rounded by strife. It was a recipe for a disaster, culminating in 1972 in the magnificent march to Pentonville jail when five dockers were imprisoned for refusing to observe the Industrial Relations Act.
66 The party leadership is busy arguing that ballots should be made a legal requirement for trade unionists, but they have no plans for ballots in the Stock Exchange, in Lloyds, or in the City of London generally. 99 The Conservative at that time had to find ways and means of circumventing their own law, of preventing it from being carried out. Heath sent an official solicitor to Pentonville jail to rescue those trade unionists.
That bizarre sequence of events showed that such laws couldn't work. It seems a wierd quirk of politics that the shadow cabinet, a prospective Labour government, shouId be putting forward the same ideas as a formula for good industrial relations.
People At Work is a rejuvenated In Place of Strife. It has built within it the operation of a new legal body not dissimilar to NIRC, the National Industrial Relations Court of the Heath era, which would result in a minority who refuse to take part in industrial action being able to take their trade union to court. As somebody aptly put it, the new Labour Party-TUC policy document could be described as a scabs charter.
People At Work represents a retreat by the Labour Party leadership in the face of Tory propaganda. The Tories have tried to create a climate of opinion in which trade unions are held responsible for the nation's decline. But the evidence of the last seven years knocks that into a cocked hat.
Everybody now knows that the very essence of Tory monetarist policy has produced mass unemployment and has run down Britain's manufacturing output. There has been a f10 billion shift in the balance of payments - from £5½ billion surplus on manufacturing accounts in 1979, to a deficit of about £4½ at the present time. That has not been as a result of trade union activities. In fact, the number of people belonging to trade unions has dropped by nearly two million in that period.
66 Delegates at TUC congress have to ask themselves a simple question: will this policy assist the average trade unionist to further his or her wages and conditions, or will it put a break on collective bargaining and industrial action? The answer is that it will put a break on realising better wages and conditions for workers. 99 There is no evidence that the industrial might of the trade unions has managed to stop the government in its tracks. Most independent observers would argue that some of the most bitter industrial struggles which have taken place in the last seven years have resulted in victory for the bosses and for the government. I wish we had scored some bigger industrial victories, but the truth is that we haven't.
The Labour leadership's strategy for winning the next election is to take Tory claims at their face value - and to adapt to them. But if the message is that the next Labour government will be partial to the bosses and not too keen on trade militancy, then many of those men and women who hanker after a job but can't get one under Thatcher will be unsure of what sort of prospects they face with Labour in power. If the message is thatthe next Labour government will do its damndest to shore up the rotten system we live under, then all those people who suffer by it will have no confidence that Labour will start the job of radically changing it.
A manifesto which pledges Labour to fight for the rights of working class communities is the only way to ensure a victory at the next general election. Defence of trade unions must be at the centre of such a manifesto.
Trade unions exist to act in a NATIONAL UNION OF MINEWORKERS (WERS RCH