed. The gains for working people were concentrated amongst those who were key to the relationship: industrial labourers. The enlargement of the wages, resources and rights of that one section marked out the difference between them and those women and immigrants who had not broken through. It was the greater equality afforded English working-class men that opened up the inequality between them and the oppressed.

  The corporate system comes into its own

  After the ‘new Liberalism’, it fell to the wartime coalition of 1914-19, and then the 1940-45 coalition and the post-war Labour government of 1945-51, to consolidate the corporate system. War mobilisation into the army and the munitions factories greatly increased the demand for labour, both in the First World War, and in the Second. Between the wars, though, a terrible slump led to mass unemployment and the ‘hungry Thirties’.

  Between 1914 and 1919, and again from 1939 to 1945, the emergency suspended all the normal rules of balanced budgets and free markets. Asquith’s Munitions Minister Christopher Addison relished the idea of directing the work of industry, and often leveraged workplace strife into a case for government taking over.27

  Ruby Loftus screwing a breech ring, Laura Knight, 1943

  As well as the great increase in the numbers working, there was a marked change in the make-up of the workforce. Millions of women were mobilised to work in munitions factories and on the land, wholly changing the sociology of work.

  The use of women in munitions and engineering factories caused serious conflict. The Clyde Workers Committee led by Davy Kirkwood and John McLean trod a fine line between defending the rights of skilled workers and pushing for the exclusion of women. This was a live issue, and Charlotte Drake told a Conference of Women’s Organisations at the Board of Trade ‘that the men’s trade unions should be asked to take in women members and the women paid just as if they were men’. That way, she said, ‘there would be no reason to talk of the undercutting of the men by “women blacklegs”’.28

  The Labour Party

  The movement towards a more corporate capitalism, though, would need a political vehicle that working people could trust, and that was not the Liberal Party. Politically, the new century saw the formation of the Labour Party. The party was formed on the initiative of the trade unions who created a Labour Representation Committee in 1905, followed in 1918 by a more strictly disciplined party. This was the party that would in the 1970s bring in equal opportunities legislation. Labour was in government in 1924, and 1940-45, a
nd as a governing party between 1945 and ’51, from 1964 to 1970, and 1972 to 1979. Over that period British industrial relations were transformed with the creation (and eventual collapse) of the ‘tripartite system’ that institutionalised the partnership of capital and labour, with government, the third party, playing a role between umpire and organiser of industry.

  Even more so than the ‘new Liberals’, Labour argued for the state to regulate private industry to defend workers. ‘The state assumed a new importance to the unions’, said J. T. Murphy: ‘State socialist ideas spread like wildfire. The demand for the nationalisation of this and that industry became popular.’29

  It was not, however, until the Second World War that Labour’s instincts for a corporate capitalism could be put in motion. Even though they were junior partners in the wartime coalition, the Labour Party, by virtue of its intimate connection with the unions, carried great weight with working people. The Cabinet Office closely — and secretly — monitored popular opinion for signs of disaffection from the war effort, fearing the worst, but the results were largely approving. War mobilisation gave working people a feeling that they had a much greater stake in the fortunes of British society than they did in the era of mass unemployment.

  During the war Ernest Bevin was Minister of Labour and second only to Churchill in the Cabinet. Bevin directed production, and cancelled the free movement of labour with ‘Essential Work Orders’, with a central register of all workers. Hours worked rocketed and consumption was cut by rationing — all of which could happen not just because of the widespread sympathy with the war, but also because working people were given a say in the organisation of work through Joint Production Committees. Workers and their representatives sat on Joint Production Committees, often with an official from a government department to meet the targets set in the Essential Work Orders. By the end of 1943, over 4000 Joint Works Production Committees had been established in the engineering and shipbuilding industries. Though the idea was that the Joint Production Committees were about increasing output and preventing bottlenecks, workers’ representatives often interpreted that to include their own goals. Canteens were a hot topic of discussion. But most of all skilled workers had their own views about how to do the work well, and were glad to be asked, having so rarely had their understanding of the processes recognised in the past. Under the common moral mission of winning the war, labour, management, and the government officials came close to embracing each other as partners. The wartime Joint Production Committee experience was the foundation of the corporatist, tripartite system of industrial relations in Britain, and a touchstone for most later iterations of that idea, right up to the mid-1980s.

  Patriotism was re-worked to make the idea of Britain a popular, everyman version. Through the war, and in the peace that followed, the party of trade unionism was called upon to govern not just at home, but in the colonies, and to manage Britain’s relations to the wider world. Both the former trade unionists and the Fabian civil servants embraced the Empire project. So it was that the Labour Party objected to the clauses in President Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter that promised decolonisation on the grounds that ‘the inhabitants of the African territories are backward’ and ‘not yet able to stand by themselves’. Labour’s ‘Marxist’ food minister John Strachey was blunt:

  By hook or by crook the development of the primary production of all sorts in the colonial territories and dependent areas in the Commonwealth and throughout the world is a life and death matter for the economy of this country.

  Or as one young Labour Tribune supporter asked, ‘what would happen to our balance of payments if we had to take our troops out of Malaya?’30

  The post-war Labour government took one fifth of British industry into public ownership, including coal, steel, and rail — representing a quarter of the industrial workforce — as well as creating the National Health Service and extending compulsory state schooling from age 11 to 14. A significant share of the workforce was working directly for the state, and, though there was conflict between government managers and employees, workers, and in particular their unions, largely shared the identification with the ideal of nationalised industries.

  Organised labour and officialdom

  Workers’ representatives took part in a wide array of official bodies, panels and inquiries

  • Wages Councils (operating industry by industry, 1945-93)

  • National Wages Board (1950-65)

  • National Board for Prices and Incomes (1965-70; policed pay norms and productivity agreements; separated into a Prices Commission and a Wage Board in 1970)

  • National Joint Industrial Council (first created in 1919, these bodies were known as Whitley Councils in white-collar occupations)

  • Advisory, Conciliation, and Arbitration Service (known by various names since 1960, as ACAS since 1975)

  • Commission on Industrial Relations (1969‐74)

  • National Industrial Relations Court (1971-74)

  • Employment Tribunals (set up under the Industrial Training Act, 1964)

  • National Economic Development Council (1961-92)

  There were also industry-wide negotiation bodies, like the Railway Staffs National Tribunal, and factory-based consultations, and negotiations between unions and management.

  There were as well a number of Royal Commissions dealing with trade unions over the years, including

  • Royal Commission on Trade Unions (Lord Derby, 1867)

  • Royal Commission on Labour (1894)

  • Royal Commission on Trade Disputes (1906)

  • Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations (Lord Donovan, 1968)

  And unions gave evidence to a great many Royal Commissions that they were interested in, such as the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance (1926); the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance (1931); and the Royal Commission on Mines (1906).

  There was also the provision for Courts of Inquiry, like that into the newspaper dispute in 1955, into the power dispute in 1971, and into the dispute at Grunwick in 1977.

  Trade unionists were drawn into a dizzying array of official bodies, which dealt with pay, prices, productivity, and industrial disputes.

  Many of these bodies were set up with the express goal of disciplining labour, though where that was too explicitly so, as with the National Industrial Relations Court, the body failed. They were also very effective at drawing workers into the administration of capitalist industry. The legitimation of organised labour drew on 3000 full-time union officials and as many as 175,000 voluntary shop stewards. Though industrial disputes were commonplace, the conflict between the classes was largely contained in what the authorities often referred to as ‘constitutional’ actions. Employers told the Donovan Commission that the shop steward was not generally ‘trouble maker’ and ‘more of a lubricant than an irritant’.31 A Ford’s directive advised that ‘a shop steward holds his position by virtue of being a company employee and his first responsibility is to carry out the duties for which the company pays him’.32 Trade union officers could also serve on school governing bodies, as Justices of the Peace, as labour councillors, MPs, or even Ministers, and could take seats in the House of Lords and sit on government quangos.

  Mark Freedland and Nicola Koutaris explain that between 1945 and 1970 the Department of Employment identified itself as ‘the seat and location of a tri-partite approach to the governance of the labour economy’, which rested on the ‘regulation of employment relations by collective bargaining of various sorts and at various levels between employers and organised labour, brokered and supported by the State’.33 In a Commons debate on the aerospace industry, Ealing MP Bill Molloy lauded the ‘record of British trade unionists in achieving industrial peace’, and Minister Gerald Kaufman agreed, saying that the British trade union movement ‘sets an example in patriotism’ — and they had a point.34

  The new corporatist capitalism rested on a kind of social contract between private
industry, organised labour, and government. The promise of job security and reasonable wages, coupled with extensive consultations and negotiations, cemented the deal. Managers took on the new arrangements and worked with them. The policy coalescence around full employment and corporatism was dubbed ‘Butskellism’ after its main proponents, the Tory ‘Rab’ Butler, and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell.35

  The recognition of the status of the core, skilled, and organised industrial workforce also meant by implication the subordinate status of those who were less organised, and whose skills were not certified. They were not covered by the same contract. The corporatist system institutionalised discrimination in employment. It created a hierarchy in employment where unskilled labour, immigrant labour and women workers were underpaid, aggressively managed, and insecure. The status of women workers in the new corporatist model was carefully set out for them, and given institutional shape by the post-war welfare system put in place after the Beveridge Report of 1944.

  The Beveridge Plan

  Central to the post-war compromise was the creation of the ‘welfare state’, set out in William Beveridge’s report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, in 1944. This was the bible for Labour Party supporters, the outline of a comprehensive welfare plan to create ‘freedom from want’.36 The plan was a great step forward for working people at the end of a terrible war, who had experienced the insecurity and hunger of the 1930s. ‘The aim of the Plan for Social Security is to abolish want by ensuring that every citizen willing to serve according to his powers has at all times an income sufficient to meet his responsibilities.’ But the responsibilities that Beveridge outlined were very different for men and women, seeing the latter first and foremost as housewives, whose responsibilities were in the home, while the former were breadwinners, who would be expected to provide for their wives.